Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Banished from his own Ultima domains, game designer Richard Garriott is making a comeback, via Korea.
Dec 4, 2001 | Lord British, immortal sovereign of all Britannia, is sitting on a squeaky chair in my apartment, sipping a glass of water. He's about to lead me through the domains of his new realm, one that stretches across continents and oceans -- as soon as his publicist can get a solid connection to AOL on his laptop.
If it's momentarily difficult to separate Lord British, the computer game character who's been around pretty much since the medium existed, from Richard Garriott, the Austin-based game designer who created him, that's because Garriott himself has helped to blur the distinction. Lord British, typically residing on his throne in a jewel-encrusted castle, has been a ubiquitous presence throughout Garriott's line of Ultima fantasy role-playing games, as well as in Ultima Online, the groundbreaking, massively multiplayer role-playing game (or MMRPG) that still enjoys an active membership in the hundreds of thousands.
Lord British was a pseudonym Garriott chose for his own role-playing persona, way back in high school Dungeons & Dragons sessions (shortly before he began creating computer games in his parents' garage), as a nod to his English birth. The pseudonym became a persona he was even willing to play in real life, as his Ultima games grew in popularity.
"I'd often go to trade shows in Lord British attire, signing game boxes as Lord British and Richard Garriott," he tells me a few days before his appearance in San Francisco. "In my first almost 10 games in the computer game industry, most people actually didn't know who Richard Garriott was. The Lord British moniker was so pervasive that it clearly superseded the knowness, or whatever the right word would be there, of who I really am, Richard Garriott."
Even for me, there's a momentary disjunction, trying to square my previous mental image of Richard Garriott -- the guy who seemed to be taking it all just a bit too seriously, dispensing copies of his games while wearing a crown and a robe -- with the guy now in my apartment, a solidly built, blond Texan in light blue denim shirt and jeans. (His only visible connection to the Ultima universe is the silver, serpentine pendant dangling from his neck.)
Today, Lord British is no more, at least in the Ultima fantasy lands, a victim of a corporate takeover and, in Garriott's view, shortsighted management.
It hasn't been easy. "I'm 40 years old right now, so literally half my life has been invested in the creation of that property," he tells me. "So yes, to step away from it is clearly somewhat of a traumatic, big deal for me."
Then again, he says, Ultima and Lord British have also been a creative burden, an economic gold mine that made it difficult for him to do anything apart from that franchise. "Yes, it's sad to have left it behind, but boy am I excited to be finally doing something not called Ultima."
He's talking about the aptly titled Tabula Rasa, an online game currently in development, which he says will draw from the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Plato's "Republic." But that's not why he's in my apartment. At the moment, he's overseeing the American debut of Lineage: The Blood Pledge, an online role-playing game that entertains millions of Asian game players.
Lineage, through a bizarre confluence of addictive gameplay, globalization and international historical grievances, is a huge phenomenon in its native country of Korea. The game is so popular there that its online conflicts often spill out into real-life fistfights. It's also, at first glance, far too foreign to ever make a truly successful crossover title in the United States.
But Lineage is the game Lord British has tied his fate to -- a surreal position to be in, when you consider the kind of astounding tectonic shifts, culturally and financially, that have happened to make that possible.
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