How Richard Garriott Works

in the tech and computer industry. And we need to come up with a better title than that, I think Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Anyway, we're gonna talk about the another leader in tech and uh specifically within the video game field, Richard Lord British or General British Gariot. Yes, uh, you may not be familiar with his name, but if you've ever played the Ultimate series of Games, you have something you owe him your thanks. Yes, yes, he's the one who made those yeah. Um yeah, Richard Garriott. He's

a He's a remarkable person. I've I've actually had the great pleasure of meeting and chatting with Richard Garriott on many occasions. But it was back when I was a teenager, a young pup. Yes, yes, before I had become a professional journalist. Um so. But the the he's a genuinely

very nice person. But it's it's interesting to kind of look at his journey, uh, where he's gone from, uh, from being a when he was a teenager to being a multi millionaire who now is possibly pursuing space related interests. I think possibly pursuing it. Well that further pursuing, I should say, um, well, first of all, it's not any super prize that he would be following his father's footsteps, right, that's true. We should talk about him for a second.

Richard is the son of Owen K. Garriott, who, among other things, was an astronaut. Yep, he actually was on the sky lad mission in nineteen seventy three and in eighty three he was on Space Lab one. Wow, that's pretty cool. It's very cool. So I have a dad who's an astronaut. Right, So here here's Richard Garriot and his dad's an astronaut. He Uh, he's interested in things like role playing games, becomes a big fan of the

game Dungeons and Dragons. Um. He sent to a computer camp when he's a teenager and becomes extremely interested in computers as well and begins to see ways to marry these two interests together, his love of role playing games and the love of computers. I actually want to throw something in as I was reading the Wired article about Richard Garriott. Actually it was sort of about Richard. It's sort of about Star City, which is a um Russian

space camp that that he went to. But apparently, according this article, uh, he convinced his teachers that learning basic the computer language Basic satisfied his foreign language requirement in high school. That doesn't surprise me at all. Richard. Richard's a very very charismatic and uh and convincing fellow. When you meet him in person, he's um uh, he's fascinating to talk to he Uh. I know that he created a computer game back when he was at the computer

camp that printed on tape just before monitors. So the way it would work is that you would, uh, you would inter say a room and like a role playing game, and it would print out a room and as key art showing you you know where your look where you were in relation to the rest of the room, and

you would move your character. Let's say, like I move one space north, it would have to print out the whole thing all over again, showing you where you were now in relation to everything else, plus making other stuff appear as it came into view of your character. Not the most efficient kind of game, but it did show that he was very interested in this from the very beginning, and it was a very clever solution to the problem of not having a visual means by which you could

communicate that information. But now, oh, go ahead, I was going to say. You know, you may be saying, okay, so if he wants to be an astronaut, why didn't you just do that? I mean, why is he doing the whole computer camp thing. Well, there was one problem, actually two problems. That would be his eyes. Yea, his

eyes were not good enough for for NASA. So he's been he sort of from what I read, he sort of fell back on computers and gaming because he liked those two things, and he because he couldn't go forward in in the space program. So you kind of got it, you know, a fork in the road. And he said, well, you know, I love these things too. This is what I'm gonna do, right, And he embraced it, and I teen eight he wrote a game called a Calabeth, which is sort of the precursor to be precursor to the

Ultimate series. UM. And this was back in the days when you would find computer games at your local little computer store and they would be pinned up on a bulletin board and they'd all be in zip. Luck bags would be a floppy disk, maybe a sheet of printed instructions and uh, if you were really lucky, some art that actually said what the title of the game was. Otherwise it was just on the sticker on the disc itself. He's old five and a quarter inch floppy disks. Yeah,

I do too. I still have some. UM can't run them on anything, but I have them. So yeah. It actually got very popular. And the way Richard used to tell the story was that he said, I was doing what I loved and I sent the sent this company my my game, and then they started sending me money. It was great, fantastic. I was like, well, this is

what I want to do. So from there he went on to program Tima one and uh, this was back in the day when a single person could produce a game from start to finish on his or her own, something that does not happen very much these days. Um, it's just because games have gotten so complicated at this point that you you almost need an entire department of

a major company to to put one together. But this was back in the day when someone with enough enough time and enough effort could produce a game by themselves. So but he did started a company, d Yeah, he formed it with his brother and a few other people, Origin Systems. And Origin Systems produced the Ultimate series as well some other games, like with the Wing Commander series and a few other series as well, but the Ultimate ones, I think we're kind of the flagship for that company. Again.

According to the Wired article, more than a hundred million copies. Yeah, I own a few of those. Yeah, yeah, because I was a huge Ultimate fan. In fact, before I ever met Richard Garriott, I was. I was already playing Ultimate too, which was a very simple role playing game in in

the early ultimates one through three. It was pretty much following the standard kind of role playing system in which you're you're playing a powerful character and you go around killing stuff and selling stuff and trying to beat the bad guy to win the game. And here's the interesting part. The first thing that I think is really interesting about Richards progress as a game developer. He started to become dissatisfied with the way these games were kind of laid out.

The storyline of these games. He thought that they were too simple. The whole good versus evil thing was a little too um primitive. So he decided he wanted to create a game in which your choices as a player would determine whether or not you could win the game. It wasn't just you know, if you killed enough or X, you were suddenly powerful enough to take on a troll, and you kill enough trolls you can finally take on

the big bad guy. It was that you had to make moral choice is throughout the game, and based on those choices that determined whether or not you could win the game. As when he created Ultimate four and really introduced the concept of the avatar character and UH, to become an avatar, you had to adhere to some very strict rules and if you broke those rules, then you it was impossible to win the game. And UH, it got a lot of attention among gamers, and most of

it was positive. I mean a lot of the gamers who wanted to just breathe through a game were kind of frustrated because they couldn't just you know, hack and slash their way through. But it was so different from why had to come before it that it really kind of revolutionized video computer role playing games at the time. And um, that's pretty much how you went from that point on. It was very important that your character was able, you know, that that the choices you made as a

character actually affected the way the game progressed. And uh so it wasn't just random encounters or anything like that. If you told off someone in this one town, then your reputation could spread in that town and people would treat your character differently based on that. Um. And I mean, you know, it sounds like I'm going on and on about this, but really that was very revolutionary at the time. Well you think about it, um, and it's more than

just a two dimensional game at that point. You know, before you had you know, left right up down essentially you know, black and white choices, and now you enter into shades of gray and things that you do. The game is smart enough to know what's going on and to to react to the decisions that you make and have other non player characters you know, react to you differently based on the things that you do. That's pretty sophisticated. That's a lot more immersive, that's a lot more like

real life. So uh you know, maybe for the non gamers who are listening to us, and they're probably very few of them, I'm guessing, um, you know, you would say, Okay, well that's more intriguing. That's the kind of thing that's gonna get uh more if you will non geeks interested in games, because you know, say, well, this is this is a lot more like you know, what I'm used to in my own life. So and you can you can see the effects of this kind of game design today.

I mean, like the game Fable, for example, I think owes a lot to this ultimate model. UM. In Fable, those choices you make as a character determine your character's outcome, It determines what your character looks like, it determines how everyone reacts to you. And I think that that's all based on this same kind of philosophy that Richard Garriott really sort of championed early on. UM. Now, the later games in the Ultimate series there were nine of them total.

In the nine official full on Ultimate games, there were also a few expansions and a couple of little side games as well, but the last two, in particular, Ultimate eight and Ultimate nine kind of got a little of a well, there's a little backlash from the fans. Ultimate eight had a different system of controls than the previous ultimates did, and not all fans found it very entertaining.

UM and Ultimate nine, a lot of people felt even though it was delayed quite a few times, I felt that it was still rushed when it came out, So there was a bit of a, like I said, a little bit of a backlash by this point. And and again, this is a point where the games were so complex that groups of people had to work on them. It was no longer possible for Richard to to design a game from start to finish and build it all himself.

And speaking of other parties, it was in and Electronic Arts bought Origin System UM, so you know they had a transaction for thirty five million dollars in stock um. And by that point, you know, he was a multimillionaire already, you know, founded a mansion. Yeah, I'll have to go a little bit later. The mansion is is Yeah, that's a that's another matter entirely. Yeah, the Electronic Arts situation was kind of the beginning of the end. UM they love.

The company continued to produce UM some some pretty good games during that time, but Electronic Arts began to cancel a lot of the projects that the origin team had been working on, and eventually that I think UM made Richard decide to leave the company entirely. He resigned from Electronic Arts and founded a different company UM called Destination Games. But uh, and I've never talked to him about that.

It seemed like one of those kind of taboo subjects. UM. So I don't really know what the whole story is behind it, but I can imagine it has to be a little frustrating to see the something that you've created kind of get the back burner by a larger corporation, especially if you were told to head on like early in the deal that you were going to have a lot more control. Um. I don't know the details behind that.

I don't know that necessarily that happened, but he did leave the company and found it an new company, So that tells you something, right well. Of course, Electronic Arts, for its part, is very very large, as in eight hundred pound guerrilla gaming in a multi multibillion dollar industry at this point, and they have responsibilities to their shareholders, and I'm sure that it was probably something along those lines.

You know, when you get to a to that point, when you're that size, you uh, some of your decisions are dictated more by the bottom line than others. Um. Well. And and one of the thing I wanted to point out about the games that he made back when he was with Origin and e A UM, he was also responsible for the creation of Ultima Online, which is one of the very first graphic based massive multiplayer online role playing games m m O RPGs. Was that ever did

that ever take off? Ultima Online did very well. Um, it was although it was always battling ever Quest right the time, and I think it eventually was pretty much they they also ran, but they had its own hardcore base of fans, um and so it was never it was never a failure. It just I think EverQuest eventually outpaced it and and just kept the lead from that point on until of course World of Warcraft, which now dominates everything. Um. But yeah, that's that's another thing you

have to kind of credit Richard for. I mean, granted it was a team of people who put that together. It wasn't you know, it wasn't a one man show or anything, but any but he was definitely a champion of that. I got to see UM Ultimate Online in a beta build UM about a year before it actually went live, and I was I was really intrigued by it.

It looked a lot like Ultimate six in terms of graphics, so it actually went backward because at that point, I think Ultimate eight had been out for a while, so it actually went backward as far as graphics are concerned. But Ultimate six was also a really popular entry into the series, so I didn't think it was a bad thing at all. And it was also one of the first to have sort of the in game economy. Yeah. Yeah,

it was really really kind of nifty. Of course, everything that Richard does he tries to, you know, make sure there's some innovation involved. UM. But so when Richard left and founded Destination Games, he merged with another company called nc soft. Actually Destination Games merged with nc soft. Richard didn't that would have been weird. It would have been

like the Borg. So they put him in charge of the Austin office of n c soft and that's when Richard began work on a new massively multiplayer online role playing game called Tabula Razza, which had a science fiction uh background as opposed to fantasy. Now he's really into fantasy.

I mean well, I mean, like we said, he was really into the dungchess and dragons, and he was really into uh, you know, he went by Lord British for the longest time, and he dresses in Elizabethan often not as much as he used to, but yes, I mean you would see him dressed in dressed Gettish, yes, and well to the point where he really enjoys that kind

of the whole pageantry and theatricality of it. He also was part of the Society of Creative Anachronism or s c A, which is all about recreating kind of this medieval, this idealistic medieval Renaissance sort of recreation um, the Middle Ages is we would have it to be, I believe was one of the mottos of that organization, which I

may or may not have belonged to at one point. Um. But he also you were mentioning the mansion he would also he has has he owned a mansion that had secret passageways you can only get through from one room to another by solving a puzzle. Or you would be in an upper gallery and there'll be no way to get to the lower gallery unless you moved a certain object a certain number of times and then a magical staircase would appear. Um. He would occasionally turn this mansion

into a full fledged haunted house. Uh. He would do it like every other year, and he would hire Hollywood special effects companies to come to his mansion and converted into this haunted house. So we're talking, you know, motion picture quality special effects going on at this thing. And he would let people come. He would give out tickets. Uh you do the ticket thing to in order to keep a good control on traffic. But I'm pretty sure he did it was all for free. Yeah, you know.

I think he might have auctioned some off for charity or something. But he didn't charge people to come in and see his stuff. He just he loved this kind of theatricality and he loved to share it with other people. Still does I'm sure. I don't think he does the Halloween stuff anymore. I think he stopped doing that. It just became um too complicated. Uh. I believe sometime around the late nineties, maybe the early in two thousand, two

thousand one, he stopped doing it. But well, that's uh, you know, sort of the story of a successful game designer. I mean, if you're if you're making that kind of money and living this kind of lifestyle, you'd want to, you know, probably keep going if you were really into games. Right, just yeah, you're doing games for except for the fact that, yeah, you would think that, uh, and you'd be wrong. Yeah, Richard Garriot is no longer producing games, at least as

far as we can tell. Right now, um, we we need to talk about his most recent famous exploit, which is that Richard Garriott became a space tourist. Well, you know, I think he would disagree with you. He become a space ambassador. No, no, no, now, see this is part of the deal because um, this article and Wired, which is pretty interesting. It really gets into like I said, really it's more about Star City, which is where the

cosmonauts train. Now, when you enter training, according to this article, when you enter training at star City, you are a cosmonaut. So he is a cosmonaut. I'm sorry, but NASA will not call him an as you not. And he apparently takes exception of that. Um. The article suggests that maybe it's because he's into player classes. Could he wants the title to level up as an astronaut as opposed to cosmat multi class. Yeah, the Americans call him a space tourist, um,

but but not the Russians. And he uh in October lasted off for space Yasaya's rocket YEP at t M A thirteen YEP, went to the International Space Station spent more than a week up there. As I recall YEP YEP and and and his fascination with space. This isn't a new thing just because the Russians offered this. Oh did I say the Russians just offered this? Well, he became a donor to the X Prize Foundation, and he actually uh started this organization called Space Adventures, which sells

seats on Russian spacecraft for trips into space. And that's kind of how he ended up there. He um, but seat for thirty million dollars. About to say, I think it's up to thirty million dollars And apparently from what he said, that's quite a bit of his money. Um. He came, you know, this is not pocket change for him. This is a serious investment. Um, Andrew wants to go again and it may be uh up to forty five million by the time he does that, So he may

he may be starting another game company. Well yeah, because on November eleven, he wrote an open letter to the Tabula Raza website which essentially announced his he was resigning from the nc soft company and was leaving to pursue other interests. But that's about as much as we can tell from that letter. I mean, there was, it was

fairly cryptic. We know that the inspiration for this was his trip to the International Space Station, so presumably it has something to do with space exploration, possibly private space exploration, but we don't really have any details other than that. At this point, he hasn't really elaborated on his reasons for for resigning and or what his other pursuits will be. Yeah, and again he's into it. This is not just the Russians taking him into space and he gets to hang

around in the space station. He actually has to take a part in working on science experiments. Um he has to flush the space party if he needs flushing, and he had to be trained on every piece of equipment in case something went wrong. Right, It wasn't a passing fancy kind of thing. Now. As a matter of fact, apparently he had to study Russian for four hours a day so that he could actually read the instrument panels. So I mean, he this is you know, this is

not something that he has to take lightly. This is something he has to be ready for in all capacities. It's not just flying around and going hey, yeah there's Mars. So yeah, he was. He was a cool guy back when I met him. Uh, and now he's super cool. Um And I'm really interested to see what he does next because he he he gets behind his projects with such energy and passion and uh and a real curiosity that you can't help but admire the work he's done.

Even if you're not a big fan of computer games, you know, there's there's no question that a lot of work went into what he has accomplished so far. So it's very exciting to think that he's gonna tackle something new and I kind of kind of curious to see where it goes. Now, Um, I have am I gonna

miss his games? Yeah? I loved the Ultimate series. Um and uh, you know, it's kind of a bummer to think that he's not going to be doing that anymore, probably, But I am glad to see that his work has inspired other people so at least to get you know, kind of following his footsteps. That's true. And you know he's only Yeah, he's still a young guy, so there's plenty of time. Well, I think that's a really good

uh overview of Richard Lord British or General British gariot. Uh. If you want to learn more about these kind of topics, we can read things like how M M O RPGs work. Those articles are live right now on how stuff works dot com. And I guess we'll say Hale and well met Tia again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you

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