How Richard Garriott got started in games | Hacker News Reader

How Richard Garriott got started in games

polygon.com

29 pointslnguyen6 comments

Lots of credit goes to the Garriott's high school administrators for being supportive:

> When I got back to Houston, I told the faculty, 'I want to continue working on this machine. There is no curriculum [for computer programming]. What I would like is your permission to, instead of taking a foreign language, please consider BASIC my foreign language.'"

> The faculty gave him its blessing. Over his junior and senior years, Garriott and a few other students with permission to tailor their curriculum to their strengths embarked on self-guided journeys.

And later on, the school president's office let him use the new Apple computer. Granted, times were different and records may not have been computerised, so there was no threat of changing grades and HACKING.

Garriott, and more specifically, the Ultimas, are the sole reasons I became a programmer. I first played Ultima 5 on a monochrome C64 monitor. Seeing the technological leaps up until the 8th sequel was mind-blowing to a younger me. There was something there that sadly will never be replicated. The lack of an internet connection meant there was nothing available other than a box, a manual, and a map to feed the imagination. I was even further disconnected from the world given I grew up in the countryside where neighbors were scarce.

I remember me and my brothers all huddling around the screen on rainy days, the four of us trying to assume the identities of the default party members - it literally felt like looking into a portal to another world.

It was an emulator for Ultima Online called RunUO that ignited my passion for game development. The ability to alter a few lines of code and see that reflected in the game was so damn exciting. Happy to say 15 years later working on my latest game in UE4 that feeling still endures. Thank you Richard Garriott and the RunUO team ;)

I had a similar experience. I wouldn't say it directly led to my career (but certainly influenced) as a software engineer, but it did shape the way I view the world.

Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar taught me about an alternative set of ethics. While too simple for real use, it was aspirational enough to get me thinking about alternatives to what I'd been taught. Ultima VI: The False Prophet led me to acknowledge good and evil typically are informed by individual (or group) point of view. Ultima VII: The Black Gate taught me to look at religion critically, to see that beyond the surface message there are often other messages that go unnoticed.

There's no question that Garriott tapped into something deep inside me that is still coming out to this day.

I suspect that Richard's first computer was an Apple ][+, not an Apple //e (as claimed by the article), as Ultima existed (published 1981) well before the Apple //e was released (1983).

Correct, it absolutely would not have been a //e. Not that it really makes a difference, but still, that was a weird thing for an otherwise-decent article (or rather, book excerpt) to get wrong.

His first Apple, circa 1979, was probably an original Apple II with a language card, equivalent to the II+ that came out in mid-year.

Interesting to note that it was so expensive that even a senior NASA astronaut, probably a GS-13, had to split the cost with his son.

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