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Games Entertainment

Garriott Brothers Return to Gaming 52

Posted by michael from the sulfurous-ash-and-black-pearls dept.
rhaig writes: "According to the Austin American Statesman, The Garriott brothers, Richard and Robert, the creators of Austin's Origin Systems Inc., are back in the gaming business. The pair scooped up about 30 recently laid-off Origin employees to staff their new Austin-based online game company, Destination Games."
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Garriott Brothers Return to Gaming More

Garriott Brothers Return to Gaming

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  • And even better than that: http://exult.sourceforge.net
    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.

  • Sweet! (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    I've been a huge fan of the Ultima games, and even besides that Origin used to put out good, wacky stuff. (rembember Tangled Tales?)

    The last few Ultima offerings were pretty poor in comparison, (I'm a big fan of Ultima VI, and everything before that) so I hope that Lord British brings us some new, original stuff. (even if it isn't Ultima)

    Damn you, Slashdot. You finally put out a story I'm interested in, and now I can't wait!
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • "Origin was doing pretty well (deadline wise and product wise, not necessarily money wise)"

    Origin has always had quality products with whatever they have done, but I wouldn't say they were always on time. I remember Both Strike Commander and Ulitma VII were SOOO late. I was young and impatient, and it killed me that they were so late. It was actually painful for me to wait so long after they had claimed it would come out.

    I have to say their technology was never out of date, though. Their games always ran slow on my computer, and barely decent at the top-of-the-line at realease time. Did you have to walk across Brittania in U7 on a 386SX-20?

  • Cuteness versus intelligence? Seems like a non-issue to me, here.

    -l
  • Note to moderators: It's the Garriott brothers that deserve the +Funny, not the above poster who simply stated the obvious.
  • That's my job!

    Badman, AKA Hint Dragon
    Origin Hint Guru and Tech Support, 1995-1997
  • Let's hope it works out, or they'll have to change their name to "Bridge Out Games" or "Road Closed Games" or "You Can't Get There From Here Games" or ...

    The early Ultima's were some of my first computer games, which really got me hooked. I'm glad to see Lord British hasn't run into a "dead end" .

    Zildy
  • I think that's the whole idea, at least to some extent. UO2 got behind schedule under the "management" of EA's Origin Assimilation Team, not RG. Origin was doing pretty well (deadline wise and product wise, not necessarily money wise) until EA scooped them up. Perhaps when you speak of missed deadlines and buggy releases on Richard's watch, you're thinking Ultima 9, but IIRC, EA was primarily responsible for that bungle too.

    In any case, it's gonna be a fun ride. I can't wait to see what Destination comes up with.

    I'm not so willing to lay the blame squarely on EA. I'm a big fan of Origin's games, especially the earlier stuff. Ultima IV was, IMHO the best game they produced, adjusted for game inflation.

    The world has moved since then. No one wants to blame RG for the problems, but I'm not so sure he's not very much to blame for the last couple of debacles. I'm not trying to blame RG over EA, I just think there are very few (if any) people that have both the closeness to the situations and the lack of bias to really say who was to blame.

    While I'm very much convinced that RG is a master of the older kind of computer game, I've not seen the evidence that mastery applies in today's game production process.

    I'm still going to take a very close look at anything he comes out with, but it's not going to be an automatic "RG made this, I"m going to buy it". I really, really hope his next release removes all doubt of his skills, but for now, at least, he's got something to prove.

  • http://www.aro.com/

    Ultima lost my interest after III.
  • Programming for the sake of programming gets old fast.
  • I know you and you know me. It was quite a while ago that I tried to compile libAtlas-C++ so I'm sure this is no reflection on you, but libAtlas is not a "complex protocol", it's a simple protocol, that's the point, it is only complex because of the gross misuse of templates and "design patterns". Coding for coding sake is moreso masturbation than gaming for gaming sake. The idea is to code something, release it, and add new features to it that are driven by actual people playing it. At least that way the project is not the exclusive domain of programmers. But hey, if the worldforge crew wants to stay up in the ivory tower, go right ahead, but put on the web page "This game is not playable and will never be playable because we're more interested in having fun progamming."
  • you forgot to add water to the meal. normally to get water, you needed a bucket and a well. luckily, grinding enough wheat produced a big bag of meal, and a bucket contained a couple of loaves worth of water.
  • Journalist / Game Designer Allen Varney wrote the following for the Austin Chronicle: http://www.allenvarney.com/av_brit.html (The rest of Varney's site is worth looking over too...)
  • EA has a habit of pushing products out the door before they're done.

    *cough* Black&White *cough*

    -Legion

  • Oh, wow! Check out this review at The Adrenaline Vault of Lineage [avault.com]. It looks and sounds sweet! Hopefully they'll be able to clear out the bugs, and localize it for English - making it well worth the time to check out. This sounds just fantastically cool.

    From the article :
    The brothers also announced a partnership with NCsoft, the South Korean company that runs the world's largest subscriber-based online game, Lineage: The Blood Pledge.

    The company has 2 million subscribers in South Korea alone; under the partnership, Lineage will be repackaged and relaunched in the United States this fall. Meanwhile, Lineage creator Jake Song will move to Austin to help develop games, which NCsoft will help launch in Asia. (Emphasis added.)

    How the hell is there a game with 2 million subscribers - almost 6 times the subscribers of EverQuest - that I've never heard of before?!

    This game looks sweet - like what I've wanted to play for a long time : an MMPORPG (with 2 million players) that looks like Diablo II! Cool, cool, cool. Again, I hope their support of it, and their localization doesn't suck!

  • I would like to point out that this is this same group of 30 people that put UO2 more then a year behind schedule. If he could find some good project management he might stand a chance. Otherwise he's going to be putting buggy games out when he could have had time to perfect them.
  • damn... that's sad. Seriously. I would've loved to have had the opportunity you did, and probably been just as disappointed when things fell apart. Great little write up.

    Origin was games for me during the 80s.

    I'm incredibly happy to hear that they're back together with a lot of their old team members. I truly hope that they can reclaim their leadership role in the industry.

    Any chance that you might be working for Destination games? ;-)
    -- kwashiorkor --
    Leaps in Logic
    should not be confused with

  • But when EA bought ORIGIN they got the whole ball of wax. Neither Richard or Robert work for ORIGIN anymore, in-fact, they can't even make another Ultima game, those are now the sole property of EA.

    It looks like starting Destination Games was their only way to get back into gaming. Atleast they'll have a staff they're familiar with.

    _f
  • Anyone got a link to pictures of this castle home?
  • Someone needs to recognise that the fun of a game is not in the programming, it's in the playing!

    Well, enjoy your Tetris game then.

    Some people actually think programming is fun, but I suppose that is a minority view on slashdot nowdays.

  • Okay, I'm several days late, but sometimes I come across posts I just have to respond to.

    I have been the maintainer of Atlas-C++, the successor to an old product called libAtlas to which I presume you are referring, for several months, and the stable release of this code builds in less the 1 minute on my PIII 700, and currently builds on any compiler since egcs 2.91. It is true that our devel tree, and I think the initial stable version required a bizare compiler, but this is no longer the case.

    Any experience C++ developer will tell you that although the binaries seem to be huge, most of that will disappear if you strip it, and the actuall binary size has very little effect on the memory footprint. Its mostly debug data.

    As for evangelism, I think we all recognise that Atlas is not ready for widespread deployment, but complex protocols and their implementation takes time and lots of testing to get right.

    Someone needs to recognise that the fun of a game is not in the programming, it's in the playing!

    Perhaps this is the case for you, but it is certainly not true for everyone. I gain much more enjoyment from programming games than I do from playing them, and I only really play games that I find interesting from a technical point of view. Gaming for gaming's sake holds little attraction for me.

  • I am very disappointed that this post got moderated down. SmokeSerpent's criticism is accurate. Yes, I have spent too much time accuratly modelling digestion of food, and probably made too much of an issue of it in that last set of release notes. Ironically enough your comments on teeth have got me thinking about modelling that.

    Thankfully we now have entering buildings working, although its not as smooth as I would like. Believe it or not 3D collision prediction algroithms, and portals are much harder problems than the relatively simple arithmetic involved in working out how much weight an animal gains as a result of eating food.

    Perhaps people are two quick to judge negative comments as flamebait, but maybe that's because only a few of us really now how acurate your comments are

    --

    Al Riddoch - WorldForge Acorn coordinator

  • I have been programming for programmings sake since I was 12 years old. Thats 15 years. If you want to insult me for it, please do so directly, and don't hide behind euphemisms.

    If you are talking about Atlas as a low level protocol for passing structured data across the network, then I agree that it is simple, and if this was the case then our work on Atlas would be complete. However Atlas is much much more than this. The Operation and Entity hierarchies that Atlas defines together with the planned ability to query this hierarchy dynamically at runtime mean that Atlas is a long way from completion. I curious about your assertion if "gross misuse of templates". As far as I can see the use of templates in Atlas-C++ is light and entirely apropriate. I am not defending my own code here. I did not write it, I just maintain it.

    If I wanted to write a game, base it on what players wanted, and release as soon as it was ready, then I would program games for a living. That does not mean it will never be playable, though it may mean that many people won't find the games that I am involved in designing fun. Other people who have similar interests to me will.

    The type of game I want to create however is not going to have much effect on WorldForge as I am only once coder in the dozens of coders, artists and designers who work on WorldForge.

  • You can still buy them, you know. Look for "Ultima Collection" It's Ultima 1-8 and Akalabeth. Cost me $10 at Frys.

    Not exactly abandonware, is it?

    And I doubt they'd run in W2k. Some of them want to run in real mode DOS, so even WinME is questionable.
  • If making bread and other such busywork is fun to you, try "The Sims" instead of RPG's. You can bake bread, eat it, put the remains in the trash, watch the trash rot, and take the garbage out to the curb. Realism, whee.
  • Garriot certainly did some ground breaking stuff. His Ultima series brought a whole sense of realism and proportionality to RPGs, practically every item in the game could be interacted with in some way. At the time, it allowed for some very interesting and sophisticated gameplay.

    Of course, for games today such concepts are a given.

    Not necessarily. Consider how much of say Baldur's Gate one can interact with compared with a years-old game like Ultima 7. Now I love BG, the storyline and that it uses AD&D, but it doesnt hold a candle to U7.

  • I never got into the Ultima stuff, but I did like some of the Wing Commander series. Anyone know what's going on with that series? Has it been superseded by the Star Wars and Star Trek spin-offs, or is someone still working on stuff set in the Wing Commander universe?
    -----------------
  • And what gaming shops will the marketing droids be taking over after their current titles become old hat?

    Competition drives the necessity for improvement. Its selection that the world lacks.
  • you can't really blame Garriot for all the problems that Ultima 9 and UO had. Really, the company to blame is EA. EA has a habit of pushing products out the door before they're done. Obviously, UO and Ultima 9 are two great examples of this. Ultima 9's development was stalled by EA who took many of the main devs away to have them work on Ultima Online. When U9 was put back on the burner, a large portion of the original dev team was kept on Ultima Online. EA had already sunk a ton of dough into U9 and wanted to get it out the door ASAP. Hence, the largely unplayable game that U9 was. And really, aside from EA's bungling, the players ruined Ultima Online, not Garriot.
  • Since it mentions that many people from Origin will be working for him, I am making the broad assumption this will be an Online RPG. On the one hand, yay. On the other hand, I don't think UO:O would have been conceled if it was looking better. This may be my bitter nature escaping, though...
  • >I'm betting that any other gamehack who just read this article (and there are 90,000
    >potential gamehacks reading slashdot on any given day) can whack up something with the same
    >user-selectable-parallel-universe model in a couple of months, if not a couple of weeks.

    The infrastructure maybe, but would it be a fun game?

    Plotting out a detailed story can easily take a year. Forget about the technology for a moment and look at print authors. How long does it take Terry Pratchett to knock out another diskworld novel? That guys' really GOOD, and writing is his full time job, and he still only does about one book a year.

    With most games these days, the story is "let's go kill something". Uh-huh. The most recent ground-breaking uber-game was "The Sims", which actively avoided any plot-like elements anywhere in the design.

    R.G. doesn't have to redefine the world to make a successful game. There's a new "game of the year" every year.

    Considering that his first product is repackaging a proven game in a new market, and that he's financing the company with a small chunk of his personal wealth and so doesn't have loans to repay or investors to placate. Basically, he's doing it to scratch his own itch, because he likes making games.

    I'd say the new company's on a pretty strong footing. Now we just have to bug him for a Linux version... :)

    Rob
  • (second hand story)

    Discplaimer: Some people are offended at death. I did not imagine this story, nor do I condone this or give any personal opinions as to the validity of it. This is not funny. Do not laugh. Fine.

    ------

    Back in the early 90's, I had a friend who was living down in Austin in his friends walk-in closet. One day he went to work (at Origin) and was sitting in his cube.

    Suddenly, he hears screams and gunfire. Two guys dressed from head to toe in black are rampaging the building killing people!

    A boatload of police show up and surround the building, as the two black-clothed men throw down their weapons and uncover their faces.

    Apparently, it had been a big joke for them to set up this scene. They had selectivly asked some friends at work to act dead when shot, and had informed the secretaries of the gag.

    This friend went on to study at the prestigeous Barnum and Baily Clown College (Of which there are even worse, more horrid stories from that era as well).
    ----

    Another story I heard was that they had their annual employee meeting, where they discussed financial results. They had rented out a private theatre for the presentation.

    As the employees finished arriving, the CEO of the company walked up to the stage and asked for the first slide.

    The CEO announced, "We're doing damn good!" and proceeded to show Jurrassic Park (The Movie) a day before it was released.

    Now, wasn't that a nicer story. ;-)

    - Pan
  • I've noticed that a lot of people here enjoyed playing Ultima 7 and Serpent Isle, and that some of them have tried to play the game again only to have trouble getting the game running in modern operating systems.

    The problem was the custom memory manager Origin wrote in order to get around the limitations of EMS. It performs BIOS-level memory access, which Win9x and Win2K simply won't allow.

    The solution is a new executable for these games that uses modern memory management techniques and also incorporates a frame limiter so the speed problems are also solved! I've personally tried this patch out and trust me, it's a REAL kick running Ultima 7 in a window!

    You can find more info and get the patch at http://members.iinet.net.au/~rsd/U7inWindows.html [iinet.net.au]. The author even makes the source available, and is encouraging someone to do a Linux port. Now how cool is that?
  • ok, no it doesn't, but it just aint my ball of wax. I could role play when it was just me a terminal and mud, but I spend 99% of my time in UO just clicking on my knife and a piece of wood to make arrows. Yawn. RTS > RPG in my not so humble opinion, but maybe Worldforge will eventually release something that is playable and prove me wrong.

  • Sure...but playtesting is key to making it a balanced world. And the attention spans of you players are short. You've got to have a compelling story to keep the users paying the access fees.


  • Baking bread isn't the point. Or rather, it is. ^_^ Incidentally, I heard this same debate many years ago regarding Ultima 9. In... rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons (among the names it's owned over the years...) Baking bread itself is not the point. The many ways the player and world could interact was. For example, I'll take the game Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire. You can use the traditional weapons you find... or you can make your own ^_^ Saltpeter + Charcoal + sulfur = gunpower. Bamboo + flint + steel = rifle (really!). Rifle + gunpowder + rocks = bang! Gunpowder + clay jar + cloth strips + tar = fuse bomb (and grenade!). You could do anything with anything. There's More Than One Way To Do It. (woah.) By concentrating on the bread, you're missing the big picture. Incidentally, baking bread rocked as it could save you money. (1) Get wheat from field (2) Grid wheat (3) Put meal in oven (4) eat bread - mmm
  • From a Gamespy article [gamespy.com]:

    "While Destination will only be developing online games, they may end up publishing other solo player or online games."
  • his new game, Tabula Rasa (or "blank slate"), won't be out for another couple of years, Garriott said.

    Good! Maybe by then new computers will be able to actually run Ultima IX.

  • I'm betting that any other gamehack who just read this article (and there are 90,000 potential gamehacks reading slashdot on any given day) can whack up something with the same user-selectable-parallel-universe model in a couple of months, if not a couple of weeks.

    Which is why the market is saturated with the product right now.

    ;-)

    But seriously, This is something I look forward to. Anytime a serious artist in the field puts together something, especially a start from scratch thing, I'll at least check it out. With enough expertise, a career in this field should go 50 or 60 years of jaw dropping products.

    This could be fun.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • I have all the Ultima games from beginning to end.

    I know I'm going to get beat senseless for this, but Ultima IX may be the single best game of any kind I've every played (yes, I played it through to the end) except for maybe Nethack, and Ultima Online is great as well.

    I think the recent Ultima games have been given a bum rap.

    $0.02 + $0.01 for the pennies dish.
  • It's great to hear that these two gaming pioneers are back in the business. This is great news for the industry as well as gaming consumers. A while back, perhaps a year ago the announcement that Origin Systems would produce only multiplayer subscription based online games, after the success of Ultima Online.

    Is there any word on weather Destination Games will be operating exclusively in that market as well, or pursue other areas of the market as well?

    --CTH

    --
  • > This new game, Tabula Rasa (or "blank slate"), won't be out for another couple of years, Garriott said.

    These guys are big on the wordplay.

    Tabula Rasa.

    A game that hasn't been written yet, throws away their old model, and basically is so pre-production that "another couple of years" is a plan horizon for it?

    I'm betting that any other gamehack who just read this article (and there are 90,000 potential gamehacks reading slashdot on any given day) can whack up something with the same user-selectable-parallel-universe model in a couple of months, if not a couple of weeks.

    --Blair
  • '...but then can step into their own "parallel reality" adventure game.'

    great, so when we're escaping from our own reality and playing video games, we can then escape from the alternat ereality that is the video game, into yet another alternate reality. Man, make me wonder how some people are ever gonna find theyre way back without bread crumbs.

    What I'm wondering though, is how in the world Garriot ever got away with a contract from EA stating simply a 1-year non-compete clause. They should have known that he was gonna jump right back into gaming. Since he was basically the biggest resource of epic, grandiose sized gaming, they're the ones who can't compete with him now. I've got confidence that while a massive game from within his imagination is still several years away, it'll be quite different from what else is on the market at the time. He did it once, and did it well. at the very least im interested to see what else he can do from here.

  • Next project? (Score:3)

    by Frizzled ( 123910 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @02:26PM (#212765) Homepage
    lumthemad.net [lumthemad.net] has been covering this for a while ... this article dicusses a rumor that Garriot has obtained a controlling interest in NCSoft [ncinteractive.com] which is currently developing a game called Lineage [lineage.co.kr]

    The article is here [lumthemad.net] ...

    Secondly, it looks like he'll be charging a bit for his next online game (maybe as much as $30 a month) ... that's here [lumthemad.net].

    _f

  • Richard Gariot still alive? (Score:3)

    by Gorobei ( 127755 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @04:03PM (#212766)
    I thought Rainz assassinated him a while ago.

  • Eagerly antipating... (Score:3)

    by doorbot.com ( 184378 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @03:49PM (#212767) Journal
    ...Autoduel's sequel.

    Let's get Steve Jackson back in the mix too!

    GURPS AutoDuel has progressed well since then as well. Plus, the game could have some nice 3D eye candy too.

  • Re:Good luck this time (Score:3)

    by ShaunC ( 203807 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @03:23PM (#212768)
    Flamebait or not, this is worth a reply:

    >If he could find some good project management he might stand a chance.

    I think that's the whole idea, at least to some extent. UO2 got behind schedule under the "management" of EA's Origin Assimilation Team, not RG. Origin was doing pretty well (deadline wise and product wise, not necessarily money wise) until EA scooped them up. Perhaps when you speak of missed deadlines and buggy releases on Richard's watch, you're thinking Ultima 9, but IIRC, EA was primarily responsible for that bungle too.

    In any case, it's gonna be a fun ride. I can't wait to see what Destination comes up with.

    Shaun

  • For those that don't know. (Score:3)

    by MulluskO ( 305219 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @02:33PM (#212769) Journal
    ORIGIN Studio Brand
    From its modest beginnings -- brothers Richard and Robert Garriott working out of their parents' garage -- to its current 81,000 square feet of high-tech office space and more than 200 full-time employees, ORIGIN Systems' (http://www.origin.ea.com) has always been known for setting new standards in interactive entertainment. The company, based in Austin, Texas, has emerged as one of the innovation leaders in the ever-changing world of entertainment software.

    ORIGIN was established in 1983 and since then has produced more than 60 highly acclaimed titles, including the award-winning Ultima, Wing Commander, Privateer, and Crusader series of games. Development continues at ORIGIN for Internet-only products. The first of those was Ultima Online and its follow-up, Ultima Online: The Second Age. Ultima Online , the industryÂ's most successful and profitable online-only game, today allows thousands of people to play simultaneously in a persistent fantasy world and currently has 150,000 active player accounts.

    taken from
    http://www.origin.ea.com/info/home.html

  • A long trek back to the top (Score:4)

    by bartle ( 447377 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @02:29PM (#212770) Homepage

    Garriot certainly did some ground breaking stuff. His Ultima series brought a whole sense of realism and proportionality to RPGs, practically every item in the game could be interacted with in some way. At the time, it allowed for some very interesting and sophisticated gameplay.

    Of course, for games today such concepts are a given. The ideas that put Garriot on the top are now regularly implemented. He's all but starting over from scratch, whatever he accomplishes won't be able to coast on previous successes.

    But on the other hand Mr. Garriot certainly strives to tell a good story, something many of the semi literate game designers don't prioritize anymore. I'll be curious to see what he comes up with, he has a freedom to design games that many of his peers must envy. Hopefully he'll come up with something truly unique and different.

  • Destination games... (Score:5)

    by Luyseyal ( 3154 ) <swaters.luy@info> on Friday May 18, 2001 @02:18PM (#212771) Homepage
    From Origin to Destination. I like it.

    Easily amused,
    -l

  • My Origin Experience... (Score:5)

    by BadmanX ( 30579 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @03:50PM (#212772) Homepage
    If anyone would like to read about my personal experience working at Origin, it's on my web site at http://darkbox.pentagod.com/soulcage.htm [pentagod.com].

    Badman

  • Re:A long trek back to the top (Score:5)

    by vhold ( 175219 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @02:46PM (#212773)
    I'm not so sure that those concepts are a given. The trend I've witnessed, adventure games in particular, is that the players have fewer options then ever. When text based input interfaces were all but totally eliminated in favor of icon systems, games that were once expected to take weeks to finish could now be clicked through in a couple of nights.

    Even the Baldur's Gate games, with a huge detailed world full of objects doesn't have the kind of object interoperability that the Ultima games had. Even if a lot of the possibilties that were opened up seemed mostly useless (making bread), it was the fact that it was possible that led to a more involving experience. I think that the game everybody is looking at right now to bring a lot of that back is Neverwinter Nights.

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