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TVTranscript
00:01Greetings, sir.
00:02He's one of the most colorful characters in gaming.
00:07Lord British and Richard Garriott are really the same person.
00:11Some people would think that he was a little weird.
00:13Who helped jumpstart a genre.
00:15He got his foot in the door before anybody else in the massively multiplayer market.
00:19He evolved with the whole PC industry and then blazed the path for the massively multiplayer.
00:25There were humble beginnings.
00:27The three car garage became our manufacturing and shipping department.
00:31And emotionally trying times.
00:33And I would be literally curled up in a fetus position on a chair in physical pain.
00:38I mean literally gut-wrenching physical pain.
00:40About the nightmare of what is about to happen to us as a company.
00:47And things weren't always what they seemed.
00:51And it was very clear there was not a match at all.
00:55But he left a lasting legacy.
00:58There are very few people who stay on the cutting edge of an industry like this for 20 years.
01:03He didn't start the RPG genre, but he certainly reinvigorated it in the early 80s.
01:09This is the story of a video game wizard and his journey through knighthood.
01:13Lord British and Richard Garriott you can probably say is one of the founding fathers of the games industry.
01:17It's the story of Richard Garriott.
01:42As a child, Richard is literally surrounded by space.
01:45One, zero, ignition, liftoff, liftoff.
01:50My father was a Stanford University professor and then a NASA astronaut.
01:54And that took our family to Houston right across from the Johnson Space Center
01:58where all of our neighbors, literally both my next neighbors and the people behind us were astronauts.
02:02And the people all around us were either astronauts or engineers.
02:06And his mother's career helped pave his own.
02:08And my mother is a professional artist.
02:10And so if you really think about what computer games are, you know, computer games are high-tech art, engineering
02:16art.
02:16And so it was really a perfect background for getting into this business.
02:21Richard doesn't develop an interest in gaming right away.
02:24But by age 14, he reaches a turning point.
02:26An epic story helps lead him on his way.
02:29The first one was being given the book Lord of the Rings,
02:32which was the first and still largely the only fantasy work that I've read.
02:36The second thing was role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
02:40So 1974 is the year Dungeons & Dragons was published.
02:43And so I was one of the early adopters of that game.
02:46But these times aren't filled with just fantasy.
02:49So I began to work with or play with these personal computers, not really even at home.
02:54We didn't have one yet.
02:55At school, young Richard is fascinated with computers and teaches himself programming.
03:00I began to create little fantasy games on this teletype.
03:03I would draw walls for corridors of a dungeon, dollar signs for where the treasure was,
03:09letters for the first initial of the monster that might be moving around the halls.
03:12And I was very fortunate that getting in early was the key to successful self-taughtness.
03:19Richard jots down his own D&D type games.
03:22Their names were D&D 1, D&D 2, D&D 3.
03:25I actually had to write all my programs out in a notebook.
03:28And makes a very smart bet with his father.
03:30He said, you know, that game, this is huge. This will never work.
03:34And I said, oh, this is going to work.
03:35I've been paying very close attention to writing this out.
03:37And he said, I will buy half of an Apple II computer.
03:40And if you pay for the other half, if when you type this whole thing in, it works.
03:44And as a prop to his birthplace.
03:45I was born in Cambridge, England.
03:47But I only lived there for one month.
03:49He creates his own moniker for his Dungeons & Dragons games, Lord British.
03:53And so as I began to write my first computer games, I just started putting, you know, Lord British as
03:58a character, as one of the many characters within those games.
04:02So as soon as we had the Apple II, the next logical thing to do, of course, is to take,
04:06I've already done 28 of these simple character graphics games on a teletype.
04:10I turned around and immediately did the same thing on the Apple II.
04:13And so I came up with a new name that I thought I literally made up, which was called Akalabeth.
04:18Akalabeth becomes his first game for the Apple II.
04:21Akalabeth is not a very good game in the sense of it's a cool demo, but there's no way to
04:27win the game.
04:27There's no plot to the game.
04:30There's no sequence of events.
04:31It's just randomly generated dungeons and treasure hunts with no goals to accomplish.
04:36But good enough to impress his boss at Computerland.
04:39He said, you know, well, Richard, you know, your game is every bit as good or better than the two
04:43or three games that existed at the time that were hanging on the pegboard wall in Ziploc bags.
04:48And he said, you know, your game's as good as those.
04:50We ought to publish it.
04:51Enterprising Richard likes the idea, but decides to publish the game himself.
04:56So I went out and invested what for me was a ton of money, $200.
05:00And I went literally just a few doors down and went to the print shop and I had these printed
05:03up and had my mother draw me some pictures to put on the front of it as graphics.
05:07And we started hanging them on the pegboard in the store there and about 20 copies sold in a few
05:11days there on the store wall when suddenly I got a call from California.
05:15And that call represents the opportunity of a lifetime.
05:19It's from a game company called California Pacific.
05:21So I flew to California on their ticket and they handed me a contract.
05:25So we'd like to publish your game nationwide.
05:27So I signed the contract.
05:29My royalties were $5 a unit and they sold about 30, 35,000 copies of those.
05:33And do that math.
05:34That's about $150,000 for a high school senior.
05:38He goes on to the University of Texas and immediately begins working on a follow up.
05:42So immediately I said, wow, if this game will do this well, which was already a best seller, with a
05:48game that I had never even intended on releasing to the public at all.
05:53If I do a game knowing that it's for public consumption, I can make a much better game.
05:58And that's what began the first Ultima.
05:59And the birth of the Ultima series will launch gamers into a new world.
06:09It's filled with unusual creatures.
06:14And medieval environments.
06:35In 1980, the creative computer programmer Richard Garriott begins working on a world that would change RPGs forever.
06:42And he uses his Lord British character to help market the game.
06:46Well, my first publisher, you know, was going like, well, what's this Lord British thing on here?
06:52And they went, well, you know, Richard Garriott is not really a very memorable name in a marketing sense.
06:57Let's drop Richard Garriott off the credits and let's just leave Lord British.
07:05Ultima is a two dimensional computer animated sword and sorcery fantasy world with an ecology, economy, and ethical code of
07:17its own.
07:20This world is called Britannia.
07:23Richard releases the second game in the series, Ultima 2, Revenge of the Enchantress.
07:28They used to be the good old days as they might be called when one guy could make a game.
07:33And that's exactly what he does.
07:35With only $70,000 scraped together from savings, his parents and private investors, Richard and his brother Robert start a
07:42new company, Origin.
07:43They work out of his parents' garage.
07:46Literally, we had a three car garage with an art loft over.
07:49The small room was Robert's business office and the big room was me and a few of my friends who
07:53did all the games.
07:54And the three car garage became our manufacturing and shipping department.
07:58Richard works at Origin while still attending classes at the University of Texas at Austin.
08:03But he gets a serious wake up call.
08:07I was taking an assembly language programming course at UT and I actually flunked the class.
08:13And it was the first class I'd ever flunked.
08:15And it was what I was doing for business.
08:18That told me anyway that I had to make a choice of doing one or the other.
08:22It was actually very different. My parents were extremely supportive.
08:24They were like, well, heck, no question. Go do the gaming stuff.
08:28So he drops out of college and pursues gaming full time.
08:32And in 1983, he publishes his first game under the Origin label, Ultima 3 Exodus.
08:38Once we published Ultima 3 through our new company, Origin, we moved out of the house.
08:43And Origin really begins to take off.
08:48At the time, those games were incredibly loved.
08:50They really were. They had such a following.
08:54After I had written three games, I now realized, okay, I know how to do the basic structures.
08:59Now I want to make a good game.
09:01The result is Ultima 4.
09:03Ultima 4 took two years.
09:05It was the first time I actually really sat down and tried to truly create a world.
09:08Tried to create a back history.
09:10Tried to create purpose to your existence as a player.
09:13This fourth installment introduces the eight virtues.
09:16And the Avatar, a role model hero that has to stand tests of morality.
09:21So I wanted to create a game where if you were going to win, you actually had to walk the
09:24straight and narrow.
09:25And I was worried that people would think I'd gone way off the deep end and that I was kind
09:29of preaching.
09:30And so I actually was worried that Ultima 4 might be flop.
09:33A flop it wasn't.
09:35Ultima 4 sells more than 200,000 units.
09:38And Origin becomes the darling of the industry.
09:41Those games were so successful in sort of picking up that.
09:44In that they were classic fantasy of being the good guy, rescuing the princess and slaying the dragon and those
09:49kind of classic stories.
09:50Richard has big plans for the next installment of the Ultima series, but it will come with a hefty price.
09:55He must make a tough decision.
09:56So we sat down to make this decision of what are we going to do?
09:59If we quit now, we can walk away with millions of dollars.
10:02If we ride forward, the good odds we're going to be millions in debt.
10:06And I would be literally curled up in a fetus position on a chair in physical pain.
10:10I mean literally gut-wrenching physical pain about the nightmare of what is about to happen to us as a
10:16company.
10:18And in 1992, Electronic Arts, a San Mateo computer game company, comes to the rescue.
10:24Buying Origin systems for $30 million.
10:28EA has become a powerhouse for probably very good business reasons.
10:32It obviously just fundamentally knows what it's doing and being able to support companies like Origin and appreciate, I guess,
10:39the brands in Ultima.
10:40The deal for selling Origin was worth a number of millions of dollars.
10:43So it was clearly a whole other plateau.
10:47Origin digs into EA's deep pockets and begins working on a new installment of Ultima that has a twist.
10:53All the time we've been creating these solo player games, we've always gone, you know, wouldn't it be great if
10:58my buddy could come with me too?
10:59The boys at Origin put the game to the test.
11:02So we actually put up on our website, we said, hey, anybody that wants to come beta test, we want
11:07you to pay us $5 to send you a desk for the privilege of beta testing.
11:11And we had 50,000 people send us $5.
11:15Oh my gosh, we were right. We've hit on something really big.
11:19In 1997, Ultima Online is released.
11:21With the launch of Ultima Online, he got his foot in the door before anybody else in the massively multiplayer
11:26market.
11:27Ultima Online marks the beginning of a new age in online social interaction and gaming.
11:32It goes far beyond the text-based single player adventure games.
11:36Just sitting in there and typing and the text appears above the head of your avatar and then you see
11:40somebody else actually respond and talk to you.
11:42And all of a sudden, you've done something that you've never done before.
11:45With a special appearance from Lord British himself.
11:49Part of the Ultima mythos is always that I, Richard Garriott, get to go to Britannia and I play Lord
11:54British while I'm there, but it's really me.
11:57But Lord British is not immortal.
12:00I would hear back from players and almost always they would kind of snicker and eventually say, oh, by the
12:04way, also, I took great joy in killing you.
12:06And I was like, hey, you know, that's not good.
12:08So I began to create future Ultimas with code in place to protect Lord British from being killed once I
12:14realized people were doing this.
12:15Then people would write in and say, haha, I found a way to kill you anyway.
12:18As the Ultima series grows in popularity, so does the Lord British persona.
12:23Richard shows up at trade shows wearing the regal garb.
12:26Lord British and Richard Garriott are really the same person.
12:29You know, I have, of course, extremely well grounded sense of reality.
12:34He felt he could crown himself and he, uh, he'd make himself a king.
12:38I mean, you've got to give him credit there, only a lord.
12:40It's serious. He hasn't given it up.
12:42And it's a persona that he's, uh, pursued.
12:44And most people refer to him as Richard Lord British Garriott.
12:48He's absolutely serious.
12:49In the United States it actually always went over very well.
12:51In Japan it actually went over very well.
12:53But I have to tell you the one place it did not work was England.
12:59In England, not just anybody gets to be a lord.
13:02Not even Richard Garriott.
13:04First press member walked up into the room and kind of looked at me sideways
13:07and gave me the once over.
13:09He said, so what the hell are you supposed to be?
13:13And I was like, ugh, I was, I was crushed.
13:16It was like, and I had to spend the rest of the day there.
13:18And I had already signed up to do like three days of this.
13:21And this was the first member of the press.
13:23And, uh, it was, it was a total disaster.
13:26Richard's D&D style crosses over into his very real life
13:29as he builds a castle in Texas.
13:32It was stocked with trap doors and secret areas
13:35and all this cool stuff.
13:36But a very real world invasion shakes Richard up.
13:39Well, at 3.30 in the morning, there's a big crash.
13:42I wake up, so I actually go to my closet and I grab a, uh, a gun.
13:46And I call the police and I crack open my bedroom door
13:50and I look out my bedroom door with the police on the phone
13:52and the gun in another hand.
13:54And, uh, police say it's gonna be 15 minutes before they can get there.
13:57Well, we have this five minute stare down,
13:59and this person then turns around and starts walking down my stairs.
14:02And so I'm going, hey, you know what, I've just said stop or I'll shoot.
14:05So I aim off to the side and pull the trigger.
14:07Doesn't faze this person. Doesn't even hear it.
14:09They finally get there five minutes later, find this guy.
14:11He's, he's in one of my bedrooms and please come in and, you know,
14:14push him to the ground rather forcefully and handcuff him.
14:16And it turns out this person's had a serious psychotic break.
14:19But a home invasion isn't Richard's biggest problem.
14:22Creatively, things are about to take a drastic turn.
14:26The last six months of my time there was spent in this battle, effectively,
14:32of my vision for the future versus the other senior members
14:36of the corporation's vision of the future.
14:38And it was very clear there was not a match at all.
14:53For eight years, Origin and Game Giant EA were seemingly a match made in heaven.
14:58Together, they created one of the most successful role-playing game franchises,
15:01the Ultima series.
15:03But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end.
15:07EA wanted him to do games that he didn't want to do.
15:11They, they asked him to make, like, simple little Java-based online games.
15:16We need your help.
15:18And he really had no interest in doing that.
15:20You are a fool. Goodbye.
15:22And in 2000, Garriott leaves EA and Origin,
15:25the company he founded nearly 20 years before.
15:28The departure is painful.
15:30Origin was still a place where I assumed I would be spending the rest of my career,
15:33and Electronic Arts was a company I presumed I would be spending the rest of my time with as well.
15:37So to leave that nest and go that far away was much more traumatic.
15:41Upon leaving EA and Origin, he signs a non-compete contract.
15:45And so we forged a deal that basically allowed me to continue equity participation with the company
15:50for a period of year.
15:52That way I was still earning money even though I wasn't working, so to speak.
15:54And during that same period of time, they had use of, uh, Lord British within the Ultimas.
15:59So it was a good mutual deal.
16:01I have no time for you.
16:02And then Lord British left.
16:04He takes a year off to set out on a real-life adventure.
16:07We went to Russia and did cosmonaut training where we, uh,
16:10did the neutral buoyancy tank in spacesuits with zero-g parabola flights.
16:14We went to Africa on safari.
16:17We took submarines, uh, down to, uh, on a treasure-hunting trip.
16:24Meanwhile, the online world continues to grow.
16:27Korean-based NCSoft releases Lineage.
16:34It quickly becomes the most played game in Asia.
16:40So Lineage, which is, you know, phenomenally popular in Asia with 4 million players,
16:46is having a much more difficult time here in the United States.
16:51NCSoft sees Garriott as the gaming tycoon with enough status to bring Lineage and its success to the U.S.
17:00Even before we met the folks at NCSoft, they already were, you know, beta testing Lineage here in the United
17:06States
17:06and only had, you know, a few hundred players playing it.
17:15And essentially, you kind of look at, well, what are the factors that has made this phenomenal success in Asia
17:19and how can we maximize the success in the United States?
17:22And it turns out that's a more difficult problem than we thought
17:24because we actually thought we knew the answer to it
17:26and so far we haven't proven that that's the case.
17:32Lineage is a fabulous game about regional conquest.
17:35So there's a great political game about ownership of property, command of these castles
17:42and the power that that has within it, which is why it's so popular worldwide.
17:47However, the U.S. audience is clearly much more critical of things like animation detail and presentation,
17:55which we knew, we had instincts to say that that was true.
17:57It's just turned to be far more true than we had hoped.
18:02And Lord British is expected to be reincarnated.
18:05Oh, of course Lord British will be coming back in games.
18:08You know, not only are now with NCSoft, we're actually, Lord British is actually taking a visit, a tour, inside
18:14the game Lineage.
18:16And that's not all. Offline, the real-life Lord British is working on his new game.
18:21It's called Tabula Rasa, which my brother is working on.
18:25And so Tabula Rasa really has one key goal from a gameplay standpoint,
18:29and that is to blend the best features that we evolved over the last 20 years in solo-player gaming
18:35and combine that with the best features of massively multiplayer gaming.
18:39Tabula Rasa, first of all, is not a medieval swords and sorcery game.
18:43I sort of view Tabula Rasa as a mystical, futuristic, farcical world.
18:56Well, if history proves itself, then any game bearing the Lord British name will be worth playing.
19:01I think that being involved with NCSoft would be great to see that there's opportunities for him to be involved
19:06with these other projects.
19:08Our long-term strategy is to release a game, about four games a year.
19:12We're developing a lot of products internally, so one product is called The Lineage 2.
19:18Lineage 2 is a fully immersive 3D environment versus the top-down view.
19:27We believe that with Lineage 2 we'll be able to keep a much more exciting pace to the game.
19:44He didn't start the RPG genre, but he certainly reinvigorated it in the early 80s.
19:49He didn't start the RPG genre, but he certainly reinvigorated it in the early 80s.
19:59Do not be so sure.
20:01But he certainly took an existing genre into a really, really exciting direction.
20:06The Lord British Richard Garriott you could probably say is one of the founding fathers of the games industry.
20:11His original games, the Ultima series, were absolutely the games that got a lot of people into the industry as
20:18it is right now.
20:21Richard Garriott is kind of a role model for a lot of us because he pioneered things when there was
20:26nothing happening.
20:28He showed with Ultima in the early beginnings that, you know, one guy could make a big difference and trap
20:34a lot of people into these experiences.
20:36You could say that he's still on the absolute cutting edge of the industry and there are very few people
20:42who stay on the cutting edge of an industry like this for 20 years.
20:49He evolved with the whole PC industry and the experiences he was creating and then blazed the path for the
20:55massively multiplayer, you know, with Ultima Online.
20:58I wouldn't be surprised if Richard Garriott again just surprises us out of left field with something that sets a
21:04huge evolutionary trend.
21:08I just enjoy making games that are ethical parables.
21:12May all of the virtues be with you, my son.
21:28Have a good day.
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