In the eyes of gamers, will Richard Garriott redeem himself for Ultima IX? How much was he to blame for the way the game turned out?
I hope so! It’d be nice to see. You know, I’m sure most of the problems with Ultima IX were not his fault directly. I’m sure there was lots of pressure on that team by EA to get the game done – the usual b.s. But I really wish he had taken a stronger stance and put his foot down. I would have been cool, and right, to see him go to war over the integrity of the series he started. I would have loved to hear him say: “Hey, EA_fuck you. Take me to court. But you are not putting MY game out there in this kind of state.” But maybe it just wasn’t his game anymore. In any case, it was a sad, pathetic end for a once-great series.

What’s the biggest mistake that was made with UO?
Naivete. We were naïve about the number of people we’d get, the way they’d behave, the amount of bad behavior we’d get, the appeal of the concept… it manifested in things like the many problems with playerkilling, the way low sales forecasts, a lack of awareness of what it would take to run the service, mistaken priorities in the game design and technology… on the other hand, I think that if it had not been for that naivete, it couldn’t have been what it became. It takes a certain amount of cluelessness to go tilting at windmills, you know?

In 1992 Blue Sky Productions, later to be known as Looking Glass Studios, debuted with one of the most innovative and influential first-person perspective computer role-playing games in the history of the genre. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, set in the universe of Lord British’s Ultima series, may have been the first CRPG to actually capture the tense claustrophobic excitement of a grand D&D styled fantasy dungeon romp. It did so with an attention to detail and a level of programming sophistication rarely seen before or since.

Brandon “GreenMarine” Reinhart, 3DRealms: “It was the first multiplayer game of that magnitude I ever played. I used to play a lot of MUDs and this was like a super mud. I played it a lot. I cheated, I exploited, I killed. I loved it all.”

Bob McCabe, BioWare: “This whole series is wonderful, but Ultima V still stands out in my mind as the best title in the group. Awesome music, great story, great atmosphere. Just a fun all-around game.”

Tom Hall, formerly with Ion Storm: “I mapped this all out, found secrets, learned the runic alphabet. I was totally in love with this game. And some great tricks in the ending castle. Loved it. I made some parody games called the Penultimas.”

Steve Gilmour, BioWare: “The very first PC game I ever laid hands on. I had bought a computer off a geek at UBC, and of course the box came with 4 or 5 games. I remeber playing a few, then I got UU going. 8 hours later I remembered to empty my bladder. It was suddenly night, and I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that I had to get those runes.”

Levelord, Ritual Entertainment: “I spent even MORE hours playing this than Silent Service while going to UCLA. I can honestly say that my GPA went down a good 1 – 2 points because of Ultima IV.”

Richard Garriott, Destination Games: “Though I know there were earlier RTS games, none really got the mix just right to open up this powerful genre. The original C&C still has great strategic subtlety that most other RTS's still miss out on.”

• Hands-on gameplay experiences from the upcoming massively multiplayer online games from Westwood, Maxis, and EA.COM.
• Special sessions with the development teams of upcoming and new EA games. Be the first to see what's coming!
• Get the scoop directly from the creative forces behind these games with Q&A sessions featuring special guest speakers such as: Will Wright (Creator, The SIMS™); Gordon "Tyrant" Walton (VP and Executive Producer, The SIMS ONLINE™); Brett Sperry (Founder of Westwood and Chief Creative Officer) and many others.

A little known fact is that the three of the five designers on the Tabula Rasa team are people who have previously worked on Ultima Online. Me, the ex-producer; Sage, the ex-lead designer; and Runesabre, the ex-lead programmer are all designers on Tabula Rasa. Jeremy Gaffney, the ex-lead programmer of UO2 is the Design Manager, and Rick Holtrop, also from the UO2 team, completes the group. A designer on Tabula Rasa is responsible for developing the way each system in the game will work, from the interface to the way monsters give experience, from the advancement schematics to the traffic flow of players within social spaces, etc. We are still in the early stages of our design for the game right now.

Lord_British: We WILL ship a stable, well balanced game!!!

Tajima –
This is a memorial to Kathleen Watson, the real-life inspiration for the “Gwenno” Ultima character and a friend to many people at Origin and the Austin game development community. She died last November, a victim of cancer. (She wrote the song, “Stones,” which is the opening theme to Ultima Online.)

In loving memory of Kathleen Watson, friend and citizen of Britannia.

As the living inspiration of Gwenno, she first entered our lives as wife of Iolo and companion to the Avatar in Ultima IV. Along with her husband David Watson, she created the beautiful tune “Stones”.

Our condolences go out to her family and friends. Britannia has lost a treasured companion and a dear friend.

The strategic/collaborative battles enabled by the use of the world’s largest large-scale database management technologies have provided an effective means of delivering surrogate satisfaction for modern humankind.

People like the gankfests.

The shortfall came from the company’s spending of 47 billion won in May to scout U.S. game developers, Richart Garriott brothers of Destination Games, and purchase major games in the works such as Tabula Rasa and recruit other developers.

NCsoft also revealed plans to introduce Lord British into the world of Lineage. Lord British is Richard Garriott’s legendary game character that first appeared in the long-running Ultima series of role-playing games. In May, NCsoft announced a partnership with Garriott’s new development studio, Destination Games, to help promote and launch Lineage in North America.

In May, NCsoft paid $33.4 million in stock and cash for Destination Games, an Austin, Texas-based startup headed by Richard and Robert Garriott and Richard’s former colleague Starr Long. These gaming legends are well known for creating and fostering the Ultima series of role-playing games. Now they’re being bankrolled by NCsoft, which is collecting a cool $80 million a year in revenues from Lineage.

Jessica Mulligan – Most of what is scheduled to launch in the next two years looks to be Sci-Fi and Fantasy. The most interesting launch to watch will be The Sims! Online; it’s the first shot at a mass-market persistent world. If it goes over well, it could possibly be the “killer app” that brings millions more players into the hobby. Personally, I prefer to play the more traditional, familiar hard core online games.

Mark Asher – Yes. I expect to see some sex-themed MMOGs, though probably not from the current game publishers. Graphic violence? Yeah, some MMOG will try that angle to distinguish itself from the others. Boundaries? I don’t know why we won’t see MMOGs with graphic depictions of sex acts, but I’d not expect them to be big budget games. It will have to be something that a small team can cobble together. You’re not going to find investors willing to dump millions into an X-rated game. It’s just like porn movies and their small budgets vs. traditional Hollywood movies.

Star Long – It is certainly not nearly as saturated as the retail games market. If you look at where this industry was when UO launched the total paid online subscriber base for all online games was probably not more than 100,000. Almost 4 years later the total number is well over 3 million (most of which is in Korea playing Lineage). That is way over 100% growth per year. No other game genre has that kind of growth. Additionally most of the online games have yet to see a significant drop off in the subscriber numbers despite more games being in the market. Almost all of them continue to grow. There are certainly a lot of online games in development but as we have seen recently by some not so successful launches it is not an easy thing to back one of these beasts up. So I think we will see a bunch of games hit the market but most will crumble and the top 5 or so will control almost 90% of the subscriber base (much like retail games today).

John Smedley – Hmm… yes, I think it’s inevitable… but I think it’s all a question of style. For example, look at the screen shots of World of Warcraft which are very beautiful and yet obviously are not trying to be photo-realistic. Another great example would be an Anime style online RPG. As for the advantage of having less-than-real life graphics in online games, I think gradually the power of the cpu’s and graphics cards is pushing the envelope to allow these types of things not to really be a consideration when we’re making games. I realize this sounds a bit like a pipe dream now, but I fundamentally think it’s moving that way.

Richard Garriott – It’s interesting to compare the next 10 years with the last 20 years. Over the last 20 years, interface and graphics have radically advanced, but game mechanics have largely remained the same, except for the first 5 or so years while the medium was in its true infancy. Looking forward, I would expect the same type of curve to happen in online, though more accelerated. Thus over the next 2-5 years I would think game mechanics will by found that are compelling in an MMP setting, then after that we will fall back into tech advance more than game play mechanic innovation. Thus by 2006, I’d expect to see the style of games we will be playing in 2011, but through 2011 the presentation will become highly advanced.

To be specific: Though I would love to see VR style interfaces, I still doubt they will be popular, but the graphics will be rendered in as realistic or surrealistic and high resolution as is needed to create a real time vision of a conceived reality. Much of the game play will be as it is today, but we will have discovered a few great new play paradigms. I suspect some of the most compelling will be MMP social environments. People will log into virtual environments, not only to combat each other, but often in “games” that have no measured competition at all. They will socialize, explore and problem solve together around the globe. In these environments we will see even deeper friendships form, more “dating” and people will compete, but for influence and attention, much more like they do in the “real” world. Since relationships are real, the line between real and virtual will be substantially blurred.

Lord British is scheduled to make his entrance into the world of Lineage on November 26 as part of a four-week-long special event.

“I’m thrilled that Lord British has found a new home,” said Garriott, now an executive producer at NCsoft’s Austin, Texas, office.“ And I’m happy that home is Lineage. Players in North America are about to find out why Lineage is so incredibly popular in other parts of the world. Its unique features offer something that people here have never before experienced.”

Ultima I: Reborn will be available for free when it’s released some time next year.

However, Peroxide has no contract with Electronic Arts, which bought the game in 1992 from the original publisher, Origin Systems.

The Peroxide team did contact Richard “Lord British” Garriott, one of the original developers of the game.

Garriott granted his permission to remake the game as long as there was no financial gain, according to Damiani.

Electronic Arts, however, hadn’t heard about the Ultima project and would like to have a word with the Peroxide developers.

“EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted,” said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. “As for Richard Garriott’s approval, that’s like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz.”

Ultima 1: A legend is reborn was mentioned in this article over at Wired news.

On a note, I’d like to clarify some statements made in this article by an EA spokesman. He claimed EA has no knowledge of our remake, thus we could still hurt their intelectual property rights.

Peroxide has attempted to contact EA at an occasion last year, and having received no answer from any public relations or any department, it was assumed then we were allowed to proceed.

Also, as it’s been known by now, and is explained in our FAQ, we have been granted verbal permission for this project by Richard Garriott, the owner of the Ultima franchise when this project started. As Richard Garriott was a (Or at least one of the) creative president of Origin Systems by then, we assume this would represent the position of the whole company. What is really an unfortunate statement though regardless of its legal validation is that Richard Garriott’s permission is as meaningless “as Toto’s allowance to remake the Wizard of Oz”. The implicit sarcasm on this sentence is in my opinion disrespectful towards the creator of the series and the responsible mind behind the most successful and lucrative projects of Electronic Arts, likely the ones that took the company to the top of the computer gaming industry today.

To any extent, we have taken measures to attempt and speak to them directly, though we have done this before and unfortunately did not get an answer.

Origin Systems today announced that it has signed an agreement with Grammy and Emmy-winning producer/director Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn, McFarlane Toys and Spawn.com, to create characters exclusively for Ultima Online: Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge, the latest version in the award-winning Ultima Online (UO) series. The company is also partnering with McFarlane and McFarlane Toys to develop both a line of six action figures based on the new UO creatures and two comic books based on Ultima Online: Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge.

“Exodus,” he spoke in his deep voice, “it seems your lack of understanding of the humans could very well cost us this entire campaign!” His arm shot out and knocked a small statue across the room like an arrow. The small lights on the far wall began to sparkle like firelight through gems.

The D.I.C.E Summit, scheduled for February 28 – March 1, 2002, is intended to bring together the most celebrated leaders in the gaming industry to encourage discussion and cultivate innovation. It will be held at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, in conjunction with the Fifth Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

• Richard “10 Ultimas, not counting add-ons” Garriott – Attack of the Killer Sequels
• Will “If you let them build it, they will come” Wright – Audience Developed Products – How to Involve the World
• Sid Meier’s Sid Meier – The DINO Project: Three Glorious Failures

Ultima Online, the Internet’s premiere fantasy world experience, now deeper and darker with over 30 new monsters from the mind of Todd McFarlane.

The worlds of Ultima Online have been revolutionized with exotic, fantastical creatures from the mind of Todd McFarlane. Enter a world oppressed by evil forces, where diabolical villains have returned and aligned their powers in an attempt to conquer and vanquish the virtuous. Over 30 new monsters and creatures designed by Todd McFarlane add a darker twist to the once familiar land of Ilshenar. A new land area located in the center of Ilshenar is the setting for the beginning of this dark siege. Who will prevail in this legendary battle of good versus evil? What new characters will emerge to protect and defend the heroes of Britannia™? What frightening and evil foes await them?

Join the world of Sosaria and help the citizens save their land from Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge.

My last project with Origin, other than Ultima IX, was Ultima Online, which in my mind opened up a doorway into this new thing called subscription-based online gaming. EA saw it differently. EA thought subscription based online gaming was somewhat of a fluke. They thought the next stage in evolution was, instead of going for hundreds of thousands of subscribers with subscription-based games, to go the AOL games channel, pogo.com style strategy where you get many millions of participants who are supported marginally by advertising but the big belief was that you could take these tens of millions of people and convert them to paying subscribers in some way.

The reason I left Origin was that they were pushing me and Origin and lots of developers across EA worldwide to develop these small JAVA application games for the EA.com service. For me, as an employee of EA, my salary couldn’t be justified making these tens of thousands of dollars JAVA app games. It was not a strategy that was interesting to me professionally or made any fiscal sense as well and that led to my departure.

He’s talking about the aptly titled Tabula Rasa, an online game currently in development, which he says will draw from the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Plato’s “Republic.” But that’s not why he’s in my apartment. At the moment, he’s overseeing the American debut of Lineage: The Blood Pledge, an online role-playing game that entertains millions of Asian game players.