Game Industry Legends: Richard Garriott de CayeuxGarriott's career spans the game industry from the Apple II days in 1979 to the present, where he is working at his newest company Portalarium on the next generation of gaming. Garriott created his first company, Origin Systems, along with his brother Robert, their father Owen and programmer Chuck Bueche. Origin Systems produced many notable games, industry luminaries (such as Warren Spector), and several important companies were created by Origin Systems alumni (including id Software and Digital Anvil). Origin Systems was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1992, and Garriott left to found Destination Games in 2000. Destination Games was acquired by Korean gaming company NCSoft less than a year later. Garriott left in 2008 and founded Portalarium, where today he's busy creating a new game to once again advance the state of the art.
Garriott's personal adventures have been equally as compelling as his fictional creations. He's a co-founder and board member of Space Adventures, which holds contracts with the Russian Federal Space Agency to broker private citizens traveling to the International Space Station. In 2008, Garriott realized his long-held dream of of following his astronaut father Owen into space; his adventures are chronicled in a new film, Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission. Earlier this year, Garriott married Laetitia de Cayeux and added her name to his, though he's still known mostly in the industry as Richard Garriott or Lord British, his game alter ego.
We talked to Richard about some of the changes he's seen in the industry, the difficulty of finding good designers, and where he thinks the industry is headed.
IndustryGamers: I'm trying to get a sense of perspective on the changes that have occurred in the game industry and how you think things have changed. Perhaps change is the only constant we can depend on.
Richard Garriott de Cayeux: I would argue also that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The technology of course advances monumentally quickly, but the on flip side the fundamentals of good game mechanics, the kinds of games that are popular, are relatively constant, but with each new grand era a new form of play is unearthed and becomes part of the lexicon of types of games and methods of creating them that people enjoy.
IG: I want to return to that subject, but first a little history. What was your first published game?
RGC: My first published game was the prequel to Ultima, Akalabeth. But even before that I wrote 28 small games on a teletype, D&D 1, D&D 2, through D&D 28, all for Dungeons & Dragons. This was circa 1974, when I was a big player of D&D, a reader of Lord of the Rings, and also had access to this teletype before there were even personal computers; I immediately began to create computer games. All the way back to about 1974, but then Akalabeth was my first published game, it was the prequel to Ultima, which obviously was the series that ran the longest.
IG: Akalabeth was what year?
RGC: That was released in 1980.
IG: When you did that game it was just you, you were the team.
RGC: Not only was Akalabeth written by myself, but Ultimas 1, 2, 3, amd 4 were essentially written by myself. Occasionally I'd get help with a subroutine or two or a piece of art here and there, but as a general rule all of the first 4 Ultimas and all of the prequels were written solo. It was only starting with Ultima 5 that I really began to have a team.
IG: Did you use artists on any of the earlier ones?
RGC: No, I did all the art, I did all the sound effects, I wrote every line of text, I wrote every line of code, I wrote all the manuals, the prequels and all the way up though Ultima 4 were almost entirely solo endeavors, in every aspect. It was a one-man band.
IG: Once more pixels were available it started to get more difficult, I guess.
RGC: In particular, once the graphical quality became sufficient to make use of a real artist, versus “Draw on graph paper then have to convert to binary, and convert that to hexadecimal, then type in the hexadecimal then have to figure out how to move that around on the screen.” Once there were art tools and paint tools and sufficient resolution to use them, then immediately artists became not only useful but essential.
Every artist we've ever hired has been a better artist than myself. Interestingly when we started hiring programmers, around the time of Ultima V, I believe I was at least as good a programmer as any other programmer. Over time now I no longer program and every programmer we hire is now a better programmer than me. In the field of design I am fairly critical of the vast majority of people who get into game design. What I mean by that is, some people have a magical art talent they picked up as a kid and then refined through education and then have a good portfolio of great art they've made, so you can hire them with confidence that they're a good artist. There's some that were nerdy enough as a kid to hack into computers and then go school and refine their coding technique so they can produce code samples and you can hire them with great confidence that you've hired a great programmer. Then there's the people who are neither artists nor programmers but still like to make games so they become designers. In my mind it is rare that anybody who gets into the field of design is actually better as a designer than all the programmers and all the artists, if you know what I mean. They have no background or skill or qualification that makes them better than the programmers and the artists, they just aren't a programmer and they aren't an artist as often as not.
What makes me a powerful designer is I did write all the code once upon a time. I did draw all the art once upon a time. And I was the only designer for many, many years. So now, even though I think there are clearly other great designers in the field of computer games, I think it is extraordinarily rare and I would argue that amongst all the teams I ever used to work on the one skill where I still remain at the top of the heap is design.
IG: With both art and programming, it's something you can iterate a lot and get better at it - there's lots of ways to study and get better. With game design, there's not a lot of training out there.
RGC: That's exactly right. It's interesting, as a company the most valuable thing I could do as a business owner was find more people like myself. Because I believe that game design is the hardest part of game making, and it's the most valuable part of game making. So if I'm going to identify or train another designer to replace me or to start another project other than mine, that would multiply the value of our company dramatically. So I have tried innumerable times to pass on what I consider to be my design methodologies. I think there's a variety of ways you can approach game design and a variety of ways you would be successful, but I have a decent one. I also know that I can describe it, I can show people exactly how I do what I can do, and I believe that if others were to go through the same process they would end up with, maybe not exactly the same results but equally worthy and quality results. My process is very labor-intensive, it's a very research-oriented approach to game design. I consider myself a student of the Tolkien style of fictional development, and yet virtually no one even in my own company, having heard me expound on this for years and years and years, will put in the long nights and weekends of study in order to come up with something that is of similar power.
IG: Tolkien was very methodical about how he developed his works...
RGC: As am I.
IG: … and he took a long time to develop his works, it's not something you just dash off. That level of detail...
RGC: ...and believability, and self-consistency, and power....
IG: There's a lot of craftsmanship that went into that.
RGC: That's right.
IG: It's hard to find that in a lot of companies. Many of them just say, get me the game by this date. Clearly the scale of things has grown by orders of magnitude in budgets and team size. How do you think that has affected game design? Positive or negative or neutral?
RGC: I think it has foundationally not helped. Here's what I mean by that. Machines get faster and faster but there are also major moments of technological improvement. And those major moments, things like going from floppy disk to hard drives, the invention of 3D graphics processors, the emergence of the Internet to connect people together, etc. Let's just take those as a sample. I'll use the genre of the first-person shooter as the touchstone for this story. If you look at those first games, then, if you're gonna make a new first-person shooter to compete with the original first-person shooter, it generally speaking has to have more depth. It has to have more of a reason than “walk around in a maze and shoot things” for you to want to buy it, having already now played a simple walk-around-in-the-maze-and-shoot-things game. That works fine right up until a major change. The games get deeper, and more literary, and more worthy and more interesting during this deepening process. However, as soon as there's one of those big technological upheavals, I'll say, the emergence of the CD drive, as soon as CD-ROM existed in games, suddenly you could store a buttload of art on those CD-ROMs, much more than you could ever store on a floppy, so immediately the graphic quality of the way you would draw your hallways and corridors in a simple first-person shooter became so much more beautiful that the game design, it allowed a great-selling game to be nothing more than a run-around-the-maze-and-shoot-things.
IG: The same basic design...
RGC: It went back to its simplest form again, you didn't need the depth. After CD-ROMs came out, the first guy to make a beautiful game that took advantage of the CD-ROM but was shallow, to compete with that game you had to make one a little deeper and a little deeper and a little deeper. So again, games started deepening, until suddenly with the emergence of 3D hardware, you can now render a scene that is so much better than you could by storing graphics on a CD-ROM, that again that play dynamic resets to the run-around-the-maze-and-shoot-each-other, that's now just a simple maze shooter again. But to compete with that game, over the next two years games get a little bit deeper and deeper and more interesting until the emergence of the Internet. Now with the emergence of the Internet instead of AIs in the maze you can have real people. The gameplay resets back to run-around-the-maze-and-shoot other real people in that maze, and then to compete with that game you have get a little deeper... you get the idea.
Every one of these inflection points resets gameplay back to where games are very shallow, but much more beautiful than they ever were before. But to a person who appreciates the art form of computer games, it's during those periods of stability of the platform that force developers to compete not just on my game looks better than yours, but my game is more interesting than yours. It's more compelling, and I'm more attached to it.
IG: Is this resetting of the games to a simple play state, is this a function of the fact that when a new technology comes along it usually requires a lot more programming and artwork...
RGC: Exactly, exactly. Just mastering the new technology takes the full time and bandwidth and budget of the development team.
IG: So there's nothing left over for the game design because it's hard enough just getting the game up on the screen.
RGC: But also, frankly, it's not necessary. Even if you had the time and budget, and said “feel free to take twice as long with twice the budget,” why would you do so? You're going to become the top-selling game if you ship now because there's no other game nearly as beautiful as yours because you're the first.
IG: Time to market is critical.
RGC: Exactly. So there's no economic motivation to pursue both. The winner of the first round will be the person out with a beautiful game to take advantage of the new technology.
Interview continues on Page Two!
