Interview with Richard Garriott - 4/23/92
David Taylor
series of fantasy-adventure computer games. Many of these questions
are based upon questions you (the netters) submitted. There are many
more specific questions about the Ultima series in particular. I've
left those questions with Mr. Garriott and checked off some of the more
interesting ones we weren't able to get to and have asked him to get
back to me at his leisure. Will let you know if I get a list of
answers back. He's very busy right now (as he normally is just after
the release of a game) but may have time after things have settled
down.
This article will be paired down for a version which will appear in the
"Exam Week Extra" issue of the Daily Texan. Specifically, many of the
questions concerning programming will be left out.
Please forgive me twice:
a. I am not a professional, objective journalist. Mr. Garriott is
very easy to be around (considering his stature in the field), and
it led to a weirdly informal interview. His media relations
manager was present to keep him from getting too "informal" (but
apparently this isn't easy).
b. I like to write games and unfortunately am a fairly big fan of his
games. (See "professional, objective" under a.)
Lord Brittish: A Fantasy Interview - 4/23/92
by David Taylor (d...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu)
The game just came out Saturday, Apr. 18. I'm skeptical this time.
Most of the previous Origin releases have been jewels. For his luck to
hold out would be obscene. Richard Garriott, a.k.a. "Lord Brittish,"
has returned with the long overdue release of the seventh part in the
"Ultima" computer fantasy adventure game series, "Ultima VII: The Black
Gate," and this would be a perfect excu.. opportunity to ask for an
interview with the most famous computer game author in the world.
Texan: "How old were you when you wrote your first computer game?"
Garriott: "I went to school in Clear Creek High School in Houston. We
had a teletype with a paper tape reader hooked up with a modem to the
Region 4 Cyber. I took the one computer programming class that the
school offered. For the remaining three years at high school, I would
write computer games. No teacher, no grades. At the end of the
semester, they'd just look at what I had written and I'd get a premium
gauranteed A letter grade." Galan, Origin's media relations man,
fetches a roll of paper tape and what looks like an old scroll.
Written in BASIC on the paper tape are some of the 28 games Richard had
been working on in high school. The scroll is just the printout from
one of these ancient games. It is a small map of a tiny 16x16 world
printed in text characters on a teletype. "I've basically been writing
the same game since 1974."
T: "Help me with my math. How old would you have been when you first
wrote [the program that produced the teletype output]?"
G: "Uh ... I would've been ... 14 years old, 15 when I finished it." He
points to his first published game on the wall, "Akalabeth." "That's
written in BASIC, too. It was based on some of the games I wrote in
high school. In 1979, I had access to an Apple ][ computer, so I was
able to add 3D perspective view dungeon graphics. I was working in a
ComputerLand store as a salesperson, and my manager said I should
really consider publishing it. So I spent $200 on ziploc bags and
cover sheets in 1979, and I published that game. Of the only eight I
sold in that ComputerLand, one found its way to a computer publishing
company in California. They called me on the phone and said that there
were plane tickets waiting for me at the airport. I flew to
California, signed a piece of paper, and they started sending me
money. I didn't like the original package, so I had that second one
[he points to another copy with a sexier cover] done by Dennis Loubee
who's done the covers for every Ultima since then. I was 19 years old
when that was published. After that game was finished, I said, `Gee,
that made a lot of money, and I never intended to publish it. If I
were to really write one with the intention of publishing it, I could
really make some money,' and that's when I started work on the first
Ultima. It was also written in BASIC. This sold even better than
Akalabeth. So I said, `If I were to write this in assembly language,
it'd be an even better game!' so I wrote Ultima II. I had sort of a
falling out with California Pacific at this point, and they basically
stopped paying me. I went to Sierra for Ultima II. They promised me a
box with a cloth map. Most of my competition back then was arcade-
game ripoffs that came out in ziploc bags about once a month, and
nobody cared much about them. Mine was one of the only boxed games in
the industry at the time. The Ultima games are still the only ones
with cloth maps. The publishers don't like these maps because they're
expensive to produce. After Ultima II, I said `Gee whiz, the code for
this was kinda clunky.' It was the first assembly code I'd ever done,
so I started Ultima III. So you can see a pattern emerging here. All
these games were learning experiences for me. I was rewriting games,
starting over from scratch. It was really an accident, but I still do
it to this day. I really believe that it's what's helped make the
Ultima series so popular. Each one was dramatically improved over its
predecessor. So Ultima III was the first product Origin produced back
in 1983. After I had my own company, I actually started receiving
letters sent to me personally. I had never received letters before.
Suddenly, other things were happening too. I was 23, I had moved out
to the frozen wastelands of New England. You're going through that
phase of life where you've moved out of the house, and you're sure
glad, and you don't want advice from your parents, but you're really
not so confident you're making the right decisions on your own, and you
sure wish you could have some help from somebody though you didn't want
it? You know this phase?"
T: "I'm 23 right now. I know the phase." I roll my eyes.
G: "That's when I began working on Ultima IV. I'd learned how to write
a good program, and now I wanted to become a good storyteller. I
wanted to make sure the story had content. Ultima IV was the first one
that had ethical overtones in it, and it also was just a better told
story. The first three were "Go kill the evil bad guy" stories.
Ninety percent of the other adventure games out there are still in this
format. You know, "Go kill the evil wizard. You're this great hero.
How do you know? Says so in the documentation. What're you supposed
to do? Kill the bad guy! Why? `Cause you're told so in the
documentation. Ever see the bad guy take advantage of people in the
world? No. What do you do while you're there? You take advantage of
everyone you meet and hoard lots of treasure so that you can kill the
bad guy who never did anything to you!" The difference between Ultima
V and Ultima IV is that in U4, you could tell the bad guys from the
good guys really easily. In U5, some of them were good at heart but
comfortable under the new evil system even though they were
fundamentally good guys. Some guys you thought were good guys but are
really helping the bad guys. The storytelling was a lot better in this
release- lots more gray areas. By the time we got to Ultima VI, the
previous five Ultima's were getting really hard to use, and the Apple
platform was just getting too constrictive. Suddenly, we went from a
64k 1MHz 6502 processor to a 10-12 MHz 8086 processor with 640k of
memory. There was an instant technological leap with just the hardware
we were using, but we also decided to start using an easier user
interface."
T: "What inspired you to change to a mouse-oriented interface?"
G: "There were two games back then that inspired me. One was Chris's
[Roberts] `Times of Lore', and another was `DungeonMaster.' Ultima
VII's interface is my own conception, and I'm very proud of it, because
it's so easy to use." He later proceeds to show me the entire
interface in the space of 5 minutes.
T: "What sort of computers do you develop these games for, and what do
you develop them on?"
G: He points to the shelves in his office. He has in them every
release of Origin's games. He points out "Ogre" which has been
translated to work on 7 different kinds of computers, then he points to
their latest release, Ultima VII. There's only one, and it's for IBM
compatibles. "We have no plans to port it to different platforms. It
requires a fast 386."
T: "What's the performance bottleneck for these games?"
G: "The video card and the hard disk. Your happiness with the game
depends very much on what kind of video card you have. The achilles
heel of my machine here [he points to a 33MHz 486 with EISA bus] is
definitely the video card. Machine speeds vary all over the place.
Tried the game on a 486/50MHz in England. Was a little too fast.
Almost unplayable. Then there's 16MHz 386SX's...."
T: "386 SUX"?
G: "Yeah, that's my name for them, too. Most good entertainment
software today suffers on a 386SX. We stick `frame limiters' in there
to cap the speed of the game if you're playing it on a machine that's
too fast. Problem is we set the cap a little too high, so on really
fast machines, the guys in the towns sorta move around too fast.
T: "What kind of people and effort went into Ultima VII?"
G: "It took 25 person-years to develop Ultima VII. We about had 8
programmers, 4 artists, 4 writers, 4 TDA's (Technical Design
Assistants), 2 audio engineers, myself, and Michelle (production
assistant). That's basically it. The group fluctuated a little, and
it was as high as 30 for a while, and lemme tell ya, that's a nightmare
to manage."
T: "How much time do you spend managing and handling compatibility
problems?"
G: "I only manage. I don't write the game anymore. It's much easier
to hire professionals to handle the whole thing. Because I had written
the entire games in the past, I had experience with all the parts, so I
knew well how to integrate them together. So managing was sort of a
natural step."
T: "Were you sorry to stop programming and start managing?"
G: "It was very painful at first, especially when I was doing some of
the code, and other people were changing my code, but as soon as I
completely stopped, I kinda liked it. I mean, if there's something I
don't like now, I can say, "make it go another way," and it's someone
else's problem!" He chuckles.
T: "And compatibility?"
G: "Huge amounts of time are wasted on this. An enormous amount of
time is spent supporting 3-6 sound cards, different video modes and
cards, processor speeds, MS- DOS configurations. How do you access the
memory that Dos does't let you get to? There are 5 or 6 answers to
that, and almost all of them are going to piss somebody off."
T: "So you created this VooDoo memory manager explicitly for the game?"
G: "OK, I'm gonna get technical now. I assume you're an MS-DOS
person?"
T: "Uh, no. I helped write a game in UNIX last year."
G: "Smart man. We called it the VooDoo memory manager because you're
not supposed to be able to access more than 64k of memory at a time
using expanded memory management. Now, I'm leaving my area of
expertise, but I believe we were able to quickly pop into protected
mode and change registers which affect the coarseness of that page
size. We use it because I can easily show you objects in Ultima VII
which take up more than 64k, and it's very inconvenient to have to page
flip in the middle of one."
[We diverge onto the topic of the woes of MS-DOS and memory management,
high-5 after he mentions he's relatively MS-DOS ignorant, and Galan
asks that I not quote one of the derogatives mentioned] [We get back on
track]
T: "Another programming question: I've always wondered how you were
able to clip your view against the different canopies of the spaceships
in the Wing Commander series. How did you do that so fast?"
G: "You're not going to like how simple this answer is. [He pulls out
paper and pencil] We call it `slamming,' and it's the bottleneck to
most of our high-speed games. We actually draw on an entire off-screen
memory area, and then we copy over only the parts that can be seen
through the canopy using a very large list of move string instructions,
customized for each ship type."
T: "So there's no other clipping?"
G: "Not much."
T: [I do the obligatory I-should've-had-a-V8 forehead slap] "Also,
how do you model the objects in Ultima VII? Is the world still based
on a grid?"
G: "The objects are still anchored on an underlaying grid, but they
are modelled as prisms with width, length, and height."
T: [I glance at my watch and try to get back on the original list of
questions] "What made you decide to come to Austin?"
G: "I went to school here at UT. I dropped out of UT to go write games
for a living."
T: "What degree were you going for?"
G: "EE. I was getting up into my junior year, and we were starting to
do some of the more esoteric physics, and it was becoming more work
than fun for me. And, what I was doing for fun, was becoming work- fun
work- profitably fun work. It was a convenient time to go play games.
For a long time, I thought when the windfall profits go away, I'll go
back and finish up my degree. It took me two or three years to realize
that even if this fails, I have such a body of experience in this, I
believe I'm fairly employable, at this stage."
T: "Are there one or two things that make a game a success now that
wasn't true back then?"
G: "Absolutely. They used to ask me to come back to my high school and
tell students how to be successful writing computer games. I'd go back
and say [his voice slowly starts to go up in pitch like John Loevitz'],
`Convince your parents to buy a computer at the house. Just sit around
and type programs from a magazine to teach yourself how to program,
then write a game, get it published, and you'll make lots of money -
yeah!' That was true back in those days."
T: "And today?"
G: "It's far differnet. Ultima VII cost $1,000,000 to develop. When
you're spending that kinda money, it's a very serious business. Also,
my musical and artistic skills used to be adequate back then for the
marketplace. The audio-visual impact is a lot more important now.
It's why the Wing Commander games were instant runaway hits when they
were released."
T: "What do you think your chances are of recovering that $1,000,000?"
G: "We recovered that on day one. We needed 50,000 back orders to
break even. We had 60,000 the day it was released. It's the biggest
rollout we've ever had."
T: "What advice would you give to someone who wants to write a computer
game on their own?"
G: "On their own? I'd say forget it. I don't mean that as a joke.
It's very serious. You no longer can compete. It's like competing
with Lambourghini on your own. There's one of two ways you can write a
successful game alone. Either you're really lucky and you produce a
Tetris, which is sort of a shot in the dark- good luck!, or you have to
produce an Ultima or a Wing Commander, but you need about a million
bucks to pull that off, and you need to finish it in about a year or
it'll be obsolete. My advice for doing it on your own- get help. If
you want to do it in industry, you've gotta decide what facet you want
to get into. If you want to program, you really need to know C++ and
assembly. It's harder to get trained on the job for that, too. If you
want to have my job, you have to affiliate with an organization such as
our own and build a career path inside so that you get expertise in
each of those fundamental areas of design. In fact, that's what's
really capping the growth of Origin- finding people that can lead
projects. You can't hire them. They're not out there. One of our
principal goals now is to grow people to this position."
T: "Any plans of retiring?"
G: "Nope!"
T: "May I ask how old you are now?"
G: "Yeah, 30." Reflectively, "I've been working on basically the same
series of stuff for half my life, now."
T: "Can you comment about your affiliation with the SCA?"
G: "Yeah, the Society of Creative Anachronism. I'm still a member but
less active than I was. If you know any local SCA people, you'll
probably recognize their names in the game, along with names of most of
the employees here at Origin, close friends, whoever's walking outside
in the hall ..." He smiles.
T: "Multi-player games- this is a personal interest of mine, any plans
for that?"
G: "Ultima VIII! We made a multi-user map maker for Ultima VII. Well,
this was something we were using for Underworld as sort of an
afterthought. We weren't really planning to do this, but you could pop
in and out of the map-maker from within the game, which means that
without really thinking about it, we'd created something so close to a
multi-player game, with Ultima VIII, we've decided to just go ahead and
do it. One of the things we're doing is getting rid of the idea of a
party of characters. You'll adventure about on your own."
T: "What kind of networks will you support?"
G: "Well, whatever we've got will be first ... What are we using now?"
Galan replies, "Novell." He continues, "And then modem, head-to-head,
of course. We'll play it in house first, and we'll let people call in
and try it. For publication, we'll probably do modem-to-modem."
T: "So people would call some 1-800 number to get in an Origin world?"
G: "Hehe, or 1-900 ..." A fast comment (I missed it) about his brother
Robert Garriott (President of Origin) whizzes by.
T: "You have any blow-your-mind-comments about what will be new for
Ultima VIII?"
G: "Well, I can give you some interesting comments about Ultima VIII
and Ultima X."
T: "Huh? Is having an Ultima IX bad luck or something?"
G: "No ... you'll see why in a second... you've heard people throwing
around the phrase `virtual reality' lately, right? Well, Ultima X is
going to be using different forms of that. Data gloves, stereoscopic
goggles, in an Ultima world. In fact, they've started work on it a
couple doors down the hall here. We'll release it so that you can use
mice and all if you don't have that, but they're actually getting
pretty cheap, now, about $1000 for the goggles. We're also playing
with some low-tech VR stuff. Nintendo is starting to ask us for what
we'd like to see in their goggles which will be under $200."
T: "When I solicited questions for this interview from the Internet,
the most common question was more of a plea: `Why won't you write games
for the Mac?' Has the market for Mac games changed or is it still an
uphill battle selling a profitable gmae for this platform?"
G: "The Mac is my platform of choice, but the market won't support it.
The computer games market is 90% PC's. We've got to be able to recover
the costs for this stuff."
We've almost run out of our fast-paced one hour interview at this
point, so he quickly shows me a special version of Ultima VII so that I
can see the intro movie, endgame movie (which you can't normally see
unless you win), and a sample of the game interface. The movies,
although short, are impressive. He blasted the sound effects and score
on his gargantuan stereo speakers, and we watched a really well-done
pre-rendered movie starring a supreme evil type dude. The endgame
movie also provides a neat teaser for Ultima VIII. The interface
proves to be very quick to learn, too. We don't have time for more, so
I quickly thank him for his time and drive back to work before my
absence is appreciated.
Thanks to the following people for submitted questions (in order of
submissions received):
ste...@leland.stanford.edu,
M <egp4...@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>,
tbla...@ecn.purdue.edu (Tom Blackman),
ba...@playfair.stanford.edu (Barrett P. Eynon),
Robert Klingsten <bla...@engin.umich.edu>,
eva...@cs.UCSD.EDU (Eric Vaitl),
"Corp. Reed" <ec...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
Ed McMuffin <ebra...@suna0.cs.uiuc.edu>,
Julian D Lighton <jl...@andrew.cmu.edu>,
tai...@iss.nus.sg (Tng Tai Hou),
Christoph...@cs.kuleuven.ac.be (Christophe Liekens),
jyo...@isis.cs.du.edu (Jeff Young),
Todd Keenan Bowman <tb...@andrew.cmu.edu>,
"Daniel L. McDonald" <dan...@cs.arizona.edu>,
"Wayne C. McCullough" <wa...@eng.umd.edu>,
rfer...@Athena.MIT.EDU,
ifbb657 (Douglas Floyd),
Stephen M Smith <sms...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
c...@ccsitn.att.com (Charles E Jones),
jahangir!stu...@uunet.UU.NET (Stuart),
Steven Luh <eab...@orion.oac.uci.edu>,
p...@astro.as.utexas.edu (Peter J. Shelus),
bdu...@gnu.ai.mit.edu,
jahangir!stu...@uunet.UU.NET (Stuart),
unk...@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (resU nwonknU ehT),
t...@cs.utexas.edu,
"Kevin Furrow" <KWF...@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>,
S. Lee <qa1c...@uhura.cc.rochester.edu>,
mcr...@isis.cs.du.edu (Matthew Crosby),
rdip...@cancun.Qualcomm.COM (Ron Dippold), and
r...@ideas.com (Richard R. Rubel)
--
: "What rolls down stairs, alone or in pairs, rolls over the neighbor's dog? :
: What's good as a snack, and fits on your back? It's Log, Log, Log! :
: It's Looo-og, It's Looo-og, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood! :
: It's Looo-og, It's Looo-og, it better than bad- it's good!" :