Interview with Richard Garriott, a.k.a Lord British | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Richard Garriott, a.k.a Lord British

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The Digital Antiquarian has a great article about Richard [1]. It's a bit of a long read but very interesting. The follow up article to this is about "Akalabeth", a game Richard wrote when was a teenager.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/lord-british/ [2] https://www.filfre.net/2011/12/akalabeth/

IGN unfiltered did a 3-part interview (IGN Unfiltered #17) with him as well that is worth viewing. Ryan McCafferty is a decent interviewer who shows a genuine love of the products and does his research:

https://ca.ign.com/videos/2017/03/15/richard-garriott-on-pul...

Thanks, I'll give it a go.

Playing Akalabeth on our elementary-school Apple ][, in a suburb on the other side of Houston from Garriott, helped pique my interest in programming.

I've played a lot of Ultima Online back in the day, which is probably Richard's most relevant creation.

It was a fantastic MMORPG. It was really balanced and it managed to be equally fun to be a "worker" (lumberjacker, farmer, blacksmith) or an adventurer. In the shards that I used to play, there were not a lot of overpowered players, so it was very common to see beggars and poverty in the urban centers of the game's world. And those were PLAYERS, not NPCs.

I don't think any game since then has achieved this kind of feel.

I completely agree. One of the things that I loved about UO, was that early on the bugs were as much a feature than the intended game features. They created what felt like an unbounded gameplay.

The world itself was extremely diverse and had some really decent scripted AI, and on top of that GMs/Guides could trigger events (like a massive undead spawn) to engage/mess with players. It was a riot.

If you ever have a hankering for UO again, it's free in many forms now. UO: Renaissance and UO: Outlands are held on private servers and I hear are very fun.

Star Wars: Galaxies managed that, too.

Richard is one of the most down-to-earth tech-celebrities out there. He is easy to talk to on Twitter, or email, or snail mail. He is, IMHO, among the most important historical figures in the game industry.

I wish I could find the hour-long, audio-only interview with him I listened to years ago. They basically talked through his whole career starting from learning to program.

The striking part was the repeated theme for each of his companies: He built a company and a team within. They had success and a subsequent buyout offer. He'd take the money and start a new company. But, his old team at the previous one really liked working with him. So, they'd all migrate over to the new company. He rinse-and-repeated this at least three times.

Is it this? https://www.wired.com/2014/03/geeks-guide-richard-garriott/

Nope. That was fun though.

I'm looking forward to reading Andrea Contato's upcoming book titled Through the Moongate – The Story of Richard Garriott, Origin Systems Inc. & Ultima: http://www.theira.it/through-the-moongate, which was Kickstarted recently https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1108065491/through-the-...

Garriot’s autobiography was one of my favorite reads from 2018: https://www.amazon.com/Explore-Create-Pursuit-Frontiers-Crea...

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