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Richard Garriott Claims Moon, Plans New Brittania
kennon42 writes: "Lord British says he is reuniting his old Origin team. Will they
rise again to dominate the industry? Lord British owns the moon!" Self-declared "Industry Elder" Richard Garriott may have been less visible for a little while, but if anything it sounds like he's gotten more ambitious as he plans his next venture. Funny, free-wheeling interview -- I only wish it had been a little longer, and addressed games for Open Source OSes, too. And yes, he's claiming the moon.
Yes, he has read Tolkien and he's a Tolkien fan. There's hints throughout his games. In Serpent Isle for example, there is a swamp called "Gorlab", now read that backwards :)
Also, the runic alphabet he uses comes directly from Tolkien (with some minor adaptation of how it is mapped to out alphabet). I could read Tolkien's silverscroll map or whatever it was, because I knew the runes from Ultima... remember Tolkien was a professor for nordic languages, he made that alphabet.
There's probably more from Tolkien hidden in Ultima, don't know.
elen sila lumenn omentielvo if I remember correctly... (I know, the punctuation is wrong)
CU Drax
I only wish it had been a little longer, and addressed games for Open Source OSes, too.
What were you hoping to hear? "Yes, we enjoy losing money, so our next Ultima will be delayed while we waste time porting it to Linux"?
The United States of America owns Earth's moon silly people! We planted our flags up there and claimed it for the USA. If you don't like it, go up there and knock our flags down and put your own up. :-)
- Black and White
- Diablo 2
- FAKK 2 (well, that was last summer)
- Counterstrike
I'd have to say that there have been some good games out there.And then he'll have all the spawn to himself without having to worry about PKers - lucky bastard!
I believe Seamus Blackley was one of the original members, but I could be wrong, maybe he joined later. Now of course he's under the mind control of billg, and will attempt to further the interests of the dark side by devoting all his talent to xboxing.
Looking Glass had some kind of close relationship with Origin when they did Ultima Underworld. I suspect the Origin guys did much of the game design and QA, because I never did see anything quite like it in terms of play value, even later from Looking Glass/Blue Sky. I guess there must have been friction too, because after UW2 I don't think they ever worked together again.
*Sigh*
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Now that UO2 has been cancelled and there's almost an entire dev team frothing at the mouth to start work on TNBT, Gariott's non-compete runs out...
Buckle your seat belts, kids. It's gonna be a fun ride.
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We've had a lull in the gaming world for the past few years. All technology, no development in gameplay.
Is this guy gonna change anything?
I think we might be alright here. I saw a special report on FOX a couple of weeks back that PROVED that man hasn't been on the moon, and can't go. You see, there's a crater on the ground in Area 51, and a building big enough to shoot a movie in, so the whole moon thing was faked. Plus, there is radiation in space, so we can never get to the moon alive. An investigative reporter said so, so it must be true!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Old, low end hardware? Are you mad? U7 was the first game EVER to REQUIRE a 386. U6 was the first game I ever saw in 256 color VGA. (Amiga users need not chime in. I know your computer was cool back in the day.) U8 had people lining up for new computers. Then it sucked. U9 did the same, and sucked (although not QUITE as much. Almost...but not QUITE).
The earliest Ultimas were running on low-end hardware...but that's all there WAS. Ever since, Ultima has been pushing the technology envelope until it shredded.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It is funny how old classic game makers getting together sounds a little like old rock-n-roll bands doing reunion tours. I have I hopes for a breath of fresh air, but like most old reunions, you still just want to hear the old songs. 'cause the new stuff is flat and uninspired.
-Moondog
BTW, Star Wars and The Matrix are a few of the movies that follow the Hero Cycle pretty slavishly.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Not trying to insinuate that it's a bad thing, old chap. Just putting it in perspective. :-)
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
...until of course anything valuable is discovered on it... or we need it for something (like to store stuff - or launch large rocks at foreign countries).
...and then take it by pure brutal ignorant millitary force.
That's even cooler if all he is done is "claim it" but still lives in a house on earth... roll in the tanks, and bombers... better make sure you don't live next door to that guy... he's a target now...
...oh wait a second... he owns an object on the moon... and based on that has laid claim to the whole thing...
Blast him anyway... carnage... chaos... destruction! Wait a second... all of that isn't embodied in millitary force...
Ferrets! Chaos with fur, claws and an odd smell. Release the ferrets! They'll teach him a fuzzy lesson he won't soon forget - and the therapy won't be cheap either.
BlackNova Traders
The odds of Mr. Garriot doing a game for any of the Open Source OSes are slim-to-none, because Garriot is not a visionary like the rest of you Linux users. Garriot is a gamer and buisnessman, cut and dry. He's going to have his work cut out for him just developing for Windows and the majour consoles, let alone adding support for MacOS and others like Linux.
This is why the X-Box could be such a hit. The X-Box graphics drivers should look at least a LITTLE like that for Windows; DirectX is something of a standard and I can't imagine them deviating from that too much. Programming for something that they're already familiar with and something that ports VERY easily to the PC will be a big incentive for developers. Why get their hands dirty with Linux for the few thousand copies it would sell? It's just like adventure games in America; the Europeans make plenty of them, but we never get them over here because they simply don't sell. For instance, The Longest Journey got rave reviews, but sold only a pathetic 500 copies in America last year. How can the Euros justify publishing toward that? It's the same thing for Linux & company.
student of animation and the fine arts
He must pay property taxes by the acre.
Playing Ultima to win
Getting bored, making a backup, and trying to kill Everything, including Lord British
Greatest disappointment was getting to the bottom of the volcano and finding I didn't have an answer to some stupid question, which I had no clue would be required. (this at 4:00 am after a marathon 6 hour descent into it)
Still, U2 is probably my favorite. Can be played in a couple hours and the dungeons aren't even necessary.
I still think some middleground between the Unix Moria game, Ultima 4 and a mud would be great fun.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How do you feel about the new console RPGs?
There are two kinds of "Role Playing Games" in my mind. Stats-based advancement games, like Diablo and EverQuest, which are very popular, but less interesting to me, and games where you play a role first and the leveling up is less a focus, like Thief and Ultima. Leveling games are easier to build and often more popular. Yet, I feel that when the craft of role-playing is mastered some day, they will be the most desirable. Most console games are stats based games, thus less interesting to me.
Most console games are stats based games? More stats based than Ultima? It's always appeared to me that PC RPGs have far more statistics and complicated math than console RPGs. Perhaps he has more complex in mind in his "stats-based" vs. "playing a role" categories. Yet I fail to see how you could call advancement in Final Fantasy stats-based, and how could you describe console RPGs without describing Square?
Is this the end of the Ultima universe and Lord British/Blackthorne?
I own/am Lord British. A New Britannia shall rise!
The question I'd like to have answered is, does Richard also own the rights to Britannia, or does Electronic Arts ? If a "new britannia" is indeed to rise, it may have to be one that lacks Britain, Yew, Buc's Den, Moonglow and all that good stuff that makes up the Britannia we know and love. (or perhaps that's what he means by "new")
-- Maciek
Ultima 7: The major problem was the insane memory requirements. That game was a real bitch to get to run because it needed a redicilous amount of convential memory. I had a whole set of DOS boot menus (remember those?) and I actually had a special entry jsut for Ultima 9 to get it all the memory it wanted. It came out during the day of the DOS/4GW and CWSDPMI hybrid mode compilers too, so there really was no excuse.
Also, I had a number of crashing problems with it. This really isn't excusable in DOS, since you can't blame the OS, all it does is disk services, basic memory management, and the mouse (if you used the MS mouse driver).
Ultima 8: What's to say really, I mean the interface was jsut a dog. I couldn't get past that so I never really got into the game, same goes for all my friends. Even Origin wasn't happy with that one.
Ultima 9: This game is so problematic it's jsut unbelievable. I mean the actual sotry is great, the intrface is cool, the music owns, but the programming is so poor I want to beat the programmer with a rolled up newspaper. Ultima 9 crashes all the time. Not regular crashes either, it just dumps me to the desktop with no error, so something internal to its code is terminating the program. Also, the game has real problems internally. I remember once completeing a dungeon only to find the critical item had not spawned, so I had no choice but to reload and try again. Finlayy the game is SLOW in the purest sense of the word. I didn't get it when it came out at first, because I was too busy with AQ2, I jsut got it 6 months ago or so. Well I have a PIII 700 with 384MB of ram, and a GeForce DDR. Ok, so you figure the game ought to run steal, after all the on box recommendations are a PII 400mhz, 128MB ram and a Voodoo 3 (that's the recommended, not the minimum). Ha. The performance is best described as "barely adiquate". There is noticable shearing in many scenes and it drags in all occasions unless I'm in a cave or something. On my friends PII 450 with a Vooodoo 3 it's unplayable. This, and it's not nearly as detailed as say Quake 3 or Tribes 2, both which run great.
Basically I feel Orign has really been going down hill lately, much to my dismay. Each successive Ultima has been an even bigger dissapointment and now UO2 got canceled. I know many people are quick to get mad at EA for it but think about it: They wouldn't have canceled it without a good reason. MMRPGs are HUGE cash cows, there must have been some serious problems with it for them to put the axe on it. Hopefully Garriot will pull things together and start producing great games again, the Ultimas were some of my favourite games throught my childhood.
The people at moonshop.com have already claimed the Moon. Silly goose.
"Five is right out."