Posted by
chrisd
on from the who-doesn't-want-a-moat-after-all dept.
Our friends at Salon have an article "The Return of Lord British" about what Richard Garriot has been up to in the last year since he's left Origin. It is mostly about Lineage (a mmporpg?), but it touches on EA mismanagement (new tagline "We create write-offs").
EA's mismanagement?
by
Rimbo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If I recall correctly, EA was the savior of Origin Systems, bailing Origin out of its own mismanagement. An AC above said, "Who cares, everything past Ultima 6 sucked." Well, in my opinion, it's because Garriott was more involved with running the company at that point than he was with designing games. His gifts lie with the latter, not the former.
Re:EA's mismanagement?
by
Moofie
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
They saved the village, by destroying it. I worked at Origin during the Wing Commander IV era, and EA's revolving door management, and utter intolerance for any new ideas out of Austin, made certain that Origin would never do anything innovative again. All EA wanted to hear from Origin was "Yes, Master, the new Ultima/Wing Commander/Crusader game is on schedule and under budget. May we please refrain from laying off our staff this year?"
With the possible exception of UO, which I personally didn't enjoy very much, but other people apparently groove to. And don't get me started about Ultima:Ascention.
I can't speak to Mr. Garriott's company management skills. Hell, I certainly wouldn't have the first idea how to run a company like that...I don't think anybody really does. He did, at one point, have a unique gift for storytelling in the medium of computer games. Unfortunately, that got buried under creeping featuritis. Hopefully, he'll be able to start with a clean slate (or a Tabula Rasa...wonder if that name is more than just coincidental? : ) and get back to his unique visionary roots.
I sure hope so. U6 is one of my favourite games ever.
-- Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Lord British immortalised by Imanewbie.com-
by
Joe+'Nova'
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just think the way the company mismanaged its projects(U7-10), basicly sabotaging them, is a shame. Origin had tons of kewl games, I'm just glad R.G. has found something productive.
-- This mind intentionally left blank. The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
I had a look at it
by
jeti
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Several weeks ago, I read in a forum
that Lineage would be the most popular
MMPORG in asia. So I downloaded the free
trial version (>200MB) and had a look.
Well - the graphics were ok. But there
really wasn't too much to do. Also there
were a lot of players on the server
complaining that they'd de facto beta-
test the game for $15 per month. It seems
like the free trial had just been introduced.
I now consider the message about the
popularity a plant. Hopefully things have
improved.
Re:I had a look at it
by
Hadean
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, if you actually read anything about the game, you'd have realized that the popularity talked about is for Asia, which is currently at around 3 million players. Lord British and the gang are creating a whole new universe (ie new players) for non-Asian areas (in Garriott's own words, more or less, Asian players are too good at cooperating, and would destroy North American players in this type of game). So yeah, this version of the game isn't massively populated at the moment, but no, you're not beta testing... it's been through the ringer already.
In case anyone doubts what I just said, I might as well back it up (mostly because I'm bored):
In the United States the cooperation is not as well orchestrated as it is in Korea. It only takes a guild of 20 or 30 people to really take and hold a castle so it doesn't take a gigantic group.
can't hope to succeed
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
His games were stellar when the platform didn't have all the bells and whistles, today they are nothing compared to Neverwinter etc. (just imagine playing something like Never on an Apple II... woulda creamed your jeans ). He was a pioneer in the day (god bless the man for distractions in grade 5 [ultima I]) but sadly I think there is little he'll do that will seem as great as it did back then.
Re:can't hope to succeed
by
sittius
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, we can hope that maybe he'll come up with something new and innovative.
I do remember meeting him in the early '80s at a computer software store in Georgia. I agree that he was a pioneer and obviously very dedicated to what he was doing. What struck me, was that even though he was quite well known and successful, at that point he possessed a quality I've rarely seen in programmers : Humility
I imagine he's grown up and lost that quality, but that's the way I remember him...
And I still remember the original Ultima ( the C-64) version with fondness.
Sittius
-- Xibalba: My hell. Your hell. Our hell!
Some more links
by
Hadean
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Just wanted to add some more links for anyone who's interested - and for the lazy (although this article isn't too shabby):
Kinda sad, if you think about it... although, there's no point thinking about it too much then, is there?
A short history
by
gusnz
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Lineage has been mentioned on Slashdot previously, as part of a furore over violence in games resulting to aggression in the real world.
For anyone who doesn't want to load that page up, it linked a very interesting TIME article here. I suggest reading it -- in the Western world, the whole dollars-for-Diablo-items routine is normally as bad as this gets, but this is (if true) several steps beyond that entirely.
Re:A short history
by
Kefabi
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Video Gaming is serious in Korea.
They have televised StarCraft matches, complete with announcers, play by play analysis, and strategy talk. I've seen some shows go as far as have the players wear "futuristic" type wear while playing each other.
Diablo II is big too. I've seen televised duels between players.
Lineage gets a good amount of screen time too with talk about the world and items and skills and such.
There are entire channels devoted to computer games.
The fact is, they have PC rooms open 24 hours a day where you can use PC's for less than a dollar and hours. They almost always have people in them too playing one of the above games, or Go, or a game called Fortress 2 (Expanded Worms-like game), or whatever else. At 3 in the morning there are still plenty of males and females still playing games.
I've seen arcades take up three floors, people have made livings playign Video Games there. It's not something loser kids with no time do, it's part of the culture.
Now the sorry thing is some culturally insensitive prick's gonna mod this +1 Funny...
Last days at Origin
by
nsample
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I had the pleasure of visiting EA/Origin's Austin facility before the Garriott + team exodus. It was a neat place to be, but there was a real feeling that people were being stifled, not getting to do what they wanted creatively, and being slaves to the visions of other...
And I saw Richard's car in the parking lot. Hella cool. =)
Anyway, now they're off on their own, striking out! With a new company and new ideas... "destination games." They were going to lead us back to their roots (which are our roots), back to greatness...
But now, even their email addresses are at NC... the makers of Bloodpledge. The reason is, for apparently financial reasons, they're porting games. Hardly a creative process. I can only hope they pick it up and get back on track after they're done with Bloodpledge. Otherwise, they changed the name of the masters from "EA" to "NC" and the game from "Ultima Online" to "Bloodpledge."
Someone else's ideas and blood, sweat and tears. We hope to see yours again, Garriot! All your fans are hoping you find the path again.
Ahh, yes, I remember Salon.com
by
Proud+Geek
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"And it occurs to me that Garriott is standing here on 19th and Mission, a street corner caked with garbage and human poo, as one more refugee of that receding tide."
What an inspiring read. I mean, if I had a chance to interview one of the premiere game designers around, poop is obviously what I'd talk about.
And gender exploration by pretending to be a burly male warrior or a female wizard with 3 foot long breasts. I mean, having a picture like that and saying it's me teaches me exactly what it is like to be a woman. Oh, those lousy androgenous graphics are going to squish my budding transexuality.
Come on, you've got a good subject, and some interesting dirt (what is this Tabula Rasa of which you speak?). Why can't you make something good of it????
Garriot does nothing for Lineage
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It was done by the Koreans, 100% in Korea, and it was alive and well in Korea and Asia for YEARS before Garriot even stepped in.
He's just a figurehead for marketing the game in the US more or less; I really don't see why he's getting all the credit.
The days of yore...
by
AntonVoyl
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... were in the '80s for Richard Garriott and Ultima. That's when games were about gameplay, gamers needed graphpaper, and people whose names were on the boxes still coded. We may scoff at him now, but Lord British was a big deal in those days.
Picture this: it's a Saturday morning in the late '80s and 300 restless geeks are packed into a Georgetown University auditorium waiting with baited breath for Lord British himself to unveil the Ultima V beta.
We were the GameSIG of the Washington Apple Pi, and Richard Garriott was our guest and our friend. He wasn't just showing us a preview of Ultima V, he was showing it to us before anyone else got to see it.
Already, Ultima IV had blown our minds, and we all wanted to see where the series went next. For many of us who were at an impressionable age (I was 11), the Ultima series was a big part of our intellectual lives. Lord British was our guardian in the game and our hero in life.
When Garriott stepped onto the stage wearing armor and carrying a sword and shield, we just went nuts. Better still, he came bearing gifts; he reached into his satchel and threw handfuls of silvery ankhs out to the roaring crowd. I caught one and still treasure it.
Then the lights dimmed and we waited for the moment of truth. Lord British put the 5.25" diskettes into the Apple IIGS (256K). He fiddled with the projection system a bit and them blam: Ultima V blasted onto the screen.
The graphics and sound just blew us away, and Garriott explained each improvement as he took us through an hour-long tour of the game. You could see (and hear!) grass sway in the wind, waves rolled, trees blocked light while windows let it in... And the music!!!
The climax came when he showed us the lighthouse. You could see and hear the surf pounding on the rocks, while a beam of light swept over land and sea, just like a real lighthouse. And all of this before the backdrop of convincingly forboding music. Inside the lighthouse awaited a surprise: the keeper was none other than the don of our GameSIG, Ron Wartow. Somebody we knew was in Ultima V!
After talking to the Wartow character and getting him to crack a few jokes, Garriott looked up at us and then paused for a full ten seconds. Breaking the silence, he asked: "Well, shall we attack Ron?" We yelled back an affirmative reply. 8 turns later, Ron was a bloody pulp and our party was 5 gold and a ham sandwich richer. We were in stitches... the kid next me laughed so hard he puked through his nose.
On his way out, Lord British gave us cloth maps and whispered to us about Easter eggs he'd sprinkled throughout the series. We were on cloud nine, and I was ready to devote my life to becoming a pixelated Avatar. I wanted to grow up to be Lord British. I wanted to make games, I wanted to be in them, and I wanted to live them.
Sadly, I never got to play Ultima V. The game was delayed and the 'rents wouldn't spring for the IIGS. By time I had the resources to play the game, I'd moved onto the PC and was hooked on a series of games by a guy named Sid Meier, but that's another story for another day...
--
sig semper tyrannis!
Re:The days of yore...
by
kaisyain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's when games were about gameplay
Yeah back during the halcyon days of creativity when they churned out such classics as Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man, and who could forget ET? And then there all those Great Games like Tapper, LED Storm, Cupfinal, and Chase HQ. Wait, you mean you don't remember them? That's because they sucked. They had horrible gameplay. Hell, try going back and playing Dig Dug or Pac Man or Paperboy and tell me the gameplay on those things doesn't suck ass.
The problem with nostalgia is you only remember the best of the past and you're comparing it against the average from the present. How is Diablo's gameplay any worse than the original Gauntlet's? How is Thief or Half-Life less engrossing than Shinobi? How is Ghostbusters better than X-COM? Is Gran Tourismo less interesting than Pole Position?
The current complaints about style over substance might seem valid unless you haven't excised memories of Cinemaware and Dragon's Lair.
Yeah back during the halcyon days of creativity when they churned out such classics as Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man, and who could forget ET? And then there all those Great Games like Tapper, LED Storm, Cupfinal, and Chase HQ. Wait, you mean you don't remember them? That's because they sucked. They had horrible gameplay. Hell, try going back and playing Dig Dug or Pac Man or Paperboy and tell me the gameplay on those things doesn't suck ass.
Pac Man and Dig Dug certainly don't "suck ass". I play them often even today, thanks to (x)mame. Now ET, I grant you, was pretty bad.
The problem with nostalgia is you only remember the best of the past and you're comparing it against the average from the present. How is Diablo's gameplay any worse than the original Gauntlet's?
That point isn't that it isn't worse, the point is that it is hardly better. With all the resources available to us today, games should be awesome. Instead, the best they can do is remakes. Just like Hollywood. I hear that they are going to remake the 1970's SF classic "Rollerball" (minus the anti-corporate overtones -- can't have that today, now can we?). Why? Can't they come up with something original?
I worked at Origin during the Wing Commander IV era, and EA's revolving door management, and utter intolerance for any new ideas out of Austin, made certain that Origin would never do anything innovative again. All EA wanted to hear from Origin was "Yes, Master, the new Ultima/Wing Commander/Crusader game is on schedule and under budget. May we please refrain from laying off our staff this year?"
A big company stopping innovation and insisting on clones and sequels for constant, growing revenue and unattainable profits? Say it isn't so!
Sigh... what wonders have been lost but for the crushing weight of dull, grey, uninspired, witless corporate bureaucracy.
What is it about people, journalists in particular, that makes them believe that the U.S. "market" is so well insulated by the McDisney cultural powerhouse, that nothing can ever be "successful" in the United States.
The number of "foreign" products, games, whatever, that are seeing tremendous success here is staggering, but the "yeah, but" crowd just continues to bury their head in the demographics reports. I'll guarantee that some tie-wearing cynical #*@&!~*@%& at some arrogant company said Harry Potter would never be a "success" either. Can't you just hear it? Some haircut in a grey suit holding his hand over his #%&@#*()%# cell-phone and saying "a kid with glasses and a broom? Give me a break!"
Just a reaction to the "far too foreign to make a truly successful crossover title" remark in the article. What is truly successful? How much? A billion? A hundred billion? What?
This is what causes the money-grab mindset of businesses now. If it doesn't lead to a 100000% market-cap increase and an IPO and put us in the Fortune 100, and the creative team can't PROVE that will happen, then we'd rather just have another meeting.
I just read a few articles about "Dance Dance Revolution." Here's another product that U.S. companies probably laughed at. Yet, whenever I see the game, some kid is putting money in it, and 437 other kids are lined up around the corner to play it, and 300 other people are watching, and 10,000 other people are putting up web sites about it.
Keep having meetings and keep running your mouths, U.S. corporate-types. There's a million little companies out there with a million little really neat ideas that are eventually going to eat your %#&@$()* lunch.
I'm still surprised by the success of 'Crouching Tiger'. It started out good, up to the point where one of the women floated up into the air as if she were suspended from a wire.
Utter crap...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
U7 and SI were probably the -best- ultimas in the final series. Ultima VI was clumsy and incomplete by comparison (the whole Scara Brae "bug", for example).
U7 and SI saw the involvement of Warren Spector (who later went to Looking Glass where the true spirit of Origin was kept alive), and had probably the best storylines of the entire series. The only -good- to come out of Ultima VI were the highly underrated spin-offs, the Worlds of Ultima games (Martian Dreams and Savage Empire, both based on the U6 engine).
Crap? Hardly. These were classics. Why do you think the outrage against the horrid Ultima: Ascension was so great? U:A didn't even come close to living up to the standard set by U7.
And have you forgotten the Ultima Underworlds? They were post U7 and are legendary. Ultima Underworld 1 was the -first- 3D engine on the market (beating Wolf3d by two months), and was a joy to play. UU2 had probably the most intricate story in a 3D RPG I've ever encountered. These games were the spiritual predecessors of Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock and Deus Ex.
These games were -not- crap. They were great IN SPITE of Electronic Arts' meddling. Things went downhill with Ultima 8 simply because they wanted to "expand the userbase" by dumbing the game down into a Super Avatar Brothers-style game. Even the U8 engine wasn't wasted in the end: it was successfully used to create another fantastic game called Crusader: No Remorse/Regret.
Well said! Ultima 7/BG was the first RPG I played (not counting Rogue), and I was amazed at the size and interactivity of its world. Many of us have worked countless hours to keep it alive, and someday make new games in the same style.
Re:MBAs as Stupidity Barometers
by
AndroidCat
·
· Score: 2
Look on the bright side: If MBAs are stupidity barometers, you can always use them to measure the heights of buildings. (Since no one would trade for an MBA, you'd have to fall back to the drop/time method.;^)
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Ultima Online story
by
portforward
·
· Score: 2, Funny
One of the funniest things that I ever read in a games magazine was when Ultima Online was a few months old. Lord British decided that he wanted to give a "State of the Game" address so he arranged for everyone to come to a certain place in the game at a certain time and he would speak. Some guy's character was in the first or second row and thought to himself "I'm never going to get this close again." He stole a spell scroll out of the backpack of the character next to him (it was a wall of flame) and cast it at Lord British mid speech.
Now normally British was immortal, but there had been a server crash and someone neglected to reset the immortal bit. When British saw the flame wave coming he typed "Ha, Ha, nice try" and then was surprised when the "you're dead" message popped up on the screen. Everything paused for a few seconds. ..and then all hell broke loose. People were casting demons, fireballs, and everything else you can think of. In the ensuing chaos and carngae, the "assasin" escaped.
If anyone else knows where the URL is for that magazine story, or BETTER YET if you were there (in a virtual sense) please let me know.
Thanks
The Play's the Thing
by
epepke
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A few years ago, I saw the late Douglas Adams give the keynote address at Siggraph. He was just designing Starship Titanic at the time. He said one thing that has stuck with me: "Use your limitations, before they are denied you." By that I think he meant that computing power and graphics cards would advance to the point where it would become tempting to rely on flash and adrenaline for the success of a game and neglect thought.
I think that time has come. There is a dreadful sameness to the games that are being produced today. Consider Alice. The art and texture are marvelous, as is the potential of the idea: the internal world of a madwoman. Yet the play reduces to running around and shooting, with a few Donkey Kong skills thrown in. All the big tasks consist of defeating bosses, a la Duke Nukem. A good play, no doubt, but it could have been so much more.
On the other hand, consider Deus Ex. The reasonably modern first-person graphics are very good, but it also weaves in RPG elements, interaction with characters, and a multipath plot.
Are older game designers extinct dinosaurs, useless in an age where form is king? Or are they, instead, people who remember when flashy graphics were not enough to ensure satisfactory Christmas sales? Are they, in fact, the descendents of dinosaurs: soaring birds?
I hope to see computer games emerge from the current state, which is like movies in 1910, and come into their own as a real art form. To do this, I think that we need art that does more than show off the technology. I think that the skills of the pioneers are still needed.
Re:The Play's the Thing
by
DrCode
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think your post should have been modded higher.
I keep thinking about how the computer games industry compares to fiction publishing. Imagine walking into a book store and only finding 100 titles on the shelves. Suppose you bought the latest Steven King novel, and found that it was filled with 80 pages of full-color pictures, but only 10 pages of text, and cost $50?
It seems like the US Lineage players would tend to be mainly mercenaries, either for money, for experience, or because they think their employer is doing something good.
A separate Lineage game in the US probably wouldn't work very well-- people want to play the "main character", or one of a band of adventurers, while the world must be made mostly of minor characters who are important in groups. On the other hand, if the world has 2 million people playing people in groups, the addition of a few hundred thousand freelance people would probably work fine for game mechanics.
It would probably be very interesting to go on quests in a fully-fleshed-out world inhabited by a large number of PCs and NPCs in realistic arrangements. Thinking about LotR, there are a ton of groups of people who clearly ought to be PCs who don't fit the adventurer model, and it would be very interesting to have a MMRPG with people who actually want to play those roles.
Chase HQ? I loved that game. Tapper? Bring it on! How about Crisis Mountain, Burger Time, Lode Runner (with its 256 levels), and GhostBusters? I play those games for hours in my apple][e emulator.
Paper Boy was awesome, but it doesn't translate well to nintendo for the same reason HardDrivn' doesn't. Too much of the game play is the interface.
How about Spy Hunter? Available on Shockwave.com!
No but I get your point. Neither of them suck, any more than 1950's cars are better or worse than cars in the 1990's.
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall correctly, EA was the savior of Origin Systems, bailing Origin out of its own mismanagement. An AC above said, "Who cares, everything past Ultima 6 sucked." Well, in my opinion, it's because Garriott was more involved with running the company at that point than he was with designing games. His gifts lie with the latter, not the former.
one
two
Tribute-
I just think the way the company mismanaged its projects(U7-10), basicly sabotaging them, is a shame. Origin had tons of kewl games, I'm just glad R.G. has found something productive.
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
Several weeks ago, I read in a forum
that Lineage would be the most popular
MMPORG in asia. So I downloaded the free
trial version (>200MB) and had a look.
Well - the graphics were ok. But there
really wasn't too much to do. Also there
were a lot of players on the server
complaining that they'd de facto beta-
test the game for $15 per month. It seems
like the free trial had just been introduced.
I now consider the message about the
popularity a plant. Hopefully things have
improved.
His games were stellar when the platform didn't have all the bells and whistles, today they are nothing compared to Neverwinter etc. (just imagine playing something like Never on an Apple II
Lineage has been mentioned on Slashdot previously, as part of a furore over violence in games resulting to aggression in the real world.
For anyone who doesn't want to load that page up, it linked a very interesting TIME article here. I suggest reading it -- in the Western world, the whole dollars-for-Diablo-items routine is normally as bad as this gets, but this is (if true) several steps beyond that entirely.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
I had the pleasure of visiting EA/Origin's Austin facility before the Garriott + team exodus. It was a neat place to be, but there was a real feeling that people were being stifled, not getting to do what they wanted creatively, and being slaves to the visions of other...
And I saw Richard's car in the parking lot. Hella cool. =)
Anyway, now they're off on their own, striking out! With a new company and new ideas... "destination games." They were going to lead us back to their roots (which are our roots), back to greatness...
But now, even their email addresses are at NC... the makers of Bloodpledge. The reason is, for apparently financial reasons, they're porting games. Hardly a creative process. I can only hope they pick it up and get back on track after they're done with Bloodpledge. Otherwise, they changed the name of the masters from "EA" to "NC" and the game from "Ultima Online" to "Bloodpledge."
Someone else's ideas and blood, sweat and tears. We hope to see yours again, Garriot! All your fans are hoping you find the path again.
"And it occurs to me that Garriott is standing here on 19th and Mission, a street corner caked with garbage and human poo, as one more refugee of that receding tide."
What an inspiring read. I mean, if I had a chance to interview one of the premiere game designers around, poop is obviously what I'd talk about.
And gender exploration by pretending to be a burly male warrior or a female wizard with 3 foot long breasts. I mean, having a picture like that and saying it's me teaches me exactly what it is like to be a woman. Oh, those lousy androgenous graphics are going to squish my budding transexuality.
Come on, you've got a good subject, and some interesting dirt (what is this Tabula Rasa of which you speak?). Why can't you make something good of it????
Oh, I forgot. It's on Salon.com.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
It was done by the Koreans, 100% in Korea, and it was alive and well in Korea and Asia for YEARS before Garriot even stepped in.
He's just a figurehead for marketing the game in the US more or less; I really don't see why he's getting all the credit.
... were in the '80s for Richard Garriott and Ultima. That's when games were about gameplay, gamers needed graphpaper, and people whose names were on the boxes still coded. We may scoff at him now, but Lord British was a big deal in those days.
Picture this: it's a Saturday morning in the late '80s and 300 restless geeks are packed into a Georgetown University auditorium waiting with baited breath for Lord British himself to unveil the Ultima V beta.
We were the GameSIG of the Washington Apple Pi, and Richard Garriott was our guest and our friend. He wasn't just showing us a preview of Ultima V, he was showing it to us before anyone else got to see it.
Already, Ultima IV had blown our minds, and we all wanted to see where the series went next. For many of us who were at an impressionable age (I was 11), the Ultima series was a big part of our intellectual lives. Lord British was our guardian in the game and our hero in life.
When Garriott stepped onto the stage wearing armor and carrying a sword and shield, we just went nuts. Better still, he came bearing gifts; he reached into his satchel and threw handfuls of silvery ankhs out to the roaring crowd. I caught one and still treasure it.
Then the lights dimmed and we waited for the moment of truth. Lord British put the 5.25" diskettes into the Apple IIGS (256K). He fiddled with the projection system a bit and them blam: Ultima V blasted onto the screen.
The graphics and sound just blew us away, and Garriott explained each improvement as he took us through an hour-long tour of the game. You could see (and hear!) grass sway in the wind, waves rolled, trees blocked light while windows let it in... And the music!!!
The climax came when he showed us the lighthouse. You could see and hear the surf pounding on the rocks, while a beam of light swept over land and sea, just like a real lighthouse. And all of this before the backdrop of convincingly forboding music. Inside the lighthouse awaited a surprise: the keeper was none other than the don of our GameSIG, Ron Wartow. Somebody we knew was in Ultima V!
After talking to the Wartow character and getting him to crack a few jokes, Garriott looked up at us and then paused for a full ten seconds. Breaking the silence, he asked: "Well, shall we attack Ron?" We yelled back an affirmative reply. 8 turns later, Ron was a bloody pulp and our party was 5 gold and a ham sandwich richer. We were in stitches... the kid next me laughed so hard he puked through his nose.
On his way out, Lord British gave us cloth maps and whispered to us about Easter eggs he'd sprinkled throughout the series. We were on cloud nine, and I was ready to devote my life to becoming a pixelated Avatar. I wanted to grow up to be Lord British. I wanted to make games, I wanted to be in them, and I wanted to live them.
Sadly, I never got to play Ultima V. The game was delayed and the 'rents wouldn't spring for the IIGS. By time I had the resources to play the game, I'd moved onto the PC and was hooked on a series of games by a guy named Sid Meier, but that's another story for another day...
sig semper tyrannis!
I worked at Origin during the Wing Commander IV era, and EA's revolving door management, and utter intolerance for any new ideas out of Austin, made certain that Origin would never do anything innovative again. All EA wanted to hear from Origin was "Yes, Master, the new Ultima/Wing Commander/Crusader game is on schedule and under budget. May we please refrain from laying off our staff this year?"
A big company stopping innovation and insisting on clones and sequels for constant, growing revenue and unattainable profits? Say it isn't so!
Sigh... what wonders have been lost but for the crushing weight of dull, grey, uninspired, witless corporate bureaucracy.
What is it about people, journalists in particular, that makes them believe that the U.S. "market" is so well insulated by the McDisney cultural powerhouse, that nothing can ever be "successful" in the United States.
The number of "foreign" products, games, whatever, that are seeing tremendous success here is staggering, but the "yeah, but" crowd just continues to bury their head in the demographics reports. I'll guarantee that some tie-wearing cynical #*@&!~*@%& at some arrogant company said Harry Potter would never be a "success" either. Can't you just hear it? Some haircut in a grey suit holding his hand over his #%&@#*()%# cell-phone and saying "a kid with glasses and a broom? Give me a break!"
Just a reaction to the "far too foreign to make a truly successful crossover title" remark in the article. What is truly successful? How much? A billion? A hundred billion? What?
This is what causes the money-grab mindset of businesses now. If it doesn't lead to a 100000% market-cap increase and an IPO and put us in the Fortune 100, and the creative team can't PROVE that will happen, then we'd rather just have another meeting.
I just read a few articles about "Dance Dance Revolution." Here's another product that U.S. companies probably laughed at. Yet, whenever I see the game, some kid is putting money in it, and 437 other kids are lined up around the corner to play it, and 300 other people are watching, and 10,000 other people are putting up web sites about it.
Keep having meetings and keep running your mouths, U.S. corporate-types. There's a million little companies out there with a million little really neat ideas that are eventually going to eat your %#&@$()* lunch.
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U7 and SI were probably the -best- ultimas in the final series. Ultima VI was clumsy and incomplete by comparison (the whole Scara Brae "bug", for example).
U7 and SI saw the involvement of Warren Spector (who later went to Looking Glass where the true spirit of Origin was kept alive), and had probably the best storylines of the entire series. The only -good- to come out of Ultima VI were the highly underrated spin-offs, the Worlds of Ultima games (Martian Dreams and Savage Empire, both based on the U6 engine).
Crap? Hardly. These were classics. Why do you think the outrage against the horrid Ultima: Ascension was so great? U:A didn't even come close to living up to the standard set by U7.
And have you forgotten the Ultima Underworlds? They were post U7 and are legendary. Ultima Underworld 1 was the -first- 3D engine on the market (beating Wolf3d by two months), and was a joy to play. UU2 had probably the most intricate story in a 3D RPG I've ever encountered. These games were the spiritual predecessors of Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock and Deus Ex.
These games were -not- crap. They were great IN SPITE of Electronic Arts' meddling. Things went downhill with Ultima 8 simply because they wanted to "expand the userbase" by dumbing the game down into a Super Avatar Brothers-style game. Even the U8 engine wasn't wasted in the end: it was successfully used to create another fantastic game called Crusader: No Remorse/Regret.
Look on the bright side: If MBAs are stupidity barometers, you can always use them to measure the heights of buildings. (Since no one would trade for an MBA, you'd have to fall back to the drop/time method. ;^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
One of the funniest things that I ever read in a games magazine was when Ultima Online was a few months old. Lord British decided that he wanted to give a "State of the Game" address so he arranged for everyone to come to a certain place in the game at a certain time and he would speak. Some guy's character was in the first or second row and thought to himself "I'm never going to get this close again." He stole a spell scroll out of the backpack of the character next to him (it was a wall of flame) and cast it at Lord British mid speech.
.and then all hell broke loose. People were casting demons, fireballs, and everything else you can think of. In the ensuing chaos and carngae, the "assasin" escaped.
Now normally British was immortal, but there had been a server crash and someone neglected to reset the immortal bit. When British saw the flame wave coming he typed "Ha, Ha, nice try" and then was surprised when the "you're dead" message popped up on the screen. Everything paused for a few seconds. .
If anyone else knows where the URL is for that magazine story, or BETTER YET if you were there (in a virtual sense) please let me know.
Thanks
A few years ago, I saw the late Douglas Adams give the keynote address at Siggraph. He was just designing Starship Titanic at the time. He said one thing that has stuck with me: "Use your limitations, before they are denied you." By that I think he meant that computing power and graphics cards would advance to the point where it would become tempting to rely on flash and adrenaline for the success of a game and neglect thought.
I think that time has come. There is a dreadful sameness to the games that are being produced today. Consider Alice. The art and texture are marvelous, as is the potential of the idea: the internal world of a madwoman. Yet the play reduces to running around and shooting, with a few Donkey Kong skills thrown in. All the big tasks consist of defeating bosses, a la Duke Nukem. A good play, no doubt, but it could have been so much more.
On the other hand, consider Deus Ex. The reasonably modern first-person graphics are very good, but it also weaves in RPG elements, interaction with characters, and a multipath plot.
Are older game designers extinct dinosaurs, useless in an age where form is king? Or are they, instead, people who remember when flashy graphics were not enough to ensure satisfactory Christmas sales? Are they, in fact, the descendents of dinosaurs: soaring birds?
I hope to see computer games emerge from the current state, which is like movies in 1910, and come into their own as a real art form. To do this, I think that we need art that does more than show off the technology. I think that the skills of the pioneers are still needed.
It seems like the US Lineage players would tend to be mainly mercenaries, either for money, for experience, or because they think their employer is doing something good.
A separate Lineage game in the US probably wouldn't work very well-- people want to play the "main character", or one of a band of adventurers, while the world must be made mostly of minor characters who are important in groups. On the other hand, if the world has 2 million people playing people in groups, the addition of a few hundred thousand freelance people would probably work fine for game mechanics.
It would probably be very interesting to go on quests in a fully-fleshed-out world inhabited by a large number of PCs and NPCs in realistic arrangements. Thinking about LotR, there are a ton of groups of people who clearly ought to be PCs who don't fit the adventurer model, and it would be very interesting to have a MMRPG with people who actually want to play those roles.
I'd call SSX pretty inspired and even innovative, despite its debt to Tony Hawk.
Chase HQ? I loved that game. Tapper? Bring it on! How about Crisis Mountain, Burger Time, Lode Runner (with its 256 levels), and GhostBusters? I play those games for hours in my apple][e emulator.
Paper Boy was awesome, but it doesn't translate well to nintendo for the same reason HardDrivn' doesn't. Too much of the game play is the interface.
How about Spy Hunter? Available on Shockwave.com!
No but I get your point. Neither of them suck, any more than 1950's cars are better or worse than cars in the 1990's.