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Games Entertainment

Richard Garriot Leaves Origin 138

Posted by Hemos from the castle-building-crown-wearing dept.
A reader writes, "After over 15 years with Origin Systems, Richard Garriot, the lead designer of the Ultima series, has decided to leave the company and pursue other interests. " We have no comment about Britishing. Especially CowboyNeal has no comment.
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Richard Garriot Leaves Origin More

Richard Garriot Leaves Origin

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  • Heh heh heh.

    I had a special boot configuration just for Ultima VII, because nothing else would work. It also ran a bit too fast on my P133. (I got it late, there was no way it would have run on my 386 when it came out--it'd be like trying to run Ultima IX on that P133. :)

    At one point, since I didn't know what else to do with my 32MB of RAM, and I was sick of hearing the disk grind, I loaded U7 into a 17MB compressed RAM drive. It was pretty quiet then!

    It looks like they wrote their own XMS management routines, with garbage collection in the interpreter, and references to "voodoo memory", and lots of debugging. Looks like a hack to me!

    Ah, those were the days. I need to play through the old games, and I want to at least try U9. I think my favorite was Ultima V on the C64. I still have the map and the manuals, and also the collection...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • uo.com reports "he remains a friend of Origin Systems," so it was probably just a desire to do his own stuff. He probably has plans that would be outside the scope of Origin's work.


    --Phil (Not that I've even played any of the recent Ultimas...)
  • Guess when his baby died, he decided to move on..

    Makes perfect sense, really. I wish him the best of luck..
  • There was/is a linux client for ultima online.
  • The next thing you know, the Williams will be leaving Sierra OnLine -- Oh, wait...

    :)

    So does that mean Origin is now going to move to SILICON VALLEY. ALL SOFTWARE MUST BE PRODUCED IN SILICON VALLEY THE GREAT EA GOD HAS SPOKEN...
    :)

    Be Seeing You,

    Jeffrey.
  • His "Halloween parties" weren't really parties... they were the ultimate haunted house. I went to one about 6 years ago, and it was fantastic.

    They took place in and around his house, and were an hour-long quest you went on in groups of four. They were usually tied into the plotline of the latest Ultima game, and they utilized hundreds of actors and extreme special effects. The one I went on included rowing a boat down a river while being attacked, big pyrotechnics displays, flying enemies, and getting trapped in a collapsing room that flipped you over. Lord British personally started each 4 man tour at the front gate after you went through a short endurance test.

    What's more, it was free. There was one night each year that sold tickets for a charity, but the other few nights were first-come first-serve, free tickets. We camped out for days to get them.

    Cheers to Lord British, wherever fate takes you.
  • Wow! That looks pretty cool, man... Will it run on Windoze and Linux?
    ________________________________
  • Well, according to an article I read on Voodoo Extreme, Wing Commander will no longer be made, as Origin is going to become an all-Ultima company.

    Hrm. oh well....WC hasn't been good in a long time anyway.


    -Julius X
  • It was part of major "layoffs" at OSI... Check out this site [xrgaming.net] for more info on the whole thing.

    -Wintermute
  • I used to love those games, I won Ultima I II and III (man, did I spend way to much time on those in middleschool).. They games were always entertaining and "cutting edge" on the apple //e I played them on. They had really cool sounds and tons of interesting surprises.
    I used to swap hints with a friend who played it too..
    It should be interesting to see where he goes, but 15 years with the Ultima is a long time.. I'm interested to see what he comes up with next...

  • Anybody knows whether he got disgusted with the whole thing or was pushed out?

    Kaa
  • I'd be interested to know where he goes from here. The Ultima series was/is GREAT. I'd like to get my hands on his next project.
  • I did most of my Ultima on my //e. The only problem I can recall was a disk error in U4. Right before the end. Had to ship the disk back to Origin to get a replacement.

    I did buy U6 for the PC, but I haven't touched it in years. I got U8 as a gift, and played it for about 20 minutes before I decided that it sucked.
    I was told that U7 was pretty good.

    I just remember Ultima having high playability and long epic quests with many sub-quests. That's what I liked about the games

    I have found the ultima series of games to have more technical flaws than any other piece of software I've used. I can't tell you how many times u6,u7#2, and u8 have crashed out of nowhere on me.
    You've never run Windows, eh?
    --
  • I know, this is redundant, but I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE THIS! Richard Garriot is my game-god together with Sid Meyer - I've played the Ultima series since I started using a computer (my first game was the venerable yet awsome Rogue). Man, I hope he starts his own company so he doesn't have give up his ultra-mega-super massive virtual world ideas, RPGs after the Ultima series were never the same!
  • Yeah, and it was really boring too. When I had played through about half of this game I noticed that my save games were corrupt. I removed it from my HD and I haven't given any Ultima game half a glance since that.
    --
    "But I'm still like a little kid, see?
    I just don't know when to quit."
    - Rei
  • Those of us with Macs can enjoy at least one of the classic Ultima games, as well as several derivatives, as downloadable shareware.

    Ultima III: Exodus [lairware.com]

    The Exile Trilogy [spiderwebsoftware.com] by Spiderweb Software (I love these!)

    Cytheria [ambrosiasw.com] by Ambrosia Software


    J
    MacOS Open Source [jmac.org]
  • for an investment commercial. Bunch of scrrenshots of Ultima IX, running on a quad Xeon from the looks of it.

    --
  • I don't know exactly his reasons for leaving, but I would imagine it has quite a lot to do with how his company has fared the last few years. Up through Ultima 7, things were great. But after that, they just sold out. They decided to give up on their core fans and deliver a more appealing product to the greatest common denominator, and bombed badly with Ultima 8. Not to be outdone, they released a buggy, untested, unbalanced Ultima Online, where they went out of their way to cater to the cheaters and the whiners, and destroyed the game for everyone who actually tried to play within its rules, unbalanced as they may be.

    Ultima used to be a great series, rich in story. It had morals to teach, where even in the earlier games it would present them in a subtle way. Ultima 5 was my favorite. Ultima 7 was a close second.

    It had(has) a loyal following of people who dedicate thousands of hours to promoting the game, writing fan fiction, etc because they love the story behind the game. All for naught it would seem the last few years. Its a shame really.

    I'd imagine he left out of disgust. Whatever he had tried to create was destroyed by those he had to answer to. U9 suffered greatly because of marketing issues. Instead of releasing a game quickly based on a tried and true perspective which everyone was sure to love, and inserting a deep, well thought out story... they wasted their time on the graphics, they killed off the story completely and the creator has left, almost guaranteeing that its dead forever.

    Thank you Origin/EA. Thank you for reminding me the way the world really is. I grow up with you guiding me, and now that I'm older I see you for what you really are. Should I be bitter? Nah. It was fun while it lasted. Its just too bad it couldn't last longer.

    -Restil
  • Origin can't seem to keep a hold of there good designers. A few years ago Chris Roberts the creater of the Wing Commander Series left Origin to form Digital Anvial. Maybe Richard Garriot is leaving to form is own company as well.
  • Found this at RPG Planet [rpgplanet.com], as an excerpt(sp?) from a story at Gamespy:

    Word has reached my ears that Origin is going through a massive shakeup at this time with approximately 20 employees fired today and approximately 30 more to follow within a month!! All projects except UO2 have allegedly been cancelled. To top it all off, rumor has it that Richard Garriott has left the building! That's right, they say RG is no longer at Origin although whether by his own choice or that of the upper management is unknown at this time.

    We are currently seeking confirmation or denial from official sources and will keep you up-to-date on any further information we receive.

  • I don't think its a joke, too many gaming sites are reporting this. They also announced that they are cancelling all MMORPGs except for UO2.

    Ultima with out Lord British? I can believe it.

  • DOSEMU is cool, since now it's stable enough, and most compatbility issues have been solved. But the title everyone today wants to play is not U1-8, it's Ultima Online! There's a linux port of the client, but it's statically linked and I can't seem to find the right libraries. But it doesn't matter, because with every path Origin changes the encription scheme, so it won't work. I've been able to run it using WINE. If you disable sound and music it works pretty well(even more stable). But it gives an "alien-like" feeling to run it under wine...
  • My first game on PC was Ultima V... I played it for almost 2 years ! I learned english too with it, which helped me greatly later on. I owe a lot to that game.

    Seek the way of the Avatar...
  • Assuming Richard Garriot isn't just going to spend his time lounging around in his big house throwing Halloween parties, I'm looking foward to what he does next.
    Is he still living in the same house? I remember when they showed it on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, it's all full of secret panels and passages as I recall. Here's a question, if he decides to do a new game, will he be allowed to put Lord British in it or will Origins lawyers come after him and say, "The character of Lord British(tm) is a trademark of Origin Systems, Inc." preventing him from doing so? That would be horrible especially if his leaving wasn't amicable.
  • I suspect Richard Garriot had no problem with porting to Linux.

    In fact, there IS (was?) a Linux UO client, but unfortunately, it was poorly done and totally unsupported.

    Personally, I suspect Richard was tired of having his hands tied by a huge company and their overbearing marketing department.

    QUESTION: Do you suppose UO2 has anything to do with this? Ultima 9 was in flop according to many long-time ultima fans. It was marketed to look very pretty, but in the end the gameplay was shitty compared to the older ultima's (Ultima V - Wa-Hoo!). Maybe UO2 is gearing up to perform similar to U9?
  • It ain't. It's for real. Just got confirming email from friend of mine there. Straight up. No Diggity.
  • There is a little deli/grill called "Kafe Eclectic", (formerly "Ctrl-Alt-Deli"), on the bottom floor of the parking garage bldg next to 'The Origin Building', and they have (or did have) a sandwich called "The Garriott".

    Will they keep it???

    Inquiring, yet hungry, minds want to know...

  • Well, all newer Origin games were lacking the quality of the older ones. Wing Commander Prophecy, produced after the departure of Chris Roberts, promised lots of things (back to the roots, ...) but in fact was just a lot of missions glued together by 10 Video Clips and a poor story which had absolutely nothing in common with the old WCs. (Ahh, good old times when the Kilrathi were still there)

    I already predicted the death of Origin Inc at that point, and now I've been confirmed: Richard Garriot is GONE and Wing Commander Online has been cancelled. (To translate this: The Ultima Universe is DEAD, the Wing Commander Universe is just as DEAD and the Privateer Universe already got killed before)

    Well, I guess all we can do is write mails and watch as a gaming era goes down, maybe hope that Chris Roberts' Digital Anvil and Richard Garriot's new company, whatever that will be, will succeed in bringing us the quality games we used to have before those mainstream crap games (Tomb Raider and the like) started destroying the market.

    Yours in tears, Michel
  • don't forget that jwz left mozilla/netscape on april 1st, and that was no joke.
  • Thank god. I wasted a good amount of my life on Ultima Online last year. It got so bad I was skipping classes, meetings, you name it. My GPA actually dropped a couple points because of that damn game. I quit cold turkey a few months ago, but the temption is still there. Maybe now that I know the next UO won't have Richard's creative input, I won't be tempted to buy it...

    Eric
  • If you'd care to check your dates, you'd notice that Linux wasn't around for the best of the Ultima series. I was playing Ultima IV on an Apple // back in the early/mid 80's.

    Appearantly there IS an Ultima Online client port for Linux. And I don't suppose I will get into too much trouble for mentioning that server developers at Origin use Linux religiously.
  • I never had the benefit of playing Ultima on my old Apple IIe... I mainly played those screen-flipping adventure games (Black Cauldron, Kings Quest, etc). I had an Atari for games.

    But I do remember the day I first saw Ultima. A friend was playing U7p2 on his 486, and I was instantly drawn in. I was fascinated by every aspect of the game, from the paperdoll system to the music, and even the game itself. I eventually, ah, "borrowed", a copy (which I bought a 486 for), and started over from the begining.

    I remember all the time I spent playing the game.. . but I don't remember how long it was. I have the distinct feelings I must have spent a year or two on the game. I would write lists of things to do, places to get food, what trainers improved what... I was totally immersed.

    I got my hands on a copy of U7p1 after that. It wasn't the same (lesser graphics, loss of the really cool paperdoll system)... but it was the first Ultima I played all the way through. Remember the sad look Spark gives you ("puppy dog eyes") when you try to remove him from your party?

    I played U6 after that, eventually got U4. Never played U8 (the whole pentagram-on-the-cover thing just turned me off to it). Instead, I fired up The Serpent Isle again. Heh.

    I bought the Ultima 9 Dragon Edition, mainly for the Orchestral CD. The game ran pretty crappy on my pIII 450, 128M RAM, G400MAX, but I played as long as I could. Contrary to what people say, *I* believe it was an Ultima. To give you a perspective, I stopped at Minoc - couldn't find the sword to kill the skeleton guardian in the mines.

    I say it was an Ultima because I *knew* the world. Dupre was dead and gone, but it was Britannia. I believe Lord British, I believe the Avatar, I believed Raven. I stopped playing because I lost patients with the bugs, not because it wasn't an Ultima. It had a deep plot - how long did it take you to figure out all your old companions were guarding the Runes? How many of them did you just outright kill the first time through? The *Ultima* of U9 was there - the bugs just kept it from you.

    The only thing that had more of an effect on me than the story and plot of the Ultimas was the music. Stones will be played at my wedding next year.

    I guess what I'm saying is that Lord British's games had a profound effect on me - I played them while I was growing up. I almost feel that I grew up *with* the Ultimas. I wish Lord British the best of luck in whatever his next venture is, and if it is a game, I can't wait to play it.

    lw
  • The first computer game i ever played was Ultima. That got me hooked on computers. I had to fiqure out how it worked and how to do it myself. Over the years I played and won every Ultima game, including the Undergrounds and the Worlds. Thanks to Lord British I am a programmer. I guess I just wanted to say "Thanks Richard".
  • SKU=stock keeping unit
    I worked at Best Buy for a couple of years. The terminology is standard across the industry.
  • Ultima Underworld was the *first* FPS. It was out two years before Doom, and two months before Wolfenstein. IMHO, UU was better than either. I spent a LOT of time playing that.

  • Thank God I wasn't the only wretch who wasted time filling the landscape with chests. And I financed a lot of cool weaponry slaughtering the inhabitants of Dawn over and over again.

    But I realized it was time to stop when I found myself, having filled every possible landmass with chests, filling the sea with captured pirate ships. (You have to trap the whirlpool first. Tricky!) I still have an Atari ST version with the "filled with chests" save on it...

  • I've been using DirectX and ... it's crap. You can do 1000% better programs (from a programmer's point of view) by building your gfx engine with opengl.
  • But who needs a gaming APIs? I don't want a full-blown API. I can use GLUT for Input, do my network stuff with bsdsockets and use another API for sound
    ... and my code will be faster than any program written using this fat bitch (--> DirectX) ...
  • ok, ok. Sorry. I'm just angry that there's no Ultima (expect UO) for Linux, but I really like Ultima, too.
  • Garriot didn't do any Linux games. Ultima is cool, but no Linux game.

    ... I don't care ...
  • From Origin?
  • So you say that OpenGL isn't modern???

    They should watch the portability of their games from the beginning of their development on.
    Ok, when they started work on U9 Linux wasn't that popular as it is in our days.
  • I wasted way too much time playing U1-U5 on my good old Apple //e. Ultima games were always about story and quality. That seems to have gotten lost with U8+.

    I always found the Might & Magic series better (though similiarly to Ultima, the later ones seemed to drop off in quality significantly). M&M II is where it's at! :) And it'll run great on a 15Mhz 386 with 4Mb of RAM and DOS 6 (trust me, I know) - don't throw that old hardware away people!
  • Lord British Slams X-Box

    Is it a coincidence? Is EA in bed with M$ ?

  • Oops, HTML error...here is the link:
    Lord British Slams X-Box [fgnonline.com]
  • Actually no, we got the lands filled with chests by *FIGHTING MONSTERS*.
  • I've played it two times, one on a real Apple with real mockingboard (damn near completion before the disks went dead), and one on ApplePC emulator 4 years later...

    I could still tell the difference between the real mockingboard and the emulated one...the real one sounded so much better...anyway. It is sad to see him go...
  • Yes! It was exactly what I did...oh well...and filling the map with chests was great - They act like lightbulbs ;)

    AFAIK LB cannot be killed in U4 but it is possible in U5 / U6 when he's asleep.

    But it is not nearly as fun as U3 where you can kill all people in a city, get a LOT of money from there, especially by fighting guards, then get away from the city then back - everything's back to normal. Fun eh?
  • Well, I'd say if you have an 'older version', meaning anything
    from before my last checkin at 11:20pm last night, then I'll
    blame that.:-) More seriously, though, I'm not developing with
    Forge installed; but it should work, and I will eventually try it.

    As for Origin, we've had no contact yet, although we're going
    to try. If they get nasty, I'd rather know now so I can go onto
    other things; but I'm really hoping they'll help us, or at least
    stay neutral.

  • Perhaps he should get together with Roberta and Ken Williams, who were forced out of Sierra last year, and start a new company to create RPG and adventure games. I believe I read an interview with Roberta Williams where she praised R.G., and Sierra published at least one of the early Ultima's.
  • Since you mentioned exult, I'll provide a bit of information:

    We do have quite a ways to go before the game is playable,
    but progress has been much better lately. Two other developers
    have joined the project, one doing sound & config., the other
    doing the Win32 port (which is fairly straightforward, since
    Exult was converted to SDL a couple months ago).

    It's true that U7 was written with a terrible memory manager;
    but one thing they did right was to have the entire plot of the
    game controlled by a script called 'usecode', which was
    then compiled into bytecode for a virtual machine (similar
    to the way Java works). A couple other guys figured out
    the 'usecode' bytecode and wrote an assembler and dis-
    assembler for it. And using that info., I've written an interpreter.
    So... conversations are working; you can open/close
    doors; and various flags/variables that control the plot are
    getting updated. But there are still several internal functions
    that aren't yet understood.

  • Dunno, but he had tha observatory which you could only get to via a secret passage. If I had a house like that, I'd want to keep it. Or sell it without revealing any of the secret passages...

  • Ultima IX was Garriott's last chance to survive at Origin. Ever since Garriott sold Origin to EA, Origin has turned out buggy games (before even). He had to make U9 good or suffer the corporate consequences.

    Unfortunately, Garriott continued to be out of touch with what people wanted and what his team could do with the existing technology. *sigh*

    I think Garriott can be a good game designer, but a disaster as a manager and VP. (Remember the "There is no lag in Ultima Online" statement he made?) He should have stuck to what he was good at and hired some sharp people to run the business side of Origin for him.

    At least we have the old games, especially Ultima IV through VII to remember, play, and praise Garriott for (though his involvement with U7 was minimal).
  • Ultima V on the Amiga and PC... (The Amiga version also had some music whereas the other editions didn't).

    As far as I remember, only the IBM PC version was music-challenged. My Apple ][ Ultima V certainly has music. In fact, it can drive *two* Mockingboards and four speakers. :)
  • Ever heard of Dosemu? ;)
  • You're 100% right.. When I was younger, all I used my computer for was gaming. If games had been as easy to get working as they are now, I might never have learned anything more about computers at all.

    It all started when I had to buy QEMM to get Ultima Underworld to work.. :)

    Pax

  • A little more info than the measly paragraph www.uo.com gave us can be found here [gamespot.com]. Personally I think others more able have stepped into the RPG arena a while ago, I don't think Garriot can quite handle developing decent RPGS anymore but that's another story.
  • I seem to remember that, in Ultima II or III, you could kill Lord British if you could capture a ship and fire a cannon at him.

    Unfortunately, if you left the town and re-entered, he was right back on his throne....

  • As far as Origin goes, Origin *IS* Ultima. And Ultima *IS* Lord British.
    This seems to happen a lot- the main designer for a huge game switches teams, and they leave their original licence behind- however they're NAME goes with them. Same thing happened with Sid Meyer.. I mean, is Civ: Call For Power really Civ? Or is Alpha Centauri more Civ than Civ?

    ----
    Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
  • I love the games, and while the design may be of high quality, I have found the ultima series of games to have more technical flaws than any other piece of software I've used. I can't tell you how many times u6,u7#2, and u8 have crashed out of nowhere on me. There was one part of serpent isle that I had to play through 4 times because it kept crashing on me. (I think it nuked my recent save, or something, it was quite a while ago). Not to mention the horrendous installation problems. I remember that u6 came with 4 disks. Each one was like two halves, and I don't think I ever even used the fourth one. u8 didn't have smooth timing (even on my current computer, which is way beyond the best pc when it came out). I oculd rant on this all day.
  • If you'd care to check your dates, you'd notice that Linux wasn't around for the best of the Ultima series. I was playing Ultima IV on an Apple // back in the early/mid 80's.

    Origin was smarter, smaller, and more personable back in the mid-80's... I was referring to the Origin/Electronic Arts of the last several years.

    For the record, I played (in this order, at or around the time of their releases) Ultima 2 on an Apple ][, Ultima ]I[ on a Commodore 64 (took five minutes to load... but had the best music to be found in any game at the time!)... Ultima IV on an Apple 2 and IBM PCjr (or was it a 286? probably the latter come to think of it), and Ultima V on the Amiga and PC... (The Amiga version also had some music whereas the other editions didn't).

    This is what I meant by multi-platform... note that I didn't say multi-operating system (ie. Linux vs. Windows vs. DOS on i386 architecture).

    Appearantly there IS an Ultima Online client port for Linux. And I don't suppose I will get into too much trouble for mentioning that server developers at Origin use Linux religiously.

    "port", perhaps... on-the-shelf game, no. Besides, i's not the server developers that get to make marketing decisions.

    And why are we talking about Linux here anyhow? This isn't a story about Linux, nor is this site entirely about Linux... so let's move on.

    Daltorak

  • Amazing stuff. Lord British, thank you for a decade and change of incredible work. Tonight I'm gonna see if my original (!) copy of Ultima I, written in Integer BASIC on an Apple ][+, still boots. I have a feeling I won't be getting any sleep tonight.

    Two decades... but let's not split hairs. ;-)

    It was really, really nice of them to include the entire Ultima I-IX series (plus Ultima's precursor, Akalabeth) in the Dragon Edition of Ultima IX. They've been nicely packaged with installers and such, along with a utility (MoSlo) to slow the older games down so that they will run on your fast machine. Well worth the money you pay for the box.

    Daltorak

  • If you spent a couple of years on a project which was ruined because your boss forced you to put it out while it was in beta, how would you feel? Ultima IX was a great game when it worked. Although Garriott has not burned his bridges by saying this, there can be very little doubt about why he left. db
  • ...As opposed to uo.com reporting that "he has threatened to anally rape any EA executives or marketing department employees that he comes across. All EA employees are hereby advised to avoid the Austin area, and report any threatening phone calls received from Mr. Garriott."

    Anything that he wants to do that isn't a MMRPG falls outside of the scope of Origin's work-- there was an announcement a few weeks ago that said that they've become EA's MMRPG arm.

    Personally, I'm glad that he's leaving. I'd like to see if he's as burnt out as a lot of people are claiming; if we can get a decent RPG with a good background out of this event, I'll definitely be happy.

  • According to Origin's PR flacks (and allegedly the killer of LB), the guy was kicked out for violating the TOS: he found a bug, and exploited it instead of reporting it.

    As for U7: Wow. I didn't know about that trick.

  • You could kill Lord British is U3. There is a passage to the outside of the castle (I believe) back and to the left of the throne. The entire castle is surrounded by water and you are standing on the inside of it. Walk around the perimeter and you'll find a ship. The only thing it's good for is sailing around the outside of the castle. now, 1) park the ship close to the 'back door', 2) go back inside and kill a guard or jester, this will make LB come chase you. 3) lead him out the back, (B)oard the ship, said N so that there's at least 1 square of water between you and FIRE. Bye bye LB. Of course, he's back as soon as you leave and reenter the castle...
  • Methinks that because of this origin hath lost more than a mere eigth.
  • Ultima 5 was by far the BEST Ultima! They all pretty much went downhill from there. I'd like to see him do a re-make of this masterpiece with updated graphics and sound and maybe some extras!
    ________________________________
  • OK, after reading the definition of "Britishing", I have to wonder what kind of sick stuff CowboyNeal is into.

    From Old Man Murray's RPG reviews [oldmanmurray.com]:

    Sick of UO? Think you could make a quick buck building your character and selling it? Until one of these games has whores you can visit, it will simply not be real world enough for erik.

    Rebuttal from erik, GED:

    What the hell are you talking about? The only reason I play UO is for all the "Britishing": paying real world dollars to people for cyber-sex, then player killing them as I climax. That's the only reason anyone plays UO - all the violent sex. Jesus, man, where have you been?
  • >Anyone thinking this is happening very close to
    >april 1? I just cannot fathom the ultima series
    >without its original designer.

    They (Origin) have been saying that Ultima IX was the last Ultima.

    I'm shedding no tears, Ultima has been going steadily downhill. Those guys clearly had no intention of making another U5 or U7; I don't know if that's Garriot's fault or the marketroids'.

    Hopefully a fresh start will give Garriot a chance to recapture the magic of those first few games. I admire the guy, he's clearly brilliant, but those last 2 "Ultima" games don't deserve the name.
  • I wasted way too much time playing U1-U5 on my good old Apple //e. Ultima games were always about story and quality. That seems to have gotten lost with U8+.

    I hope whatever RG moves onto, he goes back to the simple story/quality formula. Good luck and best wishes.
    --
  • Anyone thinking this is happening very close to april 1? I just cannot fathom the ultima series without its original designer.
  • As both a former competitor and colleague of Richard's, I am sad to see him leaving the fold. His work with Ultima series will always be well-regarded and honored by those of us, presently and formerly, in the craft. He was one of the first, and most certainly one of the best.

    I remember fondly one DragonCon in Atlanta where Richard, playing British, and I, playing Werdna, led an audience of real-time, real-space live role-players in a "battle of epic proportion between good and evil." I still get e-mails from those who were there reminiscing about it.

    To my old friend, I say, farewell and G-dspeed! You did us great honor by your works, and gave us all many hours of pleasure in the process.
  • In the TV series, I, Clavdivs when Augustus dies, Tiberius says, "The earth will shake!" That seems appropriate here.

    First question, how is the Ultima series going to handle this? Will Lord British continue to exist in the game, as he has ever since I started playing them way back on the Atari 800?

    I can't think of another game series where the presence of the games creator was such a firm and important part of the games universe. I can't imagine Origin without Lord British, I wonder what his "other interests" are (and whether they have something to do with the computer area). Does anyone know what the story behing Garriot's leaving is? Was it amicable or was it because of disagreements within Origin? (I'm hoping it wasn't a Nolan Bushnell leaving Atari, Gary Gygax leaving TSR type of thing....)

  • Amazing stuff. Lord British, thank you for a decade and change of incredible work. Tonight I'm gonna see if my original (!) copy of Ultima I, written in Integer BASIC on an Apple ][+, still boots. I have a feeling I won't be getting any sleep tonight. I'm a veteran of Ultima I through V, and loved every one of them. Please accept my thanks for the past, and my best wishes for the future.
  • After about Ultima VI, Lord British was more a manager than anything else. After that point, the games expanded technologically but went backward in many other ways. Ultima VII was so bad in certain respects that LB made apologies for it. And Ultima IX is a disaster across the board. I almost want to say that the Ultima games were never meant to be visualized in real-time as has been done with the last three games. In 3D with a directly controlled character, Ultima seems more like a poor clone of Mario 64 than a role playing game. It is time to let the Ultima series die a peaceful death.
  • A SKU is a retail term for an individual type of some item for sale. Every different product carries an individual SKU number (where I used to work [bentleys.com], everything had a six-digit number, but this varies from place to place). So, for instance, your local Electronics Boutique carries versions of Quake III:Arena for Mac, Windows, and Linux, but assigns each a different SKU number. Other companies might ship a hybrid Mac/Windows CD that carries only one SKU. (Which leads to such sales frequently being reported as Windows sales instead of Mac ones, but that's another story.)

    My complaint was that the company guy seems to regard his products with a certain commoditized air, like soap or bulk goods, rather than works of art and imagination. Even referring to them as "titles" would have been an improvement in the message.

    Then again, perhaps my retail years (all three of them) just turned me off to the whole SKU thing. Especially when price adjustments came out and we had to spend two hours going around the store and redoing all the hanging price tags...

  • from the above-mentioned article:

    Jeff Anderson will be devoting 100% of his time to ensuring that this strategic sku is a mjor success.

    .
    .
    .

    Rick Hall will become the producer of an exciting new sku, which will be the most powerful new UO release to date.

    If I worked at Origin, I wouldn't refer to my company's games, especially games with such a quasi-religious following, as skus. It's this commodity approach to programming that gave us things like Office 2000, IIRC.

  • Actually, the first game I ever played I had to hand type into the computer from a magazine...

  • Yeah, he's half right. It was buggy as hell. Crashed lots. Wierd things happened.

    But the game itself was incredible.

    The "living world" thing is something no other RPG seems to have gotten right. There is something very cool about showing up to town and having to wait until the store is opened, or being able to follow shopkeepers home to see where they live. And in the writing of all those little subplots, all of these NPCs were actually characters. You could ignore them, of course, but cool none-the-less.

    Unfortunately, the interface for actually buying stuff was ghastly, and having to feed your troops was annoying. But the openendedness of it more then made up for it. You could just go wandering about pretty much anywhere if you wanted.

  • U7 came out at a bad time for games. Games were pushing the OS harder and harder, and MSDOS just wasn't up to it. The biggest problem was memory, the famous "640K barrier". Most games used special memory managers to allow much of the game to run in expanded memory (or was it extended? I no longer remember). Some of them did it right (like Doom) and used a standard one that worked well. Unfortunately, U7 decided to either roll their own, or just bought a crappy one. To make matters worse, U7 had the largest below 640k footprint of any game, pretty much requiring that you perform all sorts of wierd DOS tricks just to get the thing to load. (Other games were similar, but U7 was the worst.)

    Kids today, who just pop in the CD and are playing twenty minutes later, don't realize how good they have it. I remember fighting with games for days to get them to work.

  • Hell, the IBM PC wasn't around when Ultima I came out!

    I played the first three on an Apple ][+ with 64k RAM. Those versions are more fun today than half of the games that came out last year.

  • There is a Linux port here [sourceforge.net]. It is only partially a port in that it uses the original game data files. In other words, you have to be an owner of the DOS version.

    There is also a Windows port somewhere. (The original won't run under any version of Windows. They uses a horrendous memory manager that not only made it hell to install under DOS, but makes it impossible to run under any modern OS.)

    I don't think either port is very far along. I know that Exult is at the point where you can walk around and talk to NPCs, but the rest is not there yet.

  • Yes, and Ultima VII was the second greatest. Then they killed the series with super mario avatar.

    It is such a shame because no other game has quite made it there. Baldur's Gate was close, but still just didn't have the magic that the first seven Ultima's did. They're one of the few games you can go back and play ten years later.

  • Yeah, the first couple times. But after searching through the damn full pack for another ham for Dupree, I felt like telling him to figure out how the fuck to feed himself for a change!

    (It was cool that you could go hunt a deer for food, though.)

  • Hey, since I found someone who knows something, I have a question: I tried it briefly on my machine and it segfaults. I was just curious if that was due to my having the "Forge of Virtue" add-on installed?

    If not, don't worry about it as it was an older version, and I didn't really do any work trying to figure out what was up.

    Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing this thing going.

    Have you guys had any contact with Origin over this? I hope they don't give you any trouble. I can't imagine why, since you've got to own the game to use Exult, but you never know with big corps.

  • I still remember, back around 1980 or so, there was an article in a magazine called "The Space Gamer" in which a young Richard Garriot described how he did the 3-D mazes for his new game "Akalbeth". Cool stuff. I wish to hell I'd kept it.

  • When Origin started out there was no Linux, so it's not suprising that he wasn't writing games for Linux. And it's only recently that Linux has become a viable platform for games (what with reasonable hardware support), and so it's not suprising there aren't any Ultima games.

    Just because the hasn't written anything for Linux is no reason to dismiss him. /. isn't actually "News for Linux zealots", despite what you might think sometimes. The Ultima series contributed a lot to the computer RPG genre, and the platform they ran on shouldn't be an issue at all.

  • The behemoth-ness of Origin and Electronic Arts has crippled his ability to produce truly great games.

    Oh come on. He could have seen what was coming from a million miles away, but he gave in to greed and sold Origin to (cookie-cutter, make money now, bottom-line is all that matters) EA anyway.
  • I followed the Ultima 9 fiasco through the past 6 years... I can see why one in his position would want to retreat to one's castle for a while and then start over with something new and interesting without such a loud and obsessed fan base. He's a really creative person - his work shows that. And I bet he'll be back with something new and interesting. Here's to his future success! E
  • They have made several references to doing their development for UO in Linux. Here is a link to the linux uo client [owo.com]. It may not be current enough to work though, but they do seem to try every once in a while to update it.
  • GameSpot has a bit more information in their article here [gamespot.com].
    Though it's mostly unconfirmed, it seems that Garriot was layed off because he and EA had differing views on Origin's future.
  • Here is the internal email that went out from Jack Heistand, CEO of Origin, to the troops about what was going on. It was on the X-Origin mailing list in about 2.5 seconds.

    Here it is on Gamespy [gamespy.com]

    Donut, Ex-Origin, who never thought this day would come.
  • I'm noticing that comments here run one of two ways, on average:

    1. Man, it really sucks that Lord British is leaving Origin!
    2. Rock on! Now he'll get to do some real games!
    This is a stark contrast to what happens when other programmers/developers leave companies. Most people assume that they'll never hear from those people again. But the second comment trend is interesting in its own right:

    Evidently, people seem to think that Lord British should leave Origin, if only for his own good.

    Which means that if this is an April Fool's joke (which I think it is), then Garriott might want to consider it anyway, since so many people seem to think he'd be better off.

    ***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
    ***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

  • Load up Ultima V,VI and VII and find out...his games had a decent plot and narrative and most of all were involving.
    He made RPG's that weren't just hack'n'slash and you actually felt part of the story and were more involved than the other RPG's around at the time.
    I mean have you ever played Buldur's Gate...Great Graphics, faithfull to the AD&D rules, but somehow it just seems too Hack'n'Slash and you feel that the you are being driven too much towards predecided set pieces in the game.
    Go ahead try'em you won't be disappointed (well once you get round the usual dos out of memory problems anyway)

  • Other interests? (Score:3)

    by griffjon ( 14945 ) <`GriffJon' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday March 31, 2000 @06:32AM (#1159167) Homepage Journal
    He's evidentally building a new house, maybe he's working on the Lord British mansion trying to get it ready for next Halloween...

    Also, talking to some Origin employees, there was no small amount of unrest and unease about the EA buyout and heavy-handedness, not to mention EA's history of running game companies into the groung then moving on. Some employees even had shirts with the EA triangle/circle/square logo made out in Borg-style tech.

    Maybe Garriot's looking to jumpstart a new gaming company? I'm sure he could attract a lot of the original Origin programming group out of EA.

  • Wondering what he'll do next... (Score:3)

    by spiralx ( 97066 ) on Friday March 31, 2000 @05:19AM (#1159168)

    The Ultima series was absolutely wonderful, especially in its early days when its attention to plot (which was pretty much a dirty word in the computer RPG genre back then) and detailed background. It set the tone for later CRPGs, and I'm sure that it inspired the recent revival started by games like Diablo.

    Assuming Richard Garriot isn't just going to spend his time lounging around in his big house throwing Halloween parties, I'm looking foward to what he does next. Without the pressure to do yet another Ultima game, he can turn his creative talents to producing a new game with a new setting, hopefully one even better than Britannia. Given the increased power of computers nowadays, he could really produce a detailed setting and a great game based in it.

  • Good. (Score:3)

    by Daltorak ( 122403 ) on Friday March 31, 2000 @05:08AM (#1159169)
    Richard Garriot, aka Lord British [ultimaascension.com] is one of the greatest game designers and conceptualists of our time. The behemoth-ness of Origin and Electronic Arts has crippled his ability to produce truly great games.

    Anyone in the Open Source community can appreciate this on a certain level; if you were ordered by, let's say Linus Torvalds, how to design your Linux-compatible software, which you came up with the original idea for, -and- you were told to have it done by a deadline or less lose all support for developing your software, how would you feel? You'd probably say, "screw that, I want to do things my own way".

    Regardless of the fact that Ultima never made it to Linux (thank Origin for that oversight -- Garriot was actually a believer in cross-platformed games!), the twelve (major) games released under the Ultima banner have collectively done more for fantasy role-playing on computers than anything else out there.

    Best wishes to Garriot in his future endeavours.

    Daltorak

  • Todays PVP comic is about Richard (Score:5)

    by BlergEatKitty ( 140654 ) on Friday March 31, 2000 @04:54AM (#1159170) Homepage
    Check it out here.
    PVP [pvponline.com]

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