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

[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:Lord British

[Bai jie]

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

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: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.

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."

Re:Who the fuck?

[Austerity Empowers]

We all do.