Richard Garriott To Sue Former Employer NCSoft

Om writes "Richard Garriott, lead designer of the now-defunct NCSoft game Tabula Rasa, is suing former employer NCSoft to the tune of $24,000,000. GamePolitics has details on the legal filings, but contrary to official postings from 'General British' himself, it appears this split wasn't exactly amicable."

Comments

The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[eldavojohn]

... but contrary to official postings from 'General British' himself ...

If you bother to read the official document hosted by GamePolitics, Garriott claims that letter was fabricated while he was in quarantine from his space flight. And he claims its true intent was to deprive him of stock options he would have if he were terminated involuntarily. Since it sounded as voluntary termination in the letter, he no longer had these stock options:

22. Shortly after the "quarantine call," NCsoft prepared and presented an "open letter" to Mr. Garriott, announcing Mr Garriott's departure from the company. That letter was drafted by NCsoft but purported to be from Mr. Garriott to the Tabula Rasa players. The letter announced that Mr. Garriott was "leaving NCsoft to purse [new] interests." Though NCsoft's letter omitted details about the circumstances surrounding Mr. Garriott's departure, Mr. Garriott saw no reason at the time to object to these omissions, and he did not object to NCsoft posting the letter on the Tabula Rasa website.
23. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it appears that NCsoft's "open letter" was a prelude to the wrongful conduct by NCsoft to come.
E. NCsoft Re-Characterized Mr. Garriott's Termination as a Voluntary Departure, Depriving Mr. Garriott of the Full Value of His Stock Options.

Seems to boil down to whether or not his termination was voluntary or involuntary that determines if he could have exercised $27 million (not $24 million) in stock options.

Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[wjousts]

Seems to boil down to whether or not his termination was voluntary or involuntary that determines if he could have exercised $27 million (not $24 million) in stock options.

Actually, it boiled down to when not if he could exercise his stock options. If his leaving was "voluntary" he would have to sell his stock options right away or risk them not being honored by NCSoft. If his leaving was involuntary, he'd have until June 2011 to decide when to exercise his stock. Because of his "voluntary" leaving, he had to exercise his stocks in a down market rather than being able to pick the right time to cash in.

Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[jgtg32a]

If you bother to read the official document [libsyn.com] hosted by GamePolitics, Garriott claims that letter was fabricated while he was in quarantine from his space flight

I find this sentence very amusing, but I think its because I'm working on the assumption that he is crazy and isn't actually going to space, and he locked him self in his room for a while.

Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[flyingsquid]

NCSoft is crazy to pick this fight. I guess they've never played Ultima, or they'd know that Lord British cannot be defeated.

Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[DeathMagnetic]

Sometimes he can be...

Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[ahmusch]

Perhaps, however, they did play:

Ultima III;
Ultima IV;
Ultima VI;
Ultima VII (parts one and two); and
Ultima VIII.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_British#Assassination_of_Lord_British

Re:The Letter Was Written by NCsoft

[Registered Coward v2]

That would be a bad assumption. Google "Richard Gariott space" and you'll get a long list of news articles on his visit to the ISS, topped by an official web site for the event. He launched on Oct. 12 and returned to Earth Oct. 23.

Google Owen K and you get his dad - making them teh first father / son pair to fly into space and both did it to space stations. (Skylab and ISS)

Lord British

[vaxt]

It's Lord British, not General British. *scoff*

Re:Lord British

[Bai jie]

Not in Tabula Rasa. Though I will always love Lord British of Ultima fame over the space British.

I call Lord British to the stand!

[GPLDAN]

http://gmtristan.com/the-man-who-killed-lord-british/


Suddenly, with Garriott on the witness stand, Rainz, cleverly disguised using his 'Appearance as Matlock' spell - reaches into his briefcase and produces a fire scroll!!!!!!!!!!

Alas, Bailiff Blackthorne could not reach him in time...

Re:Question

[neurovish]

The options are just an agreement to sell a number of shares at a set price. If NCSoft was worth $10/share when the options were cut, and is worth $20/share now, then Richard Garriott could buy the stock directly from the company for $10/share, then turn around and sell it for $20/share on the open market. If the stock is currently only worth $5/ a share, then he would still buy at $10/share, but wouldn't be able to gain any profit at all from a sale.

NCSoft isn't paying him anything at all, they're just cutting him an employee discount on their stock if it is currently trading higher than when he started working for them.

Options of this kind don't last forever though and usually have an expire date and a bunch of strings attached.

The thread about this news got nuked on L2 forum

[Net_Op]

One of the new GM's("Moxie") at the Lineage 2 forum just locked the thread about this lawsuit and wiped all of the posts except for the original that contained a link to the Kotaku article. It was their right to do so, but this is the first time I can remember them actually taking this action.

EA Bought Bioware

[Enderandrew]

EA owns the Ultima license. Bioware needs to hire Richard Garriot tomorrow and remake Ultima. The first three Ultima games had plots going all over the place. Most of the games don't run on modern computers, and many gamers today never played a single-player Ultima. But thanks to Ultima Online, they recognize the name.

Use the Dragon Age engine that Bioware made, and remake the original Ultima trilogy. I know he doesn't want to work for EA, but working for EA under Bioware probably wouldn't be that bad. Please, make this happen.

Re:EA Bought Bioware

[Man On Pink Corner]

One of the interesting things about the Ultima V: Lazarus project, which was a remake of U5 based on the Dungeon Siege engine, was that several spells and features from the original 8-bit release couldn't be implemented safely. (You can't teleport around in dungeons, among other things.)

The old-school 2D worlds had some real advantages when it came to game-design freedom. If you wanted to implement an airplane, you changed the player icon into a 14x16-pixel airplane, made the speaker play a repetitive clicking sound, and turned off collision detection. Need a teleport spell? Just generate pairs of random numbers from 0-63 and accept the first pair that lands on an empty tile. It took about 10 minutes to add a new monster via the 2D tile editor; no need to submit a request to the art director, coordinate with the animators, and hope you're not setting the schedule back another week or blowing the texture-memory budget.

Bottom line, the first three Ultimas were chock full of stuff that would be a nightmare to implement in a modern game engine. Lighting, animation, physics, sound, and so forth don't just complicate the code base, they complicate all aspects of production. It'd be comparable to the difference between writing a chapter in a novel about dragons attacking a city, and shooting the scene in a $200M movie. Not to say it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done, but what you end up with will not be a very faithful heir to the originals.

Re:EA Bought Bioware

[Enderandrew]

I think it is largely forgotten how much RG pushed the technical boundaries. Ultima 1 had some weird elements like space flight. Would it be removed for technical reasons in a newer title, or would it be removed because it was wacky and took away from the original title?

From a story perspective, I'd like to see him revisit the original trilogy of kill-the-big-baddie and try to put a spin on it. He put that concept on its head, in Ultima IV-VI, but those games feature abstract concepts that are best handled in sequels to established properties when the fans have already bought in.

And the nice aspect of working with Bioware (and EA financing the affair) is that technical limitations should be minor.

I think the world of Ultima 1 has a lot left on the table. Those of us who know and love Ultima, basically only really know 1 of the 4 original continents. I'm really curious to examine a story that looks how magic affects a fantasy society. What kind of world is it when some people can afford resurrections? At what point is magic feared and outlawed? And what are the repercussions of a man like Mondain acquiring near infinite power?

Check out the Wikipedia page and tell me there isn't ripe potential for a good remake here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_1

As for limitations with DS/Lazarus, the Lazarus team was working within a toolset. They couldn't rewrite the engine for what they needed. RG working at Bioware would have programmers who could lift technical barriers.

Re:Who the fuck?

[amicusNYCL]

Richard Garriott is one of the better-known fucking game developers, his first games came out at the end of the fucking 70's. He created the entire fucking Ultima series, including Ultima Online, which was one of the first fucking MMOs. He gained the fucking nickname "Lord British" in school because his friends thought he sounded like he had a fucking British accent (he's American though, and lives in fucking Texas), and in his Ultima series the fucking ruler of the land was a character called Lord British whom he fucking modelled after himself (visually, anyway), and he used the fucking name to credit himself ("a fucking Lord British game"). The game he developed with NCSoft, who he's now fucking suing, was called Tabula Rasa and his fucking in-game persona was instead called "General British". He alleges that NCSoft fucking fired him and did so in a way that they claimed he fucking voluntarily left, thereby forcing him to sell his fucking stock options for a lower price than he would have gotten had he been allowed to retain them according to his fucking employment contract, which said that if he was fucking fired (as opposed to leaving voluntarily), he was allowed to keep his fucking options until 2011.

So that's what the fuck is going on.

Re:Who the fuck?

[Skye16]

Need moar fucks.

Re:Who the fuck?

[amicusNYCL]

It's cool, it's the fucking thought that counts.

Transcript of Richard Garriott's team of lawyers:

[Anonymous Coward]

Iolo: "...Ask Dupre about that."

Dupre: "...Ask Shamino about that."

Shamino: "...Ask Iolo about that."

He's got to pay for that space trip some how

[Anonymous Coward]

He said it cost him virtually all of his savings to pay for it. Or was that, it cost him all of his virtual savings? Either way....he needs more money. Afterall, Lord British can't be seen in a Hyundai.

Re:Who the fuck?

[Austerity Empowers]

We all do.

How big a bomb was Tabula Rasa?

[Trikenstein]

I didn't play it. Pretty sure I don't know anyone who played it. In fact I don't believe anyone I know was even tempted to play it.

The reason I said these things is Mr. Garriott seems to have a lot of grandiose ideas, but is incapable of implimenting them himself. Has he coded anything himself since Ultima 2 or 3?
Anyway, he comes up with ideas, gets others to pay him for them, and when these ideas don't actually work. It's everyones fault but his own.

After all, he's the idea guy. It's not his fault, you couldn't make it happen. Or that you didn't understand. That you didn't *get it*

It was a great idea.

The failure is yours.

So of course, someone, somewhere, owes Mr. Garriott a great deal of money.
And he should get it.

He can use it to buy himself a sense of shame.

Re:Who the fuck?

[fractoid]

You would only get the achievement if you did it in a serious screenplay.

-fractoid, the Learned, Impartial and Very Relaxed.