Interview with Richard "Lord British" Garriott
Crispy Gamer has interviewed Richard "Lord British" Garriott of Ultima and Tabula Rasa fame. Part I of the interview was last week, and this week we've got the full installment.

Interview with Richard Garriott, Part I

Interview with Richard Garriott, Part II

Interview with Richard Garriott - Bonus Material

As you probably know, the Ultima series was not only my favorite (well, up to Ultima VII and Ultima Underworld), but was also a big influence on me as I chose a career. Working for Origin sounded like a dream job - I even called and talked to their HR folks a couple of years before graduating with a Computer Science degree to find out what kind of qualifications they looked for in candidates.

Ultima VII remains my favorite RPG, and this interview focuses a lot on it and the "third trilogy." This interview spends a lot of time reminiscing about the development of Ultima VII, about rooms of "killing children," and discussing all the ways people found of killing the "unkillable" in-game version of Lord British.

An excerpt:

"Well, the game’s called The Black Gate, so there’s no question that it was intended to be dark. Very much so. In fact, Ultima IV, V and VI were all quite the opposite. I mean, Ultima IV didn’t even have a bad guy. Ultima V only had a misguided bad guy. Ultima VI, with the gargoyles, you were sort of the bad guy in a sense. Ultimas IV, V and VI were the lighthearted goody-two-shoes games, while Ultima VII was very purposely dark. I may not articulate it the same way you did — in that “you, the player, could kill anything and everything,” but I would say that it is dark in that the world had become dark. We now had truly prescient evil, and we had a pantheon of characters you were interacting with that were absolutely trying to take advantage of the time of darkness for their own personal gain. So you’re constantly being befriended by people who were in fact not your friends. So, yeah, it was purposely a very dark game."

Good stuff. Dang, I miss the ol' glory days of Origin in that era...

Labels: Interviews, retro, Roleplaying Games

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