In July of 2000, PC Gamer, in place of their monthly demo disk, released a CD-ROM containing thirteen classic games from the late eighties and early nineties. Many of the games were not new to me. I had already fallen in love with The Secret of Monkey Island and King's Quest, I had watched my brother play through quite a bit of Descent, and Terminal Velocity was really pretty much the same thing as Fury3. However, there were three games on that disc that I would say truly changed my perspective on gaming: X-COM: UFO Defense, Duke Nukem II, and Ultima I.
I would love to talk about X-COM and Duke Nukem and how they shaped how I think about games today, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about Ultima.
Ultima was not the first Western RPG I ever played. In fact, as I mentioned before, I was pretty well-versed in games by that time. Monkey Island had taught me that video games could make me laugh, Final Fantasy VII had taught me that video games could make me cry, but it wasn't until Ultima that I felt like it impacted me. Before, games were stories about other people, and while I was certainly immersed in some of them, I never felt like I was part of the world. Ultima had this huge world to explore with so many things to see and do. You could steal, and fight, and explore, and go to space, and go back in time, and cast magic, and save princesses, and it all felt like it was something that you were doing. I never referred to The Stranger in third-person. I was the Stranger.
The reason I bring this up is that last Tuesday, I saw Richard Garriott (Lord British; The creator of the Ultima series) speak on a panel called The New World of Gaming hosted by the Rice Alliance at UT. Now, it's been a pretty crazy couple of weeks for me, since the Tuesday before last I saw Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, Paul and Storm, and the Red vs. Blue guys at W00tstock 2.9, and this weekend I'm going to get to see Billy Dee Williams, Adam West, and Lou Ferrigno at Austin Comic Con [Note: This post was written before I went to Comic-Con, which I can now say was totally awesome.]. However, I have to say that getting a chance to see Lord British in person really takes the cake.
But I really had no idea what I was signing up for.
I went with two friends, neither of whom had played Ultima, but were interested enough to go. They both wore polo shirts and at least semi-nice pants. I wore an over-sized Playstation 3 T-Shirt and a pair of dirty black jeans. For some reason, I thought I would be the one to fit in more. The first thing that we noticed upon arriving was just how many old people there were. Now, granted, Ultima I came out thirty years ago, but even then, the age gap didn't work out. Most of them were also wearing suits. I also found it strange that they would give us vouchers for two free drinks at the bar, though I certainly didn't mind. There was also a buffet included with the price of the ticket ($10 at the door) that had a rather impressive assortment of things to munch on. The vegetable wantons were quite tasty and there were some sort of Italian-fried-cheese-somethings that were absolutely delicious. It was actually while I was eating that I heard a very loud voice directly behind me talking about NASA and space exploration. I didn't really need to turn around to verify that it was, in fact, Lord British standing no more than two feet away from me, but I did anyway.
It was surreal.
Richard Garriott's was the first name I ever heard connected to gaming. He's really an icon in the gaming world, and most of that is due to his real-world persona. He's grotesquely rich, was the first second-generation astronaut, was the first mainstream video game developer in Austin, owns an awesome mansion with secret rooms, and in 2009 he officiated the first-ever wedding on the zero gravity plane. On top of that, he made Ultima! The man just exudes cool. You can imagine how I felt standing right next to him. I nearly choked on my Italian-fired-cheese-something.
I didn't go up to him because I truly had nothing to say. All I could do was sit by the door to the auditorium and wait for the panel to start. When the panel did start, I discovered that there were three other Austinites joining him, none of whom I had ever heard of. One was an investor, another was the CEO of a social gaming company (the creator of Qrank), and I can't really remember who the other guy was. It didn't take me very long to realize that this panel was not at all what I thought it would be. In his opening statements, Richard Garriott split the video game timeline into three segments. The first was an era single-player games, mostly played by nerdy males in their mom's basements, the second was a shift towards multiplayer games which incorporated a bit more of a mainstream audience, and the new dawning age was one of social casual games like Farmville and Qrank. He talked about the fact that games are "reaching all of humanity" through Facebook and mobile devices, and about how that was where the money was. He said that the "Great Equalization" that everyone was hoping that the Internet would bring about didn't happen, and that the only way to succeed as a gaming company was with capital, superior numbers, and top talent; Not necessarily good game design. "Big companies win," he said.
I was a bit taken aback. This wasn't the Richard Garriott I thought I knew. This wasn't the man who took me to Sosaria, has a dead guy in his basement, and fought off a deranged fan with an uzi. This wasn't Richard Garriott the dreamer. This was someone else.
Now, I'm not a starry-eyed romanticist. I know that if you're going to be successful in business, you need to have some sort of business sense. In addition, I know that you need to follow trends and patterns to see where the money is. In this sense, he's right. Social, casual games are making a lot of people a lot of money. But he's right about another thing too:
Gaming is reaching all of humanity.
Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies on its launch date. More than 10 million people play World of Warcraft. There is a reality TV show called the Tester about people vying for a video game testing job that is being renewed for a second season. There have been video game weddings, video game proposals, video game museums, video game concerts, and extensive video game-related communities with people of all ages, races, genders, backgrounds, and beliefs. Gaming is finally being accepted as a legitimate art form. This is the era of gaming in which it realizes its true potential. Games are now able to tell their stories and share their experiences with a massive whole new congregation, and the man who could be at the forefront of that wants to make another Farmville?
The rest of the night went on in a similar fashion. Questions were asked by the audience, but none of them were about games. At one point Richard Garriott mentioned that he had never employed a game designer that he felt was better than himself, and it took pretty much all I had not to mutter, "Well, that explains Tabula Rasa."
I hate to sound bitter, and in all actuality, I had a great time. The food was great, I learned a lot, and I got to see a childhood hero in the flesh, even if he was a bit different than I expected. I still have an enormous amount of respect for the man, and if he ever decides to do a repeat of the '94 Descent Into Darkness Adventure at Britannia Manor, I'll be first in line, but if I need someone to help me push the boundaries of gaming, I think I'll ask Edmund McMillen.
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