Twenty-five Year Old Richard Garriott Video Interview Discovered (April 22, 2018)

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Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Here's another video article from the Interactive Entertainment digital magazine hybrid. This one goes all the way back to the first issue's included CD-ROM where they interview Origin founder and Ultima creator Richard Garriott. They cover a lot of ground and discuss what projects Origin was currently working on, what was in the cards for upcoming Wing Commander projects and why Origin made so many sequels. The first Interactive Entertainment was published February 1994 although the content appears to have been recorded probably somewhere in the middle of 1993. The ISOs for these issues can be found on archive.org.

This was billed as an "interactive interview" which meant that to watch the interview you first had to choose the question you were interested in from a list and then the answers would play in video format. For this reason, putting this into video format necessitated that the questions be placed in order and title cards added.


Questions answered in this video:


[*]How do Origin's and EA's' product lines mesh ?
[*]What's this Pacific Strike I keep hearing about ?
[*]How is Pacific Strike improved over Strike Commander ?
[*]Anything new planned for the Strike Commander engine ?
[*]Will there be any new Wing Commander products ?
[*]I've played Wing 1 and 2. Why should I buy Wing 3 ?
[*]How will Wing 3 be better ?
[*]How would you describe the first Ultima trilogy ?
[*]How would you describe the second Ultima trilogy ?
[*]How would you describe the third Ultima trilogy ?
[*]The “dark side of the Force” ? How so ?
[*]What does the Guardian do in Ultima 8 ?
[*]How will the third trilogy end ?
[*]How did "Lord British" get credit for writing your games ?
[*]Are your products created in-house or by outside developers ?
[*]Do you plan to develop all your new products in-house ?
[*]Why do you prefer to keep product development in-house?
[*]So, no plans to use outside developers?
[*]Which product lines are you supporting ?
[*]What new technologies are you exploring ?
[*]What do you mean by “Interactive Movie” ?
[*]What are you developing in the Interactive Movie line ?
[*]Why do you do so many sequels ?
[*]Will you continue to do sequels ?
[*]How has the merger affected your standing in the industry ?
[*]So who do you see as your major competition ?
[*]What do you think actually sells a game ?
[*]What prompted you to found Origin ?
[*]Didn't you have a sickening amount of money to start Origin with ?
[*]So what was it like back in the early days ?
[*]What's the scoop on your logo ?
[*]Weren't most of your early games written for the Apple II ?
[*]Why did you stick with the Apple for so long ?
[*]What prompted you to move away from the Apple ?
[*]What platforms will you support in the future ?
[*]How does Origin carve a niche for itself on a given platform ?
[*]Where do you get the ideas for your games ?
[*]Do you enjoy running a computer game company ?
[*]How is producing a game similar to producing a movie ?
[*]What's the really exciting part of being in the game industry ?
[*]What's the dangerous part of making games for a living ?

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Original update published on April 22, 2018
 
Neat find, though I hate the form of interview - it's kind of ironic how the form was supposed to be the really cool and innovative thing about it. It's just so annoying, the way they've chopped up Garriott's responses to arbitrarily insert additional question titles.

Also, what is that thing Richard Garriott is sitting on? Is it a couch, or a bed? Hard to tell, it's a big white blur.

As for the interview itself, it's an interesting one for the archives, because it comes from a time when Garriott was still very optimistic (or at least, sounded so) about the relationship with EA. I wonder when that actually begun to change.
 
I guess it's a couch. In 1993 the EA acquisition would have been pretty recent and they'd still have very much been in the honeymoon phase. For the next couple years, EA was pretty hands off and mainly just sent them large amounts of cash, which Origin multiplied into more cash. I think things started to change after Chris Roberts left and when the shocking success of Ultima Online got noticed.
 
I think it must have been a bit earlier than that, I mean, Chris Roberts left for a reason, and a lot of people followed suit in quick succession. I guess 1994/1995 must have been some sort of breaking point when things started getting at least unpleasant. There is something peculiar about Ultima 8, for example - at a time when EA was supposed to be just throwing money at Origin, U8's release was somewhat shoddy by Origin standards. Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as buggy as U9 would be, and some of its bugs were more along the lines of very silly design issues (jumping puzzles!) than actual bugs. But it was already an indication of future problems. For Chris Roberts, of course, everything would have still been great at this point - WC3 certainly was not subject to the sort of pressures that would later follow for WC4.
 
Even for WC4, while there was certainly pressure to repeat WC3 quickly, Chris Roberts ended up not having to meet the Christmas 1995 timeline they wanted and got a bigger budget than any game in history, so that still seems pretty decent. I think then being told to repeat the process yet again the following year in 1997 under new management with a fraction of the budget is where it got tough - see the Billy Cain stories of the late 1996 into 1997 crunch where they lived at their desk and everyone got divorced.
 
Pagan is a case where I suspect we'll never confirm the full story. On one side, you have key developers happy to repeat their version of the story today, the reductive: 'Electronic Arts made us do everything you hate!' And on the other side you have a publisher that has no reason to ever defend itself.

But what I always wonder is: where's 'plan A?' Where's the original design proposal that we would have loved? Where's the pitch EA shot down? What was the incredible idea that didn't happen because they had to ship when they did? What feels a lot more likely is that the team pitched a concept they thought would make Ultima more appealing to a wider audience; more action, less stats. EA funded that idea, the team made that game… and what they came up with just didn't work. And then when they wanted more time and money to fix it, EA said no, we aren't throwing more money at this, ship on schedule.

It's that small difference between EA made us make a bad game and we made a bad game and EA wouldn't let us fix it. That is to say: the jumping puzzles aren't bad because of a bug, they're bad because the game was designed to have them in the first place. And I just can't imagine it working the way we hear it today, with EA barging in and insisting no one cares about character customization but the game must have jumping...
 
Oh, absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind that U8 was designed as intended, and that it was Origin trying to expand the game audience rather than EA forcing them to do so. Transitioning to a single-character action-RPG would have seemed very, very reasonable at the time, because many games were doing it. I think EA's influence is exactly where you indicate, namely the game shipping on schedule with some bugs and some bad features that should have been addressed much earlier.
 
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