Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Richard Garriot Leaves Origin

Posted by Hemos on from the castle-building-crown-wearing dept.

A reader writes, "After over 15 years with Origin Systems, Richard Garriot, the lead designer of the Ultima series, has decided to leave the company and pursue other interests. " We have no comment about Britishing. Especially CowboyNeal has no comment.

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Other interests? by griffjon · · Score: 3

    He's evidentally building a new house, maybe he's working on the Lord British mansion trying to get it ready for next Halloween...

    Also, talking to some Origin employees, there was no small amount of unrest and unease about the EA buyout and heavy-handedness, not to mention EA's history of running game companies into the groung then moving on. Some employees even had shirts with the EA triangle/circle/square logo made out in Borg-style tech.

    Maybe Garriot's looking to jumpstart a new gaming company? I'm sure he could attract a lot of the original Origin programming group out of EA.

    --
    Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
  2. Wondering what he'll do next... by spiralx · · Score: 3

    The Ultima series was absolutely wonderful, especially in its early days when its attention to plot (which was pretty much a dirty word in the computer RPG genre back then) and detailed background. It set the tone for later CRPGs, and I'm sure that it inspired the recent revival started by games like Diablo.

    Assuming Richard Garriot isn't just going to spend his time lounging around in his big house throwing Halloween parties, I'm looking foward to what he does next. Without the pressure to do yet another Ultima game, he can turn his creative talents to producing a new game with a new setting, hopefully one even better than Britannia. Given the increased power of computers nowadays, he could really produce a detailed setting and a great game based in it.

  3. Good. by Daltorak · · Score: 3
    Richard Garriot, aka Lord British is one of the greatest game designers and conceptualists of our time. The behemoth-ness of Origin and Electronic Arts has crippled his ability to produce truly great games.

    Anyone in the Open Source community can appreciate this on a certain level; if you were ordered by, let's say Linus Torvalds, how to design your Linux-compatible software, which you came up with the original idea for, -and- you were told to have it done by a deadline or less lose all support for developing your software, how would you feel? You'd probably say, "screw that, I want to do things my own way".

    Regardless of the fact that Ultima never made it to Linux (thank Origin for that oversight -- Garriot was actually a believer in cross-platformed games!), the twelve (major) games released under the Ultima banner have collectively done more for fantasy role-playing on computers than anything else out there.

    Best wishes to Garriot in his future endeavours.

    Daltorak

  4. Todays PVP comic is about Richard by BlergEatKitty · · Score: 5

    Check it out here.
    PVP

    --
    "Never let your schooling interfere with your education" -Samuel Clemens