Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 156: Ultima feat. Richard Garriott

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

It's a double dose of Ultima! First, Jeremy and Bob chat with Jason Wilson and Rowan Kaiser from Gamesbeat to explore the RPG series' legacy, then Richard Garriott (Lord British himself) shares anecdotes about the origins and evolution of the games.

This week in Retronauts, Ultima, I barely know. Jeremy Parrish. And this week, yes, we are talking about Ultima. And it's not just me talking about Ultima. We've gone to some definitive sources, including Richard Gariat himself. But in the meantime, you're going to have to make do with a studio full of people, including, of course, Hi, it's Bob Mackie, otherwise known as Lord Skittish. That's the best I could do. That's pretty good. Thank you. And making his retronauts debut, we also have a special guest for this episode. Introduce yourself. Rowan Kynastard.

Yes, there you go. You're supposed to say name. Oh, I was, I think it's good when... Job. When you say your name and your own voice, so people are like, can associate that with you. Because it's all a bunch of like white American dudes here. So that comes through on the mic. The ultimate thing, though, is you type in name and they tell you your name.

Oh, okay. We should have started this episode with a tarot drawing, I guess. Oh, that works too. But oh well. Yes, so, Rowan, why are you here this week? Because I am the guy who yells about Ultima on Twitter. It's true. And I can think of no better qualification for being on retronaut than screaming on Twitter.

It's true. But no, you are an ultima enthusiast and an expert, and you are going to carry this episode. Just you wait. All right. And so then rounding out the panel here we have. It's Lord Poopie Pants. So my children called me this morning. Yes, okay.

It's Jason Wilson from GameSpeed. Hello, everyone. Were they punished severely, Jason? No, they're actually going out to dim sum. Okay. I would definitely not consider that punishment. That is not punishment. No, I imagine sort of jail time or something for that.

No, as you can see, I am a strict disciplinarian in my house. All right. So, we're going to kind of hurry through this episode because this segment here, this panel, is only half the episode. The other half is an interview that I conducted at Game Developers Conference 2018 with Richard Garriott about the history and kind of some of his philosophical underpinnings for the Ultima series. So I have to ask you, did you get the full interview process with Richard Garriott? Which means what exactly? Did he have his binder of Ultima?

That was his D&D campaign before he made Ultima. I don't think he carries that around with him. This was at GDC. Okay. When he was showing off and promoting his Kickstarter for Shroud of the Avatar, he came to the Venture Beat offices and he had a big interview of Dean Takahashi. and then he showed me all this stuff. And I spent like half an hour going through his characters and backworld and maps.

That's awesome. But this was like a 45-minute interview at the convention. So I don't think he wanted to carry that around with him. But he and Starlong did come in in their full Lord British regalia. Whoa. So was he sitting in a throne and were women peeling grapes nearby? No, but they were wearing like, you know, medieval garb. Because he was cosplaying as himself.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, that's sort of like the outfit he was. wears, like to do presentations as Lord British. I can respect that. He'd given the presentation earlier that day, the GDC panel on the history of Ultima online, so he was still in full Lord British regalia. So it was quite a sight in the press room. I was wearing like a suit, so everyone was like, what is up with these?

A businessman interviewing a king? What's happening at GDC? Yeah. But anyway, you know, I could have just dumped the episode or the interview on the internet as a podcast, but I feel like it really would be good to have some context for the questions that I asked Richard. And since you guys listening to this episode weren't at his GDC panel to hear about the history of Ultima Online and Ultima in general, I figured a better way to go about that would be

to have people come in and talk about the series. And so that is what we're here doing. So I admit that I am not an Ultima expert, which is why we have Rohn in here. But I have played some Ultima. I've dabbled in the series a bit, and I'm very familiar with it in sort of an abstract sort of way. I guess my introduction to the series was Ultima 3 on NES, which was just called Ultima Exodus. And then later when I started working in the press and wanted to do retrospectives on video games, I discovered, wow, Ultima 4 is a big deal. So I started reading about that and played some of it.

And that's really been kind of, you know, the basis of my understanding of Ultim. I've looked at and played some of the other games, but those are the ones I spent the most time with. Bob, what about you? Where did you first encounter Ultima? I'm a big fan of the developer Pony Canyon, of course. Of course, yeah. Who is it? That was Ultima 3 Exodus, correct?

That was the one I played a lot of. In fact, it was one of those games like totally unrelated to Ultima in every way, but Destiny, wait, no, God, I'm thinking it's the Drossel family game. Help me out here. Dragon Slayer? Legacy of the Wizards? Legacy of the Wethers, yeah, yeah. That has nothing to do with Ultima. It doesn't, but it was one of those games I would rent where I had no idea what was happening at any time, but it was a fun.

game to poke at, like, what does this do? What happens if I go here? I think, actually, if I'm not mistaken, Ultimate Exodus and Legacy of the Wizard were lumped together in a Nintendo power feature that was like, what's an RPG? America, look, there's this thing that's big in Japan, and they love RPGs, but what does it mean? Is it a rocket power grenade? No, it's a role-playing games.

There is a connection there. What's really funny about that is, it just shows what the console audience was because, you know, the PC gamer audience, oh, yeah, we know what a role-playing, oh, yeah, we know what are playing games are we vetted them. Maybe that's why I connect them in my head, but yeah, I would rent Ultima 3 Exodus and not know what to do. My brain had not developed enough to play RPGs yet, but it was kind of fun just to all the interactions you could have in that game that you couldn't have in any other game.

I remember having fun. I'm going to kill a townsperson and then see how far I can get before the guards kill me because you can, like, you can kill children in this game. It's sort of like pre-Grant Theft Auto. Yeah, exactly. There are no children in those games. There's no such thing as a child in Grand Theft Auto. But I did remember being endlessly fascinated by it, but it was just too much

to wrap my head around. And I remember asking my stepdad who played D&D a lot about the different classes, not knowing they were all knockoffs of actual classes. Like, what is a fuzzy? I don't even understand what that is. And he's like, I don't know what a fuzzy is either. What those called Bobbitts in the PC version? Maybe.

I don't think there are fuzzies in Ultima now, but Bobbitt sounds. No, that's what they were localized as the NES version. But they're halflings, basically. So instead of calling them hobbits, I guess they call them fuzzies. But yes, my memories are mostly of killing children in, fuzzies. Jason, what about yourself? So the first

Ultima game I played was not even with the Ultima name. It was called Akelebeth. Okay. So you're old school with this one. Yeah, I'm old school with this. And what's funny is, you know, I fall off of Ultima,

around Ultima 3, Ultima 4, and then I picked it up at Ultima underworld again. But Akalabef, we got, parented, when Jesus, our first computer at home, 1980, 1982, something like that. And we got that and then the first Ultima.

And, you know, Achillebeth is a very different type of game than what it would come from. And what was, you know, it was groundbreaking, not just because it was like, oh, yeah, it's one of the first role-playing games that was ever sold on the market. Richard made it itself. But, you know, it changed what was going over. It brought in some wireframe graphics, which at the time was revolutionary. You had these little buds going around and Dungeons and Dragons type games. on big computers and universities, and, you know, it was all esky text.

But this one, there was actually some wireframes. It was very interesting and very different in that regards. And you had to have food to get through your dungeon. Because if you remember any of you who played the early editions of dungeon dragons, either basic or first edition, advanced dungeon dragons, you know, you always had to have your rations. You know, dungeon masters used to track that kind of stuff. No, it's not so big deal.

But back then, and then a lot of those early games, had components where you had to eat the food. Yeah. That really, I think, manifested most in rogue and it's offshoots. Like, that is still stamina, health, food. Like, those are critical factors more so than pretty much any other RPG I can think of. Yeah, but, you know, it established the, you know, go into a dungeon, kill some monsters, get some loot, level up your characters, and go from there. And then what was interesting about Ultaba as the whole series, and as Rohn will further expound upon, is that it creates a

entire world and it creates a saga and this saga carries over through many, many games. And it's the first video game franchise to really do that. And then Rowan, what about yourself? Like you are sort of the Ultima super fan here. So how did you discover the series and what has kept you, you know, so, so enamored with it all these years? I came across the box for Ultima 6 at my local game rental store and said, I want this one. I think it had the gargoyle stepping on the avatar, or maybe the avatar stepping

on the gargoyle, it depended on which way they were trying to frame it. And the gargoyles were interesting there too. Yeah. So I got the, I checked this out and it had like the, this was like the defining open world game both for me and for that era. You could go anywhere, do anything, talk to anybody, there was just like a ton of depth that was just not present in other games. The text parser for conversations where you just type in whatever you want and maybe the person will respond to it was, you know, mind-blowing at the time for me as a child. And it's still something that is not really done in most other RPGs.

They've gone to, you know, click on the dialogue option or whatever instead of just having I remember there's this one guy who doesn't tell you anything. You can say name and job to everyone and he's like, no, I don't want to talk to you. But if you type in Lord British at him, who's the ruler of the world at that point, he'll go on this big log tangent. And there's no way to know that. You just have to actually type that in. And it's like that's a level of world building and creativity that I was really, really enamored by. So I went back and I played several of the previous ones.

I played the EGA remake of Ultima 1 all the way through, actually. So I finished the first one. Two and three I did not play much of, and three is actually a major regret on that because that's a super important game in terms of how video games started telling stories. This is like one of the first games where there are actual NPCs in towns who tell you what to do. Yeah, it's the first time really where it breaks out from Go Kill the Batty at the bottom of the dungeon. Right. it starts building up the narrative.

And then Ultima 4 I played a lot of. I don't think I've ever actually finished it, but it gets really tough at the end. But that's the big game for, you know, trying to make the stories of your RPGs have like a moral weight beyond beyond go kill the bad guy. That one's the one about you are becoming the avatar. You are doing the right thing. And some of it's kind of ridiculous. You have to build up these eight virtues. One of them is sacrifice, and the way you build up sacrifice is like you can either donate blood or you can fight some monsters, have everyone else in your party run away and stay behind and let the monsters beat you up.

So some of them are very arbitrary, but a lot of it is just like you go and you try to be a hero, you try to be kind. And I've read stories of Richard Gariat who's talking to people who, how they played old. Ultima 2, and they would, like, buy things from the shopkeepers and then kill the shopkeepers, take their gold back. And he's like, I can't have people doing that. And there was also some sort of moral panic around Ultima 3 that I don't remember exactly what it was. But this, like, inspired him to make this morality. Yeah, there was just a lot of moral panic happening in the U.S. around that time. Yeah, regarding anything like D&D-esque.

As someone who lived through it, that was such a frustrating time. I lived in Lubbock, Texas, and let me tell you about moral panic. That was an epicenter right there. So I didn't even play D&D, and I still, you know, got a face forward. So when you played D&D, I always got my mom looking at me. And, you know, part of it was like, you know, oh, this is the devil game. And part of it was, how come you can memorize all these things about a spell, but you can't remember a quadratic equation? If I could use a quadratic occasion to burn a demon, then we can talk about that.

But the quadratic equation is the demon, so, you know. Yeah, I wish my mom had realized that. But getting back to what Rowan was talking about, too, is, you know, you take a look at the way it plays with those virtues and the way it wants you to do something heroic. The role of the morality plays in the ultimate series, you find them in all the ultimate games. It's one of the threads that connects them. You know, people talk about, oh, you know, BioWare has you making these great choices and other RPGs where you have you. have to come out and decide, you know, oh, I'm going to do the good choice or the bad choice.

But none of them really hit upon what the stuff that the origin team and Richard Garrio were doing back in the 80s. Yeah, there's definitely a, even though, you know, you can say that they started the morality trend, they definitely wanted you to be moral in a specific way. And the bio-aware choice model or the fallout choice model is about like you build your character and you can be bad or good. But the ultimate model is, no, we're making you be good. And what's really interesting is where you get into the one Ultima game, where it's not only your virtues, but then you're also fighting against someone else's virtues.

Are you talking about the ninth one? No, Ultima Sixth. Oh, yeah, the Gargoy. Yeah. Yeah, those are – that was a really interesting subversion of the idea of you being the hero because in Ultima 4, you go down and you find the cadets of ultimate virtue or something really nerdy like that. And you take it and go back to your world. But in Ultima 6, you find out that the thing that you have taken was you've like gone through the world to the other side and taken like a key part of the Gargoyles world. And you destroyed their world by taking it.

And now you have to like repair the world and make peace with people who are very upset that your heroism was their destruction. And that was that was also a mind blowing thing for me because, you know, every other RPG. It's like you go and you kill the boss. But here you find out actually, you know, the boss is the friends you made along the way. And you kill them? You do kill a lot of gargoyles in that game early on before you like realize you can talk to them. So it kind of does like the superhero crossover thing where it's like, you know, the good guys fight. And then they realize, why must we fight?

We are on the same side. Right. Except. You have a little slaps into Mega Man there. Yeah, but you think about it, there still has a bit of a roleplay game. That's really pulled that off. in an effective way. There are some ways where Ultima defined how RPGs work,

and then there are some ways that RPGs are still, like, ignoring Ultima. And one of the ones is that the, what the Computer Gaming Rule columnist, Scorpia, called the Fuzel, is the big bad. They're all still kill the Fusel. And Ultima was trying not to do that in 4 and 6 specifically. And that sort of gotten lost. There are a lot of things that Ultima did that, like, I wrote a column several years ago about how basically every game is related to Ultima at some level. And, like, even beyond a Mario or a Zelda or a Final Fantasy, like, you can trace almost everything directly back through the, like, 15 different Ultima's.

Like, at least one of them was trying to do something like that. When Bob was saying that he was playing this game that had nothing to do with Ultima, the legend of the wizard or whatever, no, that's still an Ultima. Like everything is still an Ultima. And then I offer the counterpoint where, well, no, it's really a Dungeons and Dragons. Well, true, but there's a lot of technical stuff, too. You could trace it back to a cave painting, I think, at some point. We probably could.

Ultima 3 is like the touchstone for, like, there's wizardry, of course, but I think Ultima 3 is the touchstone for like almost every JRP where it spun out of. They use that as like the template almost. Yeah, I think this is actually you just got on something that I wanted to say, which is that to really understand why we're talking about Ultima, I think you have to realize, like, we talk about a lot of Japanese RPGs, console RPGs all the time because it's kind of our background and it's what we like. But those wouldn't exist without Ultima.

Or wizardry. Well, and wizardry. But, you know, you talk to Japanese developers who have, you know, were kind of foundational with the genre. People like Akitoshi Kawazu of Saga or Yuji Hori of Dragon Quest. And they always mention wizardry. But they very rarely mention Ultima. Yet at the same time, you look at games like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. And they really have a lot more of Ultima about them than Wizardry.

like wizardry was a very specific kind of game that didn't really start to evolve beyond just dive into the dungeon and kill stuff until like wizardry five or six um but wizardry you know ultima like from the very beginning um you know it started very much in the wizardry vein but very quickly expanded to something beyond that and you know like you said earlier ultima three really is kind of the er console RPG like what you think of and when you think of dragon quest or something where you have like the town and the top down view and then the combat encounters and there's like dungeons scatter around and you kind of travel throughout the overall and have to figure out where to go next like that's even with the animation in some

ways yeah um so you know I think it's maybe fitting that I uh discovered Ultima through Ultima 3 on NES because so many RPGs to come out of the NES and Super NES and Genesis and so forth like they owe their existence on a lot of levels to Ultima and you know you still see games now that are sort of flirting with some of the ideas that Ultima did so well back in the 80s like you know talking about the morality and are you the good guy or the bad guy like that's kind of the hook for Undertale which is a very recent game and is you know it's become a huge hit in Japan since it was published over there last year but you know it's it's kind of kicking around ideas. and perspectives that Richard Gariot baked into his games in 1984. So that's, you know, really impressive what Ultima was doing back then, especially considering it was really kind of the brainchild of one person. And, you know, as it evolved and became more demanding and more complex, of course, Gariot had to bring on more people.

But it really did start with one person, one person's vision, with Akhala Beth, and Ultima won. And then, you know, just kind of snowballed into bigger and bigger groups, but there was still like a sort of central driving creative force behind the entire franchise. I mean, Ultima really ended when Garriott left origin and went off on his own. Like there was no Ultima online two. There was no Ultima 10. No, but there is the spirit of Ultima living in Trout of the Avatar, which is his new game.

Right. But, I mean, that's his game. It's definitely not living at EA who bought a franchise. Oh, gosh, no. No. Like, I mean, yeah, EA also bought BioWare. So there is, you know, kind of like that descendant, but whatever special creative vision, you know, Gary had brought to the series and to his company, Origin Systems, that, you know, no, no, no, no need. I'm not trying to disparage the people who, you know, were left behind once he left, but, like, they weren't him.

Like, they didn't have the original vision and they weren't carrying that. Like, he is the torchbearer for that franchise and that concept. And visions change as, you know, Star Wars. France are grappling with right now. Too bad. It's so sad for them. But what I find really interesting, we talk about morality,

and you go back to Ultima Online, where it's kind of more back to that urban level where it's like, you know, morality isn't baked into the game? I wouldn't say so because it's an online game. I mean, you could sit there. I'm sure many retrodot listeners back in the days of the

CGBW game podcast, remember Ryan Scott talking about ganking people's houses away and Ultima Online, and back of the day where you could just run up to somebody and steal other stuff or take their stuff away or just kill them and take it. Going back to where, oh yeah, you can still, you know, those choices actually, we're back in the older Ultabas where you could go and kill townsperson or take the shopkeeper's gold. Yeah, and console RPGs like to flirt with the occasional acknowledgement

that you as the hero are entering people's homes and looting their their cabinets. Like sometimes in a Dragon Quest game, you'll open a cupboard or something and take whatever is inside and then someone in the house will be like, hey, what did you just do? That was mine. Or, you know, like a Zelda game where you can steal from the shop, but then your brand is a thief for the rest of the game. Or you're attacked by cuckos or whatever.

Yeah. Or, you know, still in Pillars of Eternity, which is a obsidian series, you know, there'll be that little symbol when you're trying to take something from someone's house or a shop that shows, oh, you're going to steal it. And then there's ramifications for that. Yeah, you know, the spirit of Ultima in a lot of ways, I think maybe lives on through the games of Spider-Web software, which very much are designed, even technically, in the mold of, like, Ultima 6. Still. Yes, they are very dated-looking, but again, it's, you know, basically the work of, like, one guy plus some people who help him a little bit.

So, it's a, like, those games very much have that sort of open world, go wherever you want. You can make good choices, bad choices. You do get those little icons like, hey, this is a thing you're going to steal. Are you sure you want to do that? Like, it doesn't actually say that. It's just like, you know, as kind of fair warning, here's a little symbol to say there will be hell to pay if someone realizes you have this. And so one of my first encounters with Rowan's work was a column he wrote about Altabah, where you know, one of the early things he postulated in this column was that

Ultima was the birth of the open world game. Yes. You won't, oh, this is, you throwing it to me? This is me throwing it to you. Okay. Defend your thesis. I mean, it's fairly self-explanatory, I feel, if you just like go and look at these games compared to the other games that were around them, like we talked about

wizardry. Wizardry did not have an outside world in any of its games until Wizardry 7. And even then still, it's kind of just a big dungeon that also has, you know, some people to go and talk to sometimes. And Mighty Magic launched with a map and you had places you could visit. But it wasn't an open world. Yeah. There's other dungeon places or places where a big monster like a Quezanard is hiding for you. Yeah.

But I think the key game for me and, like, in general, I think is Ultima 6 because this was a game where progression was not, it was not about like a, mathematical progression. This was a game about just going and figuring out what's happening and actually leveling up is sort of important, but it's not like the goal of the game is to fight, level up, fight, level up, and then, you know, beat the toughest guys. The goal of the game is to figure out why the gargoyles have invaded. And sometimes you have to fight them. But really, what you're doing is you're traveling all across the world to figure out

how this has happened. You're talking to people. and the role of combat is really, really downplayed in it. It's all about where can I go and what can I do. And the process of playing the role becomes significantly more important than the role of the dice, you know, the ROLL versus ROLE. And then when you go to Ultimus 7, you have an attempt to kind of unify an interoperative. face with an open world. So Ultima 7 is one of the first, like, you have a mouse, you are playing this with a mouse.

This is how you're going to do the game only, only the mouse. Like Ultima 6, you have these icons that are like you press T or you or whatever to talk or use things. Ultima 7, what you're doing is you are double clicking in order to, you know, activate something and you're right clicking in order to move. And that's everything. Like, when you want to use an item, you double-click on yourself and you double-click on your pack and you pull the item out of that. There's, like, almost no clutter on the world map, your main view. Yeah, it's... It tried for a seamless world.

Right. And, like, and this is also seamless technically. Like, you walk into a cave, you're just walking into a cave. It's still the open world. Like, Skyrim has not figured that out. You have a loading screen at that point. You have a loading screen to walk into a town in Skyrim. This is something that, like, obviously the technology is very different, and, you know, it's a choice that Bethesda made that they wanted to, you know, have that loading screen to make it cleaner or easier on them.

But, like, even still in a lot of ways, when you look at Ultima 7, which is probably the most accessible of the series still, like if anyone has never played an Ultima and they want to go to one, Ultima 7 is the one that they should probably go with. as like an open world that is more impressive than a lot of the open worlds that we have. And it's also a really good looking game still, I think. I really like that sort of unified, seamless world and the artistic design that has gone into it. And then they messed it all up with a plane. You know, I think you have to kind of look at early RPGs especially as being derived from Dungeons and Dragons. Right. And the shape of those games basically represents the temperament of the developer who is essentially your game master.

So with something like wizardry, you have someone who really liked just the combat modules of D&Ds. Someone who's like, let's just go down and get some treasure, kill some trolls. We're just going to kill stuff. It's going to be all about combat. It's all going to be about, like, you know, finding treasure and evading traps and things like that. Good old-fashioned murder hobo. Right. Whereas, you know, with Ultima, you have a game master who quickly kind of got tired of that.

And was like, you know, it really needs to be more about, like, telling a story, like, living in this world. Like, you know, kind of giving you the experience of exploring and being a bit of exploring and being adventurers and people actually like living in this space and inhabiting it. And I feel like that, you know, really reached its ultimate sort of zenith with Ultima Online where instead of saying, you know, I'm going to try to simulate all of these with computer characters, all of a sudden the other inhabitants of the world become the other players. And so you get back to the, like, it kind of comes full circle here with the series, like all the way back to the social dynamics and the experience of playing a tabletop RPG with friends. in this case, like thousands of friends. There's a famous story of a community manager for Ultima online who was like people were complaining about some manner of mechanic for like inhabiting the world and making

bread or something like that. And he was like, Ultima isn't about making bread and everyone comes back and says Ultima is exactly about making bread, which isn't entirely true. Like, this comes up in six and especially seven, but this idea that you can just go and, like, roll a bunch of little buns, stick them in the oven and sell them for more money than you paid for the dough. Like, this is a thing that you could do in Ultima 7. It's that level of detail and attention to, like, how the world is constructed to be as mundane as you feel like. I think something like a dwarf fortress, which I'm afraid to even look at. That game baffles me, but it sounds so fascinating.

It picks stuff like that up and just runs with it to the furthest possible conclusion. So, yeah, that's pretty amazing. Just to imagine everything that came out of everything that Ultima inspired. So one of the things that Damien Lin and I never got a chance to do a one-up was we had started doing a, you know, let's play Dorf Fortress. And so we both said, okay, let's think. Doork fortress had been around that long. Oh, God, it's old. It predates TVs and computers.

Oh, wow. So they were playing it back on calculus? Yes. On Abacusus is it. And so we jumped in, we played it for a month, and both of us had barely made any progress. It was like, we are having such a hard time trying to figure this out. Now, you know, we probably should have just stopped everything else we were doing and just done that for a month. Because that's a viable business model.

Yeah. People on the magazine just not playing, doing anything except playing doorboards. Then we got laid off and that was it. But, yes, like this is also something that Ultima Online was trying to do was to create an ecosystem. Like, this is one of the promises. and they couldn't do this. They couldn't pull this off. Like, I played Ultima online, like, in the first month, and it was an utter disaster.

Oh, my God. But it was a beautiful disaster. Yeah, it was, it was special. It was an experience that is difficult to think that you'll ever have that in gaming again. No, it will never be again. But, like, they were talking about how they wanted to create an ecosystem where, like, you know, there's a dragon who is killing sheep and eating the sheep. And if you go and kill the sheep, the dragon's going to start attacking townspeople. Like, this is the level of simulation that they wanted to have.

So, yes, a game like Dwar Fortress is maybe not directly inspired by Ultima, but it's trying to draw from the same things. It didn't work. It failed spectacularly, which is, you know, there's a lot of really spectacular failures with Ultima. One of my favorite bugs in gaming history was Ultima 7 had a bug where if you slapped, your keys would disappear. And the idea was that this was actually supposed to be a feature. They didn't want the keys cluttering your inventory, so they had them disappear after 24 game hours. But if you hadn't used the keys, then you're losing things that you actually need. So, you know, there's a whole lot of boundary pushing that is going on with these games that sometimes is funny and sometimes is disastrous and often really worked.

It sounds like something like a Minecraft server would be closer to Ultima online than a modern MMO because modern MMOs, I play one of them. It's just like, they're so designed. They're so like amusement parks, which is fine. But it's like, do you want to do this dungeon? Okay, get in line. And then when we have enough people, you'll go in the dungeon. It's very much like you're waiting in line for attractions. World of Warcraft really pushed the MMO in the direction that it is like into what it is now.

Yeah. Whereas, you know, before that, people weren't basically like, I need to get my quest marker. and go to the wiki and look up the critical steps and just get it done with. It's more about, like, living in the experience. Yeah, the survival game genre really feels more like an Ultima game than anything else now. They really do. And it's like, it's only a PVP zone. Everything is just PV.

That's true. Well, you know, there's some that have PVE. There's one called Citadel, which is a magic one instead of, you know, guns and stuff. And it could play that entirely PVE, but then it kind of breaks up with the narrative of the survival because you're not surviving its players, you're just surviving against the environment. And then it's like, you know, only as interesting as the environment they make and sadly the environment is all that interesting. Like, you know, a horde mode or something and something like Fortnite. I don't know.

Me trying to talk about modern games. What the hell do I know? Yeah. But then, you know, and we haven't even talked about Ultima underworld yet, which was another groundbreaking series. Yeah. Unfortunately, we don't have a whole lot of time. So maybe we should just kind of skisks. him over that one and explain what it is really quickly.

So what I'm just going to say is, in my opinion, you know, it's the presence. I didn't play that much Ultima Underworld, so this one's on you. Yeah, you know, it's a first person in 3D game, and it looks like something like a dungeon master. But it's not, to me, it's the predecessor of the Elder Scrolls. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like it's kind of like the step between something along the lines of wizardry and Elder Scrolls. Exactly. Where it goes into like a seamless, full motion, three.

3D, 2.5D. It's also the division between, you know, the RPG and the immersive sim. Like, this is where the RPG starts to shift over towards when you get Thief and Deus X and eventually dishonored in those. Yeah, exactly. It's also, there was a tech demo for Ultima underworld that was the first, first person, seamless, three-dimensional movement that came out before Doom. Doom was the first full release.

But this is also, you know, there's a whole bunch of technical achievements. Ultimate 8 was the first computer. computer game to be like full polygon world action adventure at roughly, you know, in roughly the same era as Mario 64 was, you know, breaking those boundaries for, for consoles, but Mario 64 was actually a good game, and Ultima 8 was a disaster. So that's a difference. There's one, since we're getting close to wrapping up, there's another thing that I think is really important about Ultima, and that is I have, sorry, I have a kind of mental division of Western RPGs, where in 95 and 96, like this huge split, where the market basically collapses for RPGs in those couple of years for, I think, primarily technical reasons, CD-ROMs and 3D graphics, and the types of games that existed before and the types of games that existed after are really different.

Like, before 95, you have games where you roll your party, and they're primarily about, like, you dive into the dungeon, you do your murders, you get your gold, and they're about, like, player-created characters. And then after that, they're much more about a single player whose morality and whose character you are building very specifically and intentionally. Fallout is the big game that defines this, but also the BioWare games, obsidian games. Was Baldur's Gate considered just a revival of that after a few years of nothing or a few years of, like, no releases? Yeah, Baldur's Gate and Fallout are the two big, like, resurrections. Ballard first, yeah. And then Baldur's Gate don't talk to fallout. Yeah, the interplay resurrection.

But, yeah, but Baldur's Gate is like a transitional game here because this was, that was a game where you were. like supposed to roll a single character and then play with other people. And they were like, oh, no, we should have, you know, embedded NPCs that you can recruit to your party. And then people love that. And now that's the model for all games. But what Ultima did is like it was the exception to all these rules. Like when I say you rolled your party in wizardry and might and magic and the gold box

games and whatever. No, you weren't doing that with Ultima. You were building your lone character and then you would get a bunch of people to join you. You know, the post-95 games were all about morality. Ultima is all about morality. The post-95 games are all trying to have freedom and open world and not just be a single dungeon. That's what Ultima was trying to do. So there's this way that it was like defining the RPGs that would come out after the series is essentially dead.

Like Ultima Online, I think, is 97 or 98, and then Ultima 9 is 99, I think. But that's it. Like, that's the end of that series. But all the RPGs that come after are from this, like, Ultima slash Final Fantasy strain unless the wizardry might of magic and gold box and, God, I'm missing one. Oh, the Barnes Tale. Which is, you know, the reason why I fall off with Ultima is because I love the party building. I love the, okay, I want to make six characters and I want to have different roles and define roles,

and I want to define roles, and I want it to find who gets to do what. And for me, the story was the emergence gameplay that comes out of that. And the stories I tell based on what I'm facing in the environment, whereas for other players, you know, it was the story that was headed down from your game master, be it Richard Garrio or so whoever else is writing stuff at origin. And that's a very interesting distinction. And you get some of that back and you still have some of that in a lot of Japanese games. That's one of the reasons why I love that tree and Odyssey so much. An interesting thing since you mentioned Pillars of Eternity is that these recent Kickstarter throwback games, they're trying to do both. They're trying to have both the embedded narrative and morality and build your character and you build your whole party.

Like, some of them, like pillars, you can either build your whole party or you can go and recruit people. Wasteland, too, you just built your whole party. Divinity Original Sin, you can do both. Like, it's this interesting remelding that is not – they're sort of trying to bring back those late 90s games, the fallouts and the Balders Gates, but they're also accidentally bringing in some weird Ultima stuff. And Divinity Original Sin specifically is Ultima 7. and inspired in a lot of ways. Yeah, and I wouldn't say it's accident. I think it's on purpose.

I think they recognize what they're doing. The divinity original sin people. Especially with Larian. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that the obsidian people and, yeah, the bard's tail people, who are they? In exile. Yes, in exile. I'm sure that they, like, have played Ultima and recognize that, but it's, it's, it's, well, hell.

Brian and Fargo had to compete against Ultima. Yes. It's, it's more than, it's more. Or the interesting coincidence of where the threads are coming from because, like, it's not specifically we want to have the Ultima style experience in Wasteland or whatever, but it's that because we have gone from these late 90s games, but we're also adding in the kind of morality development and so on that took place across the 2000s. The weird throwback modern combo ends up leading back to Ultima again. And one thing I love is that, you know, to the driving forces of the different types of Ultima's. You know, Richard Garrio with the Ultimate Series and Paul Nerwarf with the Ultimate Underworld series. They're both bringing their games back.

You know, Underworld Ascendant is in the works. It's going to be out either later this year or sometime next year. I honestly don't remember. People just saw it at Pax. So take a look. He could find out of write-ups about their experiences with Underworld Ascendant, excuse me. And then, Trot in the Avatar, is out and released now. And I've played it in about six or seven hours.

and it certainly wears its Ultima online routes. But it's more tailored into a PVV experience. You definitely interact over other people, but you're not going to have to worry about people ganking you. That's good because that's, I hate other people. All right. Well, I hate to cut this short because I feel like we could talk a lot longer, but maybe, you know, we'll be able to do some deep dives into specific Ultima games like Ultima 4, ultima 6, 7.

So if that's the case, then Roan will definitely have you back to talk more because I feel like there's a lot inside of you that needs to come out. Oh, yeah. But we just don't have time now because we do have to wrap this and let the Richard Garriott interview run. So thanks, guys, for coming in. This has been Retronauts podcast. Stick around for the second half of this episode with a conversation with Richard Garriott. This is also tied in with a series that I'm working on for usgamer.net on the history and evolution of RPGs.

And that first article in that series, which is about Ultima, should be going up around the time this podcast goes out. So check that out at U.S. Gamer. You can also hear me talking about it on their RPG podcast, Acts of the Blood God. That was part of my contract with them. So look forward to that. Anyway, guys, tell us about yourselves and where we can find you on the Internet. Jason. Well, I'm at the managing editor over at Gamsby, and when I do write, it's usually about RPGs.

You can find me there. You can find me on Twitter at Jason underscore Wilson, all lowercase. Rowan? I am also at Games Beach. I am the PC guest post editor there. I have not done a ton of writing lately, but I'm hoping to do more. I'm also on podcasts like Three Moves Ahead. And I am on Twitter at Rowan Kaiser, all one word.

And that guy over there? Hey, it's Bob, everybody. And I run an entire other podcast network that's Talking Simpsons. and Jason apparently is a big fan, so thank you, Jason, for saying nice things to me. I always appreciate that. So, yes, if you go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons for five bucks, I'm not going to go into all of it here. You can get a ton of stuff, exclusive series like Talking Critic and Talking Futurama, a lot of interviews with Simpsons, including Bill Oakley and Mike Scully, who are showrunners, and all kinds of other extra fun stuff on top of that.

So that is Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, and both Talking Simpsons and my other podcast, What a Cartoon, are free. So you can look those up in anything you listen to podcasts with. but if you want to give us money you can get all the episodes a week ahead of time and Ed Free just like Retronauts it's the same thing

I rip myself off thank you Oh yeah Bob Seru what's that clone clone wait I clone myself

okay so this copy is not inferior but you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo as well I forgot if I said that or not and of course you can find me

Jeremy Parrish on the internet on Twitter is GameSpite and at Retronauts.com Retronauts the podcast is also at Retronauts.com

if you can imagine that you can find the show for download on iTunes and the Podcast One Network. And, of course, we are, as Bob mentioned, the original Patreon-supported classic games podcast that everyone ripped off. I don't know if that's true.

How many enemies do I have out there? You can subscribe to Retronauts monthly for $3 a month, and you'll get each episode a week early, plus at a higher bit rate. And at the higher tiers, there's cool stuff that we send out every six months or so. My kids love the stickers.

Be excited about that. We haven't done stickers in a week. while, but we do have t-shirts and books and things. I have a horde of these stickers. I give them out as rewards every now. We have lots of them too. That's fantastic. All right, so apparently our merchandise is

great for kids. Who would have known it? So yes, that is this panel section of retronauts. Stick around after the ads. It's Richard Gary. Regular Retronauts listeners know by now that I just won't stop talking about my love of progressive rock and its influence on classic video game. Well, now you can finally get a perfect.

perfectly curated dose of the music I keep going on about, thanks to Digster. Dixter has a playlist for every moment, mood, and minute of your life. Go to Dixter.fm and see for yourself. They have thousands of great playlists. It's like your best friend made you their perfect mixtape, or your favorite podcaster in this case. I found a ton of my own favorite playlists on Dixter FM, and you can see for yourself. Go to Dixter.fm. slash Jeremy to check out my prog rock playlists.

You can follow, share, and listen to it. Or if you're into something a little more down to earth, Bob has his own playlist. at digster.fm.m. slash Bob. From mainstays like Pink Floyd and Genesis to obscurities like Vandergraph Generator, our playlist is a great tangent to video game history. So be sure to follow our playlists so you can listen over and over.

Our playlist will be updated weekly, which means you can check back each week for updates. Again, that's digster.fm. slash Bob and digster.fm. slash Jeremy, where you can listen to our playlists. And be sure to head to digster.fm. Always. For the best mix of music for every moment,

mood, and minute of your life. Hey, take a moment to think about your undies. I know it's a little weird, but your first thought probably isn't they're awesome, which is why I want to tell you about me undies. They're comfy, awesome undies that'll make you feeling good from the moment you put them on, and when you feel good, anything is possible. Meundies are made with a material sustainably sourced from beechwood trees. Their naturally soft fiber makes a fabric that won't sag down or ride up.

Trust me, once you put on a pair, you'll get it. With meundies, you can. get undies sent right to your door. No more hunting around for the perfect pair at a crowded store and eventually settling for something that's just good enough. Meandis is so sure you'll love your first pair that if you're not happy, they'll do whatever they can to get you into the right pair. And if they can't, keep them and they'll refund you. So it really is risk-free to try the best underwear ever. Still not sure? Well, Meandis has a deal for Retronauts listeners. First-time purchasers get 15% off their first pair of Meandis and free shipping. That's

15% off plus free shipping and a guarantee that you and your meundies will be very happy together. Get your butt over to meundies.com and treat yourself. To get 15% off your first pair, free shipping, a 100% satisfaction guarantee, go to meundies.com slash retro. That's meundies.com slash retro. Whoa, hang on. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Oh, it's another ad. Time to hit fast forward. But this once, can I impose on you to hear me out? Adds help us continue to keep this show. free to download, while still allowing us to invest the time and energy into making retronauts the best possible exploration of video game history we can create. So we'd like your feedback

on what kind of ads you'd actually want to hear. If you enjoy retronauts, we'd be grateful if you could take a quick and painless survey. It should take less than five minutes, and it's completely anonymous. So please take a moment and go to www.podcast1.com slash my survey or go to www.podcast1.com and click on the survey banner. If you filled out a survey for us in the past, thanks. But this is a new one for 2018, so it would be a huge favor if you could fill it out. Anyway, thanks for supporting the show. And thanks for taking the time to complete the survey. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of Oh, Rita, you're cutting out.

We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month.

Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. All right, so I am here at Game Developers Conference 2018 with Richard Garriott, the designer, director, producer of a whole lot of Ultima games and games beyond that. And this is going to be part of our series on the evolution of RPGs, and I feel like who better to speak? too, the way the genre has evolved in someone who is there in the front row, front lines, really, for most of it.

Indeed, yeah, great to be with you. And, you know, as you mentioned, or we were talking about, there are a few people who go back in the industry further than I do. I go back to before personal computers, I'd wrote my first games on a teletype, you know, with strips of paper tape as the memory and electro-mechanical typewriter as the input and output device. So what kind of games can you actually create on a teletype? I know Oregon Trail started out on a teletype, but I haven't heard about a lot of other games. Well, I wrote a series of games while I was in high school when I had access to this teletype. And I wrote them at the same time I was introduced to two other very formative events. One was reading Lord of the Rings, and the other one was the publishing of the game Dungeons and Dragons.

And so those three things in my sophomore year mixed together. And I wrote a series of little... They weren't exactly text games like Zork or Adventure. They were graphical in the sense of asterisks for walls, spaces for corridors, dollar signs for treasure, that you would print out every time you made a move. So if you moved north, you'd actually have to wait for it to print a 10 by 10 grid of typing to see what the scene around you looked like from sort of a top-down perspective. So it's kind of like a hard copy version of rogue or net hackers. That's exactly what of it, hard copy versions where each frame is reprinted out. So the frame rate was like one frame every 30 seconds.

And but I call those games D&D1, D&D2, D&D3, and I wrote 28 of them. So, you know, prior to the Apple 2 coming out. And then when the Apple 2 came out, I converted the last one I made, D&D 28, to the perspective view graphics that my first game, sort of the Ultima prequel, a Calabeth, and it was, in fact, the remark statement at the beginning of the code says D&D 28B. Okay. So who was able to actually play these teletype games? Only people that knew me personally and could, would be there with me to, I had to turn on,

I was about the only one in the school that knew how to turn the machine on, much less load a program onto it. So the only people who ever saw any of those were people who were literally with me at the time. But you must have really enjoyed doing it. if you made 28 of them. Oh, I did. And of course, I was teaching myself to program at the same time. And in fact, that sort of continued is one of the reasons for, I think, the early success of Ultima was this rewrite it over and over again to really maximize how much more you can do with each one. And in fact, if you think about the Ultima series, one of the Innovations or one of the style guides to most of the Ultima's was this scrolling tile graphic map.

Well, if you look at what I was just describing of asterisk for walls and spaces for corridors, that was a scrolling tile graphic map. Right. And so I was really doing the foundations of Ultima, you know, five years before the personal computer. Well, when you say scrolling, you mean like literally on a scroll. Yeah, literally on physically on a physical scroll. So, you know, there's a lot of information about you online. You've done a lot of interviews through the years.

So I don't want to rehash, you know, information that any of it. anyone can read on like Wikipedia. So one thing I haven't been able to find really is how did you discover role-playing games in the first place? Well, it was, for me, there was a very pivotal moment. In fact, in our new game, Shrout of the Avatar, I'm publishing some notes of this story for the first time where I had gone to a summer class, the summer of my sophomore year. I went to the University of Oklahoma, ostensibly for seven weeks.

of math, science, and computer programming. What I found when I got there was a bunch of other youngsters like myself who were going to be having a really nice time, living for seven weeks without any adult supervision. And day one, the other students who had arrived there before me who had discovered Dungeons and Dragons before me were going door to door as new kids arrived, giving them nicknames. And they came and knocked on my door, and they said hi,

and I said hello and for some reason they thought the way I said hello did not sound southern enough and therefore they assumed I was from England and called me British. Well, it turns that I was born in Cambridge, England, although I only lived there for like two months and I was born to American parents and I clearly don't have a British accent. But my first D&D character that same afternoon became British, a level one magic user. And I still have that character sheet. That's one of the things we're publishing is this character sheet that I only just discovered myself a few weeks ago.

Oh, wow. And, but that was sort of, I'd already read Lord of the Rings just a little, just before going there. And that was sort of my introduction to computing and gaming. So at what point did British ascend to Lordhood? I started writing stories. Another way I was gaming the rules of school, shall we say, is I learned in high school that if I took the regular English class, I would be judged on spelling and grammar. But if I took the premium English class, there was no grading on spelling and grammar. Instead, you were graded on creative

writing. And so I, having no, you know, lacking fundamental English skills, I still went into this premium English class. And the stories I began to write were the stories of my fantasy character British, or very quickly, Lord British. And ostensibly, it was for my D&D game slash maybe eventually computer game. Even the games there was writing there were so simple. There was literally no story in them. But at least that was part of my fantasization. And again, those notes, just since you have to be asking,

I've literally dug this out just this last month and we'll be releasing them. Oh, when you say releasing them, you mean like online or in a book? With the game that we're launching now called Shroud of the Avatar, which launches on Tuesday, the early backers are getting a variety of physical. goods, and included in those physical goods are these documents that I unearthed recently. Okay. That's a really great historic bonus, I think. Yeah, some of it. I literally did not know I had that level one first British character sheet until I was looking for the other materials and discovered it. So when you played D&D and other

tabletop games, what kind of role did you like to play? I mean, did you like to be the game master, or were you happy to be a participant in the adventure? Well, I enjoyed both, but I definitely gravitated toward the Game Master. And, you know, what I think is interesting about these early days of Tabletop that I think was lost as they became more popular. The first generation, I'll say, of people that joined Tabletop Gaming sort of were self-selected as not only people who might eventually enjoy it, but, you know, had some special fascination with it.

And a high percentage of those people are good storytellers, turned out to be good storytellers. And so we used to run, you know, from as soon as I had been to the summer camp, we began on every Friday and Saturday night to run gaming at my house. My mom would cook meals for everybody, and we'd have, you know, one game going in a living room, another one going in the family room, another one going. My mom had an art studio. We took over as we took over the ping pong table in the art studio for an even bigger. one and one of the kitchen table as well.

And so we'd have, you know, four or five at peak games going simultaneously. And when you went to any one of those tables, you would see some really amazing storytellers. And what all of us felt was that the rules were irrelevant. No one really paid any attention to the die rolls. It was how masterful a story can someone tell? And around the table, can you participate in a way that is funny, clever, rational, seems like it should work and therefore magically the die rolls worked and the story progresses. And one of the things I realized when I went off to college and came back to meet different

groups of the second generation, I would say, is the majority of them aren't good storytellers. The majority of them were now worried about die rolls. They sit around arguing about, well, I'm behind you and I'm up on a rock and I have initiative and they do complex calculations for a few minutes, roll a die and go miss. Okay, now I'll start arguing about the calculations again. And I'm going, that is not role playing. And so from the earliest times, you know, I was trying to make a game that was not just about the number crunching, but was about the can we tell an interactive narrative together. Right.

Of course, you know, and Apple II is an extremely limited computer. I recently interviewed Robert Woodhead about developing wizardry, and he was telling me, and also Michael Cranston or Cranford, I just interviewed him the other day. And they were both talking about how, you know, when they put their games together, the Bard's Tale and Wizardry, they both, like, reached the full capacity of what an Apple II discette could hold. They were, you know, counting bites down to, down to every single one. So what kind of, you know, with that kind of constraint, how did that shape the kinds of games you made with a call?

Oh, yeah. Well, so first of all, I completely agree. We knew each other back in the day, by the way, too. So we would be comparing notes often during this period. And my version of that same story would be things. like, you know, there was only 64K of RAM in the computer, which when I wrote a Calabeth, I used up. And so for Ultima, I really wanted more, but the machine did not have any more.

And so how I got around that is the Alphabet and Ultima 1 were written in Basic. And so I cheated Basic by saving the same program out multiple times where I changed the end of the program to have draw call information for new monsters. And I would do a binary load of the back end of a file on top of the running program and memory and have to move the end of file markers and do all kinds of unsanctioned modifications of the operating system in order to pull this off. And we did that all the time. We were having to hack the system deeply just to do really basic stuff.

but in terms of being able to tell a story how do those early computer limitations how did that sort of inform the kinds of stories you were able to tell and the balance that you had to find between combat number crunching and narrative you look at some of the early games you mentioned Zork and then wizardry

like both of those are games that came out of tabletop RPGs and tried to reproduce the experience but Zork was almost entirely just, you know, about text experience, the having the adventure, the story, whereas wizardry had almost no story and was really just about going into a dungeon and killing stuff. Well, in my very first games were, just go fight stuff, but that was really just a side effect of my learning how to program. Almost immediately, Ultima became filled with characters

that immediately had conversations, and there were still some things that I look back at that we did, that I did in those earliest ones that we, I'm not sure we've really done better since. You know, even little things like the conversations with my early characters. You could talk to them by asking them, they all, every character knew the answer to their, ask them their name, ask them their job, and ask them, how are you doing? Ask about health. Name job health. But then they all had two more hidden keywords. And those two hidden keywords might be referenced that of what they just said, like if you say, ask me his job and he says, I'm Joe the fisherman. Well, then fish.

might be something they might know about or it could be that you have no reason to know what their other one might be it might be magic sword but unless somebody else in the world in another area tells you to go ask joe the fisherman about the magic sword there's no way you would know to ask that question of that fisherman and it turns out that little simple five state answering of a simple question offered an amazing array of power for me to be able to put very sophisticated stories in the game as long as I broke it up until tiny little pieces and scattered it into the world. And so I developed techniques like I would both write out my stories linearly.

And I'd say, you know, you're going to start the game. You're going to go talk to Joe the fisherman, but you don't know about the sword yet. So you have to get further in the game. And you're going to meet this other person who chose to go back and talk to Joe the fisherman about the magic sword. And now I can go back and find the answer because I already know where Joe is. Then I would take that exact same document. And instead of writing it out linearly, I'd write it out by geography.

I'd say, here's town A, town B, town C, town D. And what I'd find by doing that is a lot of the data of the story, a lot of the advancement of the story was in these three towns, and virtually none was happening in these other towns. And so I'd go, okay, well, how can I modify that? Let's move Joe over to this other town. Let's add an intermediate clue that you have to find in some other place. And so by analyzing storycraft bi-directionally, both how does the story flow and how does your geographic exploration flow? It allowed me to create quite sophisticated stories, I feel, with quite limited technology. But that's a technique that I, you know, used to this day.

I mean, even with the team I'm working on right now, with right now, you know, I do that same breakdown. And I still do it myself. I mean, that's sort of my job on the team is to break out that kind of master distribution of storycraft. So, you know, does that approach that you have sort of like the hidden keywords? It's, is it surprised to people the first time they play, but is it something that you found, like, diminished the replay value of a game? Like, if someone completed the game, then wanted to go back and play, they would know, like, oh, go talk to Joe about the magic sword. Well, yeah, but then you have to go back to, you know, what's your goal of the experience? I mean, in the sense of, if what you're trying to do is create a rogue-like endless dungeon that is really about level grinding, then, yes, it's completely replayable because it's not really finishable, period.

And by the way, I'm not knocking that. There's tons of games that I love to play because of the visceral fun of that mechanic. You know, I'd say like the first really great one along that line would be Diablo. You know, for example, Diablo is a run and gun kind of experience with your sword. And, you know, great fun all the way through. If you're playing one of my Ultimas, my point was always to make, you know, my stories weren't just go save the princess. My stories were, from the early days, they are ethical parables to hold a mirror up to the player to show them about themselves, and in particular, in context of current social issues.

And that's still the way I run my game. So I really want to sit there and go, you know, pick whatever the current social issues are of the day that are complex. And pretty much anything that is contentious is complex. You know, Middle East peace. Let's solve Middle East peace. It's complex. And, you know, if you go into that subject, you know, there are plenty of people you can talk to on either side of that particular argument who can make a pretty compelling case why they have a sincere grievance. And you can look at a variety of solutions to that very complex problem and go, none of them are great solutions.

There is no universally great solutions will make everybody happy. And that's the reality of life. But I think that it's important with these kinds of issues to bring them up in a safe context, which a game is. you don't tell you don't literally have never put middle east peace in my game but i've taken that as a you know that and many other social you know complex subjects put them in a game you know let you know have have people in the game trying to passionately convince you to take one side or the other and no matter what side you take let me show you both why that is helpful to one group but let me also show you the enemies you've made or the people you've hurt or you know the downside to the other side just so

that everybody will, you know, get off their, you know, high horse, so to speak, and even my own games. I will have future games often go tear down my previous games just to make sure that, you know, I know that spread the mirror logic. Maybe this is a question you can't even really answer, but how did you come to hold that, you know, that ethical, the grayness of morality and, you know, the importance of perspective so important. Like, you know, you talk about your, your influences and game design and storytelling. It's things like Lord of the Ream. and d and d which are pretty binary in their their narratives but um you've clearly brought something different you know something over and above that yeah and i would say for me it was um it formed out of the results my first few games so my my earliest games really were just go fight monsters

collect treasure and there was a story but it was pretty much go save the princess or kill the big evil wizard um during those first games at calabath and the first three ultima's uh at least the first two ultimums were published through other companies. And so to the degree that people enjoyed them, I only knew that because of the sales. There were no real gaming conventions to talk to users. There was no email. And if anybody wrote, quote, fan mail to those companies, I never received it. Ultimate Three is the first game I published myself through my own company, Origin.

And therefore, it's also the first time I began to get letters from people who had played the game. And so now for the first time I actually could see what was happening in the heads of people playing my games. And I was shocked to see what those letters contained. You know, first of all, all fan mail that I've ever received is usually one or two paragraphs of, hey, I like your games. And then pages of, let me tell you what you did wrong or how to make it better. But there was something else. There was something deeper, which is people would write in and say things that I knew were wrong. Like, you know, I thought it was brilliant game design when I tried to.

to kill the dragon with my big sword and couldn't kill him. And I switched to the dagger and he died. And, you know, what a, what a crazy idea it was to make that dagger so powerful. It was the only way to kill the dragon. And I'm going, I don't think that's true. And I'd, but they said it was such passionate. I have to go in the game and look it up. And it wasn't true.

They just had me lucky. That one person happened to get the lucky stroke with the dagger versus the critical hit. So, yeah, just a chance. And, uh, but I, but I began to see people reading, not just design challenge meaning, but also story meaning that was none of the game. There was no real story in those games. And people began to read between the lines

and think I was trying to tell something meaningful to them when I wasn't. And I also noticed people like to do things like they'd play the game to conclusion and beat the bad guy. But then they'd go back through, and just because they wanted to go back and replay, and so they would go in, and the way they would replay is to be quite sinister.

They'd go kill off all the villagers. They'd steal from every shop. They'd like to kill my character, Lord British. and I realized that people were playing to min-max their way to the top not to play any story they perceived. And the bad guy was just sort of waiting there for them. The bad guy wasn't doing anything bad to be worthy of your wrath. And instead, you were the plague of locusts killing and sweeping up everything

in order to become powerful and rich, powerful and rich, and go kill that bad guy. And I'm going like, there's something wrong. with that. That's actually not, you know, I at least was expecting people to be heroic. And I thought people were being heroic. And then I also sat back and went, well, you know, I'm the one that put in the feature that you could steal from the shops, right? I mean, they couldn't have stole it from shop if I didn't allow it. And they couldn't have killed the NPCs if I didn't allow it. And so then I said, okay, I'm going to switch it up. And so I started writing Ultima 4, Quest of the

avatar, which is where the word avatar came into the lexicon of gaming. And I purposefully said, I'm going to let people play the way they've been playing. But if you go through the town and kill everybody or you steal from that shop, that person is not going to want to help you in the future. If you need one of those five keyword solutions is please tell me the magic word or the password, if you've been stealing from that shop, they'll go like, I'd love to help the hero, but you're the most dishonest thieving scumbag I've ever met. so I'm not going to help you.

And as I was doing this, it was interesting to see what happened. My company was largely made of my family. My parents were investors, my brothers and my business partner. And when I told them this is where I was going with the next game, they all advised against it. They actually said, Richard, you've got this whole pile of letters from people telling you, the way they enjoy playing your game is to be destructive. And you're about to make a game that's going to trick them into, being punished for being destructive

and force them to walk the goody-goody two-shoes line in order to win, people aren't going to like it. And I said, you know, I still think it's the right thing to do. I think it'll actually make a better game. And I'm not the right thing. I was really not trying to take a moral stance. I literally thought it would make a better storytelling experience if I did it this way.

And so despite the objections of family, friends, QA, and everybody else, I stayed the course. They produced this game about ethical parables, and it was the first number one best-selling game I released. So I've always wondered about Ultima 4. Was that inspired, the theme you took and the idea of the virtues? Was that in any way inspired by the moral panic that surrounded RPGs in the early 80s? I grew up in West Texas in a very sort of conservative religious community, so I got to hear a lot about how terrible and satanic RPGs were. and then, of course, you have Ultimate 4,

which is very much not a game about being evil. It's very much a game about being good. Yeah, and so that was also circulating around at that same time. So no question that that was an influence. But, you know, there were even, you know, my indignation about that era, you know, not only goes to the ignorance those people leveled against games, but even worse was that a lot of the people leveling that

criticism where these, you know, often the TV evangelists who were, you know, pillaging money from their followers while committing horrible atrocities, adultery, and otherwise, on their flock, and often fell for it. And so I would actually often pull those people, if not literally by name, but by reputation in as characters and vignettes within this, within the scenarios that I build out, just to showcase, and in fact, specifically, Ultima 4 was really just prove your person of good virtue. Ultima 5 was the game where I said, okay, now let me show you how a lot of people who claim to be good really aren't, and a lot of people who appear to you to be roguish are just surviving.

But in fact, once you get out of their need to survive and get food at all, they're actually far more honorable than these peddlers of, you know, hypothetical, you know, sanctity. So it seems like a very difficult line to walk, you know, not to preach at people, but also to not present like, you know, you said, roguish people, not to necessarily say, hey, it's cool to be, you know, to be roguish for its own sake, like to find that balance. How did you go about that? Like, what processes did you use? Well, you know, I, I don't think we ever really celebrated roguishness to deeply. So I don't think that danger

was there. But what I actually found it on the flip side was I've become frankly more and more bold and brazen to take on closely held beliefs that I think are only held because they're beliefs.

And, you know, for example, in Ultima 8, the cover the box as well as in game involved pentagrams. And there was a ritual magic you could do in the game where you literally drew a pentagram on the ground. You literally lit candles and placed them at the points

and you stood in the middle of it and spoke some magic words and demons arose. So that's about as paralleling of Satanism as you can do. Yet, I obviously believe it's a game. And I don't believe in magic of any kind. I don't believe in demons of any kind, personally. and yet I knew that that putting that in the game would push the buttons of a large number of people often who were the people who had been critical of me already in four and five and six.

But by the way, they were just as critical of the virtue games as they were about the non-virtue games. They just thought all of this is a bad idea. And so I've actually gone bolder in calling out, you know, of confronting people head on. I even had actually people within my own project team who were uncomfortable with the pendergrams to the point of quitting, and yet I stood my ground because it's interesting that a lot of criticism would go, well, it's okay to put in a movie, it's okay to put in a book, but it's not okay to put in a game. I'm going, you're like, why is that? And, you know, why is it you don't mind writing a, you know, I'm going to watch a movie about The Seven Deadly Sins and the actors up there pretending in the visual effects are way better than we had in the games. and for some reason, if you put it in a game, there's this added scrutiny. Yeah, it's that same debate that we're seeing resurfaced now

with government again blaming video games for violence. Which, as you know, one was just released, but there's been multiples over time to show there's actually no connection. Yeah, yeah. Not only no connection, but in the case of things like these mass shootings, the recent study, the one that just came out a week or so ago, has shown that the people who have been involved in mass shootings, had a lower rate of playing, you know, violent video games than the average population.

So these aren't gamer geeks that are doing this. Right. So you're using, you know, historically a sort of a medium that is already in the crosshairs to make controversial statements. That seems pretty bold. Yeah. And, you know, and I would say, you know, and that's not to say we haven't pushed it too far periodically, like that same game I was mentioning with the pentagrams, that pentagrams. that pentagram on the cover of that game prevented it from being sold at Walmarts and Kmart's and such

and so he actually had to make a sleeve for the outside like you do for a men's pornographic magazine or they wouldn't put them on the store shelf without a sleeve to cover the offensive pentagram but you know which obviously hurts sales right so you know

so you can push it too far but I still think I still think that you know whether it's my beliefs or your beliefs to anybody else's it's worth holding up that mirror and doing some self-examination. You know, role-playing games still, you know, have some element of conflict of battle, and your games never lost that.

But how did you, you know, approach it as you began to think, you know, about the ethics and morality of the quest process, like what it means to be a hero? You know, as you started to create games that force players to reflect on their actions, how do you still make, you know, conflict and battles and killing work within that? Well, and we've done a little differently in each game, but, you know, in the Ultima, 45, 6, 7 era, which was this, where we're very tightly focused on ethical behavior, I would even do, I would do things like, I would, the game, I tried to fill the games with as many ethical parable tests as you could. And when you do that, and especially if you don't tell somebody immediately whether they've passed or failed the test, you just, you just keep it a secret. it means they don't really know if something looks like a test, and it might be a test, they still act like it's a test, which is good, because that way they're on their, whatever their base level of behavior it is on their guard or off their guard, they'll do it all the time because they have to assume the whole world is or is not a test. And so what we would do is we do things like, say, creatures that are hungry, like wolves and bears, are not evil. and so hunting them for food is, in the case of a medieval setting, acceptable, but killing them wantonly is probably, you know, even I wouldn't say necessarily a morally negative judgment,

it is wasteful at the very least. And so what I would do is if a wolf was attacking and you ran away from it or injured it to where it ran away from you, you got a little virtue point. On the other hand, if there was something that was evil, And I'm a believer that there are not evil creatures in the world, but since we created a world with evil creatures in it, to where we did have, you know, Balrogs and demons and that sort of thing, when those creatures would attack you, you would get a bonus for defeating them. And conversely, if you ran away from them when that creature was weak, but you were powerful, meaning you could have vanquished it, but you fled in fear, so to speak, or at least didn't save whoever else might be, part of it. by that creature in the future, then you would take a hit. And so you had to parse this stuff pretty tight.

But that was what I did in those games. I just, I look for how many more ways can you parse? Because even if you get one of them wrong, or even if I got one wrong, by doing a thousand different tests, then it all comes out in the wash. I mean, it doesn't matter if you interpret it the same way I do once or twice or differently than I do once or twice, it's okay. So something I've wondered about the early Ultima games is that they had a lot of science fiction elements to them that really, I don't think, showed up so much.

in the later games. Can you talk about not only your influence there, like what brought that in in the first place to a traditionally fantasy, you know, medieval kind of kingdom style genre, but also why that sort of faded into the background. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, and I was very much on both, both

phases were purposeful. The first phase was Richard Geriot learns to program and throws everything he can and everything he can do into one game. And so, you know, the first Ultima, for example, not only included medieval fantasy, and these 2D telegraphic outdoors, but 3D dungeons.

It also included spaceflight and literal tie fighters, sorry, George Lucas, and land speeders and lightsabers and blasters. And by the time we got to Ultimat 2, we included Time Bandets Cloth Maps and Time Travel and, you know, Jurassic Park, you know, Dinosaur era. and basically everything I could think of just all thrown in one game. If I could make it work and it was cool in a movie I saw or a book I read, there it is in the game. Pretty quickly, though, I got to the point where two things sort of concurrently happened. Three things that could currently happen. One was, it is really hard to do both a 2D game and a 3D game. Not only are you coding two engines, but if you're going to make a spell like a force field in a dungeon corridor, you mean to fill the corridor.

on a 2D top-down map when I say make a force field if I just fill one square with a force field it's irrelevant because things just walk around it and you go what do you mean by a force field in that one and so you couldn't even interpret the commands as your as your agency

became more capable it became harder and harder to do too so I began to go okay I have to decide I can't do 3D and 2D and space you know I need to settle in on what am I doing physically and it turns out the tile graphics is an area that I was was my particular area of innovation and specialty. So I stuck with that one because when I knew I could continue having this kind of leading role.

Then I said, okay, well, that's generally fantasy. First of all, it's, you know, if it was 3D in space, if making 3D polygonal stuff was better, then, you know, maybe I got off to make a space game. But so I knew I'd be on the ground. And so that put me mostly in medieval. then that's also when Ultimate 4 started

and this game not only these games about virtue but it began to go I really want a reality craft and so between 3 and 4 is where I really became

a student of my own profession where I sat down prior to that moment if you asked me what I did in how much of history I learned in school

the answer was zero how much philosophy I learned in school zero how many many other things zero got some good STEMs, you know, science and engineering stuff in school and coding, or at least during that time.

But suddenly when you're going to do a game about virtue, I needed to be a student of philosophy. And so this is way before the Internet, way before Amazon. So I went to libraries and bookstores and bought whole libraries of information about history and storycraft and philosophical stuff as well. And that's what then made me say, okay, I'm going to remove all these other influences and I'm going to create Britannia, my world from scratch, with no one else's plagiarized pieces. Okay, so it was just sort of a decision to sort of cut everything out and, you know, focus on sort of the pure vision that you had for Ultima. Correct. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about Ultima underworld? I know you played a part in the

development of that game, too. And that was very different than, you know, the top-down Ultima's. It's almost like a return to the wireframe, but, you know, in a real-time polygonal or I guess 2.5D perspective. Exactly. So Paul Nerath, who's the lead developer on that, you know, I just mentioned with Ultima 4 is where, you know, I got rid of the 3D, actually Ultima 4 might even still had it. At least by 5, I'd get rid of all 3D dungeons and everything that was top-down. But I still loved 3D Dungeons. That was still a great way to play a fantasy setting. It just wasn't the area I could do personally the best,

and it didn't let me do some of the detailed physical interaction. I like to do with stacked objects on tables and chairs and little fine interactions was harder to do in 3D. And so when Paul Nerath came and said, look, I've got this 3D technology. I would like to take it into a medieval setting. And we talked about, you know, maybe we can make that an Ultima and quickly agreed to that. So we then, you know, shared history and story and other activities, but it really is Paul who deserves the credit for, frankly, the whole project, stem to stern.

My involvement, my, the reason became Ultima was really because of my passion for picking up the piece that we left behind when we began to focus only on top-down tile graphics. Right. But the ultimate name there, the connection wasn't just frivolous. No, that was in the beginning of the game. Is there from the foundation of anything beyond his first tech demo? But to that point, Ultimate Games had been turn-based role-playing games, menu-driven, etc. Whereas Ultimate Underworld, you know, you have the real-time element. Did you, and speaking collectively as the team, what kind of challenges did you face in taking those role-playing?

concepts, the sort of abstract control concepts, and turning them into something where, you know, things were constantly attacking you and you had to be aware of your surrounding and so forth without diluting, you know, what it means to be a role-playing game. Well, yeah. So, you know, if you look at the earliest ultimas, they were truly turn-based, meaning, you know, if you took 10 seconds to make up your mind, the game would wait for you. A few ultimals later, it wouldn't wait for you. It would give you two or three seconds, and if you didn't respond, they would go on without you. And then later it became fully real time. So the intention with Ultima was always to get as close to real time as we could. It's just that the technology of discrete movements

and tiles sort of feels ratchet-based, if nothing else. You know, you ratchet to the next slot. Sure. And so that sort of has a turn-based feel to it that didn't really go away until Ultimus 7, I think. And so when Paul, you know, when we first started looking at this 3D technology and smoothly moving through it, I don't think there was ever any debate to try to do it turn-based. Right. Because it was, you know, you could turn freely with your mouse. And so it just made complete sense that if I can slew and rotate, then the creatures should be slewing and rotating similarly

fluidly. And so I, you know, for me at least, there was nothing unnatural or unexpected about that leap. That was sort of the logical next step of the journey we were on. So what do you think you know, stands as sort of like the biggest accomplishment in Ultima underworld? Like when you

look at that game, what do you think it really like, what its legacy would be? Well, I think that it, then and frankly now too with, you know, Paul's working now on Underworld Ascendant, you know, it is the best virtual reality, not VR cloggoggles, but it's one of the best manifestations of a virtual reality that had been done for sure at that moment. And, you know, hopefully you'll do so again soon. All right.

So then moving on, you know, to wrap this up with Ultima Online, which we, you know, I saw your panel this morning and it was great and entertaining and informative. I was really struck by what you said about how the design of the game allowed for true consequence that there were no training wheels for the virtues. I think that was you who said that. That was Raff actually made that comment. I said that. Okay. But I'm sure you agreed.

Yes, of course. Yeah. So I'd love to hear you sort of expand more on that because you do introduce other people into like other humans into the mix and all of a sudden the dynamic of what ethics are and how you should behave changes. Right. Well, in fact, that was one of the things where. You know, as soon as we realized we're going to make this massively multiplayer experience, we realized that it not only could we not, but it wouldn't be fun in the same way to have

everyone on the same story path sort of, now it's my turn to talk to that NPC and be told the exact same thing you just heard, which in a solo player game, you don't mind that your friend next door did that because he's not in your face beating you across the finish line. But in a shared space, it's not very fun to see 10 people go through in front of you and 10 more cute up behind you to have the identical experience. And so we sat down and said, okay, we really still like this underpinning and virtue that we have, you know, and these ethical dilemmas. But how are you going to, how are we going to deliver on that? And one of the things we decided was, look, we've just come up with nine previous ultimas. which drove home this concept.

We knew that the base adopters would be those same people. We knew that they had already heard us talk about that over and over again. And so even without NPCs to give you a string of linear quests, we knew that players would come to the world with that context. And even a few repetitive behavioral feedback loops like giving money to beggars is a good idea. you know, would reinforce the virtue in such a way, reinforce the virtues in such a way that we wouldn't need to be heavy-handed with the plot. We knew we'd get away with that for Ultima Online 1.

And we did. And that's why the training wheel comments came up where, you know, we wouldn't be showing them and forcing them into certain behavior, but we knew the context of the world was still well-defined to where people would kind of understand. when they were violating or not. That's one of the challenges we face with our new game with Shrata the Avatar is we've said

we really still want to do that storytelling now. We want to merge deep storytelling and a multiplayer environment into the same game which we couldn't have done with the technology we had then. Right. We'd now have the technology to do it. How many of the ideas that you had for Ultima Online 2 made it into Shrout of the Avatar?

It's hard to know for sure because the games that Star Long and I have done together have all sort of picked up and pulled pieces forward like one of our recent games Tabula Rasa had some really what we think was really brilliant control point technology where you know if you if the player took over a contested zone NPCs would flourish and quest givers would be around but if the bad guys took over a control point area those quest givers and resources and things would disappear. And even that, we try to pull forward and just right of the avatar. Things like cover, something as simple as, you know, in most role-playing games, we think devolve into

spreadsheet management where you learn what equipment to wear and what attacks to throw in what sequence to do your maximum damage over time and to protect yourself from the most damage over time. And I don't think that's very good role-playing. It goes back to the D&D games days where I went from great storytellers I loved, and when it became arguing about numbers, I don't care anymore. And so what we tried to do is say, well, look, as opposed to letting it turn into button-mashing

with a spreadsheet behind your decisions, let's make the visual, what you see in the world around you, be more relevant. So, you know, if you and me are sitting opposite to table each other from each other right now, so if I was shooting a bow and arrow at you, in both our cases, only our upper half of our body is visible.

but if I was suiting in a chair on the other side of the room where I can see them from head to toe they have more target area in view and so I might have an easier time hitting them and so that simple statement and making your NPCs aware of it means they won't stand in the clear to get shot they'll go stand behind a log

and on the other hand they will try to move themselves to a position where you are not obstructed in their field of view and immediately combat is profoundly changed and so there's a lot of things we pull forward each game we learn some new techniques that we pull forward and we have some failures that we go let's not ever try that again and bury it makes sense so you mentioned that RPG combat often devolves into spreadsheet management you know along the same lines

I feel like most MMOs these days devolved into like wiki skimming where you know I feel like you look at World of Warcraft in the early days of World of Warcraft people would log on and they would discover the world and they would experience it. And now people log on and they're like, well, here are the list of quests and let me check the wiki and see what I need to do to complete these quests. And, you know, I think there's a lot less of that sort of losing yourself in the game. Is that something that you've been mindful of with... Well, you know, that's one of things we were talking about in the post-mortem earlier today was this desire to lose yourself in the game. And we actually think that that is the measure of success.

in many ways is once you arrive do you feel like I'm not motivated to go outside if what you come up against is something that's so hard that to get out of this room or get past this puzzle I need to go to the web then that's a disaster in my mind

you need to make sure that the game includes just enough information at just the right time to help you over the next and next next hurdle if you do that right, if you do that game design right, then the need and motivation to go to the web is removed. And so, yes, fundamentally, I agree with you that that is a problem that I believe can be solved.

So with Ultima Online, the original, you know, one of the things that I think makes it stand out historically is the fact that it kind of blurs the line between, you know, what people think of as a role-playing experience and also an actual like, you know, immersion kind of experience where instead of just going out and fighting stuff on the one hand and completing quests, you can also just live. You can also just be there. You can, you know, go out and fish. You can farm. You can, you know, take the things you farm and sell them to someone so they can make bread and you can buy it back. Like, you know, the whole economy that you talked about in the panel. I feel like that's still really, you don't see that a lot in. Yeah. In fact, frankly, I think it's shocking that we don't see that anymore. And if I had to say why, I'd say because it's really hard. This is the really main reason. You know, a lot of role-playing games that do very well.

And these are, you know, this is a game design mechanic I'm about to describe, which I think has great importance and power, which is, you know, if you make a good challenge and reward cycle, you know, a game that says when I'm level one, I'm strong enough to, I can pick up some level one gear, I can go fight some level one monsters, and as I gain experience in some gold, I can become level two, go buy some level two gear, go buy some level two monsters, and the worlds and a lot of role-playing games are gated, such that when I'm level one, I can really only survive and explore the level one area, and then when I'm level two, a little more of the world opens up to me.

That is a great game design mechanic, however, it is not what we do, that is almost the antithesis of an ultima. In the games that we make, the whole world is open to you at all times. The leveling curves, instead of being exponential, are flat, or linear at least. The content, instead of being levelgated, when you level gate content, that sort of means by definition that every player's first and foremost job is to be a combatant and to level grind as a combatant. Or you can't even go to the other side of the world. And in a lot of these other role-playing games, you can have another job.

You can be a crafter or an alchemist or whatever it might be, blacksmith. But they can't be your primary occupation. Because unless you're again a combatant as your primary application occupation, you won't even be able to see the majority of the world. We flipped that and said, we're actually to make it to where you can't be both a good, the best combatant and the best blacksmith and the best alchemist

and the best of the 20 other things that we create and you need those things from other people so if you are a combatant you're going to need a good sword and swords wear out so you will need to find a good blacksmith

and that blacksmith is going to need raw materials like ore and so he's going to find a miner and that minor is not going to be a combatant so they're going to need to hire some combatants to escort them back and forth to the mines and and we found a lot on purpose.

You know, that economic design loop was quite purposeful. But the emergent behavior that even you mentioned about the fisherman came often as a surprise. I mean, there's a story I like to tell of one day when I was in the game but invisible. So I was just wandering around watching how people were playing. And I saw this person with a straw hat and knee-length jeans and maybe no shirt, if any, or a tattered shirt or none. And he was out fishing. and every time he catch a fish he'd lay it on the ground beside him.

And he had about six fish laid out there when this big guy comes by with heavy plate armor and I can imagine them clanking, clanking they walked over. And this person walked up and said, oh, you're a poor fisherman. I have just returned for the dungeon and I've come back with all kinds of wealth and bounty and I have weapons and armor to spare.

Here, let me share some with you. And he began to lay out powerful sword and powerful gear out on the beach here beside this fisherman. and the fisherman basically said stop stop stop stop stop stop stop be gone you ruffian said your weapons of war have no interest to me said i am a fisherman i come here in the morning and i catch my fish in the afternoon i go to the market to sell my fish with my earnings going to the pub and i have a nice meal and some drinks and share stories with my friends and tomorrow i will do that again be gone and the guy was ah ruff ruff ruff ruff ruff and picked all the stuff and trundle off

again. And that exchange, it really was, to me, a testimony to the depth of the role-playing experience we created with Ultimate Online. So, you know, we need to wrap up for time, but, you know, I would just like to ask you, how do you make that prospect appealing to someone to say, like, at the end of the day, after you come home from work, you're going to log out of the computer and you're going to, you know, do another job. You're going to do the daily grind in a fantasy context. Well, yeah, so first of all, no one is as surprised as I think we were. You know, when we put in the fishing

simulation in Ultima Online, the original simulation was, there's a fishing pool and everything in Ultima's and everything in Lord British games, if, you know, if there's a microphone on the table, it darn well better work. You know, anything is there better operate like you would expect it to work as a player. So, fishing pool had to catch fish.

So, but we didn't have much time and nobody thought fishing would be very popular and it wasn't tied in of any of these other loops. So the fishing simulation was 50-50 chance kiss a fish. that's it didn't matter where you fished didn't matter what time of day you fish 50 50 chance catch a fish and immediately it became one of the most popular things people did and people began to create mythologies they'd go like oh i go out in the morning i go on that river i go over here and we're going let's go look at the code again oh 50 50 chance catch fish there's really nothing else in there and uh but then as soon

as you realize there's behaviors people like you double down on it in other words you then we began to deepen it and we do that same thing already with shroud of the avatar too where we'll You look for things that people enjoy and you find ways to deepen them. Things you thought would be fun, that people aren't enjoying it. You debate whether you need to pull it out or revise it. And the why that I would offer, why would you come home from work to go do a virtual job like fishing? I think the answer is 50-50 chance to get a fish is a lot better than reality. You can catch a lot more fish in the virtual world than you can in the real world.

And you don't have to pull the hook out or gut it. And so despite its often simplicity and its seeming work nature, the point is we can take even something like fishing and fantasize it in a way which makes it a lot of fun. Because in ultimate online pretty quickly, you could not only catch different types of fish, but you could catch messages in a bottle with clues and old boots and tin cans and a variety of funny, silly stuff and a variety of, you know, the magic ring that you'd pull up very rarely. And so you can even make what is a boring, mundane job in the real world more fun in a virtual world. All right. So just to wrap, what do you think of the evolution of role-playing games over the past 35, 40 years, and where would you like to see them go from this point? Well, you know, early on, very, very early in my career,

before really any virtual reality hardware was available or anything like the current rounds, you know, I was always a big proponent of saying, you know, I hope that we created the very first ever truly virtual reality. And the Matrix hadn't come out yet, so we hadn't talked about tapping in and that route. And I would argue that even the current round of virtuality hardware is not there yet. But I still believe that. I still believe that's the migration we're on. But I think it's important that people know that that migration is on multiple fronts. I mean, it's, you know, people at least can see the path for the hardware.

They can go, I can at least imagine that the matrix will be a physical possibility someday in the future. But what also has to come along with that is, why would I bother going there? Why is this important to me? And it can't be just to go play virtual tennis or even play virtual, just fight monsters and level up. I think it really has to be something that is meaningful to the human experience. And I hope that's the part that our team gets to play is, you know, we're probably not going to build the hardware. but when the hardware is there, we're going to be able to create the experience

that is worth it for your time to be there and mean something to you personally as an individual and as far as our society as humans to not just be a waste of time but be a truly enrichening experience. All right. Well, thanks for your time, Richard. Do you want to just let people know

where they can find you online and find your game? Absolutely. So my Twitter handle is the easiest way to get a hold me. I'm at Richard Geriot. I'm pretty diligent about that So if you check me down there I'm almost 100% I think on responses And our new game Shrout of the Avatar Actually launches here this upcoming week

And you can find it at Shroudov theavatar.com Okay, great Well thanks again for your time It was great meeting you Thank you pleasure Pleasure I'm going to be the I'm going to be.

And so, I'm going to be. And so, you know, and I'm, and... ...and... ...and...

...and... ...and... ...and... ...and... And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out.

We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fascinating.

nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. Your yard takes a real beating from the constant wear and tear and overcrowding of weeds leading to weak, thin grass. Achieve the lawn of your dreams by starting the Scotts Turf Builder program. Keep it simple.

With four simple feedings throughout the year, your grass will be thicker, greener, and more resilient. A greener, stronger lawn fights against common problems like weeds and bugs. It also stands up versus heat, drought, and wear and tear. And with Scott's no quibble money back guarantee, if you're not satisfied, you'll get your money back. So take control and give your lawn the boost it deserves. Start your Scotts turf builder program today. This is a Scots yard. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor

of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Bryant don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout

have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.