©2018 by Andreas Przygienda and Ellouise McGeachie. All rights reserved. This is a
translation of the Italian manuscript, which is ©2018 by Andrea Contato.
Change of Guards
“Richard and I got shiny new 25 MHz 386 boxes that neither of us
knew how to use. He got busy on the design side, and I started
reading books on C and x86 assembly programming.”
John Miles
“There was less of a division between programming and game design
in those days.”
Herman Miller
At the end of 1988, Ken Arnold left Origin to become a Systems and
Hardware Engineer at Dell, while Dallas Snell finally abandoned his
role as programmer to become an Executive Producer, responsible for
the development of projects in New Hampshire and Austin. John Miles
and Richard Garriott, who were behind a large part of the programming
work for Ultima V, took a step back and abandoned the programming
of the sequel due to unfamiliarity with the new platform. With the “old
guard” of Apple II programmers out of the game because they had been
transferred, promoted to management positions, or were temporarily
unavailable, the technicians who had until now been in charge of porting
became the company’s most important resource; and the only workforce
able to operate immediately and prevent the assembly line from
stopping irremediably.
Herman Miller and Cheryl Chen were then transferred from New
Hampshire, where they had previously worked on porting for the IBM
PC, and were put to work under Richard’s leadership, forming the backbone
of the new team.
Xiao “Cheryl” Chen was a young programmer from China who came
to the United States to study computer science at Boston College and
recently arrived at Origin after responding to a job advertisement in the
local newspaper. Prior, she had converted games such as Chris Roberts’
Times of Lore, Chuck Bueche’s 2400 A.D. and, of course, Ultima V to
IBM PCs but she had also shared her knowledge of Chinese culture with
Paul Malone for the game Windwalker, Moebius’ sequel.
Herman Miller had also recently joined Origin’s staff having sent his
curriculum vitae to several software houses. He was passionate about
role-playing, eager to apply his knowledge of the IBM PC platform and
Assembly on the MOS 6502, and wanted to make a career in the video
game industry. Origin was looking for someone to take Ultima V to the IBM PC and John Fachini was in charge of leading the team of programmers.
Miller’s candidature arrived at the right time as the young man
was immediately hired.
Freshly recruited, Chen and Miller, along with Ed Nelson, were placed
to work on Ultima V, on different pieces of the code. The programming
was executed simultaneously with the development of the Apple II version
done by Garriott’s team in Texas. Miller: “We would periodically
get updates of source code from the game, written in 6502 assembly
language. Then we’d make printouts of the code, and translate them
into the C programming language or 8086 assembly language. The PC
port was mostly written in C, with assembly language for graphics or
anything that needed to be optimized to run faster. We worked in adjacent
offices and shared code by carrying 51
⁄4” floppy disks from room
to room; we didn’t have a file server or version control software in those
days. We just divided up the tasks between us so that each of us was
working on a different part of the game at the same time”.
Thanks to the efforts of the entire team, the port of Ultima V was a
success. Also, because the game used the newer EGA video standard
which was superior to the old graphics capabilities of the Apple II, Ultima
V on PC was much more colorful. But what was still missing on
IBM machines was support for custom sound cards such as the Apple
II’s Mockingboard used by Kenneth Arnold for Exodus years earlier.
In addition to Chen and Miller, Dr. Cat joined the Ultima VI team
as well. Along with a growing number of developers, Dr. Cat had already
been transferred to Texas towards the end of the porting of Ultima
V to the Commodore 64/128, a move that had allowed the version
to be released at the same time as the original version for Apple II. In
fact, the headquarters in New Hampshire was emptying and would soon
be permanently closed in favor of Austin. Even Robert Garriott would
eventually have to capitulate and return to commute and visit the headquarters
in Austin a couple of times a month, as well as direct it from
a distance.
Employees who were unfamiliar with the IBM PC were trained or
moved to projects where their skills could be put to best use. For example,
John Miles, after “digging a furrow along the way to the offices”
of Cheryl and Herman, had “to ask one stupid question after another”
in his effort to master x86 Assembly. He felt prepared enough to go
back to programming, but did not deal with game development anymore:
rather, he was hijacked to create development tools and middleware.
Miles: “The segmented architecture in use by MS-DOS in those
days was miserable to live with, so I started working on general-purpose
libraries that would allow us to use C whenever possible”.
With the exception of the intro and end sequence of Ultima VI, Miles
would no longer be directly involved in the development of a video game.
However, the tools he created before leaving Origin would earn him numerous
accreditations for many of the most successful titles OSI would
produce in the years to come.
One of the most important recruitments of the ’88-’90 period was
that of Warren Spector.
Born October 2nd, 1955, Spector was six years older than Richard
and one of the oldest employees among OSI staff. He had a bachelor’s
degree in Communication Science from Northwestern University, Illinois,
and a master’s degree in Radio-TV-Film from Austin University.
Here, looking for a way to pay the rent, he came across Steve Jackson
and started working with Steve Jackson Games (SJG).
Spector quickly made a career at Jackson’s company, starting as a
simple editor and becoming responsible for the magazines. His career
had made a turn for the better, when he left SJG and managed to jump
on the diligence of TSR, the publishing house that owned the rights to
D&D, one of the most influential companies in the world of table games
and role-playing, and had managed a great product: Top Secret/S.I.
(1987).
Spector’s first meeting with Garriott took place in Richard’s “black
period”, and Warren had not failed to notice the conspicuous Mitsubishi
from which the programmer had come down to visit Steve Jackson, but
on that occasion the two had not even spoken. The second, decisive
meeting took place in 1987. Spector: “I was working at TSR in Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin in the late-80s. I returned to Austin, TX to be on
a panel at a science fiction convention called Armadillocon and found
myself on a panel with Richard. He was working on Ultima V at the
time and, as he and I each talked about games on the panel it became
apparent that we were sympatico on a lot of things.”
Upon returning to Lake Geneva, Warren began to feel homesickness
and dissatisfaction with his job. Denis Loubet’s phone call came at the
right time: “He said Origin was looking for an Associate Producer and
asked if I was interested. I said yes because I was obsessed with video
games back then and because it was an opportunity to get back home
to Austin.”
Knowing him since SJG, Loubet had probably talked with his colleagues
about the new candidate because it didn’t take long for Spector
to get an appointment. Nevertheless, winning a place at Origin was not
at all easy: “The guy [Dallas Snell] who headed up production put me
through the wringer - a nine-hour interview! - and then handed me off
to Richard, Chris Roberts and some of the other creative types there at
the time. They must have liked what they heard because they offered
me a job (at a substantial pay cut!) and next thing I knew I was making
computer games.”
Always animated by a great passion for cinema, Spector tried to bring
some cinematography into the video game industry, reorganizing the
structure of OSI according to a hierarchical scheme very similar to that
of Hollywood productions. His innovative idea would quickly take hold
in the whole industry, as this form of entertainment is not substantially different from a sort of interactive cinema. The introduction of the
CD-ROM and pioneers like Night Trap (1992) and, above all, 7th Guest
(1993) would soon make it clear that Warren was not wrong.
Consistent with his understanding of the creative process of video
games, he carved out the role of producer for several Origin titles under
development and helped Richard design Ultima VI. Already accustomed
to administering day-to-day operations, Spector would soon take over
Origin’s productions and allow the various development teams to express
their full potential, leading the company to its creative peak.
With renewed energy, Richard and the Origin staff got to work with
the goal of completing Ultima VI with a dead line set for early 1990.
It was without a doubt one of the most demanding periods for Garriott.
Deprived of sleep by work and worry, Richard began to fear for the
worst possible scenario, a delay in completing Ultima VI or a poor reception
by the public. The company’s remaining days were numbered and
Richard, who had generally never been on time, first with the delivery
date imposed by California Pacific Computer Company (CPCC), then by
On-Line Systems, could not afford to miss the deadline in March 1990.
Despair, he wrote, motivated him a great deal.
Carefully balancing time and available resources without giving in
to the temptation to cut content, features, or keeping the overall quality
of the product down in order to finish earlier, Richard still had to abandon
the engine he had written and improved from version to version
since 1978, to start his project from scratch on a new platform. Luckily,
Origin’s first published Chris Roberts game, Times of Lore, which
had bequeathed a much more user friendly interface than the Ultima V
one, and the team used it as a starting point. Just as he did with D&D
1 for the first time, Richard first created the software technology and
then, realizing its potential, began to develop the game.
The choice he had in front of him was decidedly complex. Until then,
OSI’s prototypes were specific to machines with highly standardized
hardware and the software that had been written for Apple II, due to
the design of Wozniak’s platform, was compatible on all subsequent revisions,
except for requiring memory expansions for the most complex
programs. The choice to implement a soundtrack and advanced audio
functionality was in fact the only feature dedicated to those who had
enhanced their hardware with optional sound cards such as the Mockingboard.
Developing on such machines, or bringing the software to platforms
such as the Commodore 64, which had a CPU fully compatible with the
Apple II 6502 one, was relatively simple, mostly because the programmers
had to deal with machines that had standardized hardware. With
the transition to the PC, everything was destined to change because the
market was made up of users who had PCs equipped with peripherals
and components produced by different companies, and very different
specifications. While the avant-garde was perhaps equipped with Hard Disks and dedicated sound cards, there was also a large market of older
machines, with cheap processors, older versions of MS-DOS, floppy disk
drives (51
⁄4” or 31
⁄2”) and the PC speaker as audio device.
Faced with the choice of how to develop PC games, some software
houses focused on products that were compatible with most of the available
PCs at the time, to reach the largest possible share of the installation
base. This strategy required a great deal of sacrifice: Games were
being developed to work on the least performing as well as the most
advanced hardware and, as a result, they risked spending money on
publishing and marketing while appearing to be already outdated by
the end of the whole process in comparison to the products of competitors
who operated with a different approach. Other software houses,
such as Sierra On-Line, decided to produce games for more advanced
systems by counting on the “wow” factor, superior graphics and audio
to amaze, as well as getting high sales and counting on the fact that
their product would still be bought even by those who would update
their hardware later.
Garriott and OSI decided to follow this strategy. Rather than looking
for the lowest common denominator in the market to reach more users,
they focused on developing games for cutting-edge hardware, creating
games specifically aiming at the new VGA video cards and computers
equipped with sound cards. This strategy, as we will see, was not without
risks and contraindications. In order to create a game for the most
advanced technology available, Richard needed technically capable and
above all, more numerous teams than what was standard at the time.
The first four chapters of Ultima were written personally by Garriott,
who resorted to the help of friends and collaborators for some special
features such as the tiles engine and the soundtrack by Arnold. The
fifth chapter of the series was largely written by Miles and Garriott,
with the help of Arnold for the music and Loubet for tile graphics. However,
with the sixth chapter, everything had changed. Richard’s temporary
exemption from programming, instrumental in giving him the time
to learn the new x86 Assembly language, had become definitive. Reluctantly,
Garriott ended up leaving the entire programming to others,
devoting himself exclusively to the design of the game.
The development team grew considerably in a few months to include
four programmers (Cheryl Chen, John Miles, Herman Miller and Gary
Scott Smith), who dealt with different aspects of the code and sharing
tasks. Other new additions to the team also included many technicians,
musicians, designers and writers. The transition of the video game industry
to more maturity was underway, but not yet complete, at least at
Origin. Development teams had grown to involve people with different
skills but staff were not yet completely specialized. Dr. Cat, for example,
although joining Origin as a programmer, entered the Ultima VI project
as a plot and dialog writer. In the same way, Miller, in addition to programming
a considerable part of the game, ended up taking care of the soundtrack.
The subdivision of roles and areas of expertise was in place, but not
yet complete, and Origin could not yet afford to hire specialists for each
area. Nevertheless, the path was set and OSI would follow it to the end,
with such strength that it would become a pioneer in the industry.
One of the main obstacles to the specialization of roles, besides the
economic factor, was the almost total lack of suitable tools to create
games without having strong programming knowledge. Miller: “Sound
on the PC was very primitive in those days and typically involved programming.
Most PCs just had a speaker that could play a single tone
at a time, and you needed to do rapid pitch changes with careful timing
in order to get more interesting sound effects.”
In the absence of suitable instruments, writing music on a PC was
more of a programming job than composition work, and excellent musicians
would have been completely disorientated when lacking good
computer skills, while being faced with the complex technique necessary
to allow PCs to emit sounds and melodies.
The same problem also afflicted all those who were in charge of writing
the dialogs, deciding the interactions between the NPCs and the
player, implementing interactivity with the world and integrating the
plot into the game world, which they had to draw piece by piece. For
them too, powerful development tools were not available and therefore
a certain programming competence was required to make the code for
managing NPCs or dialogs work. The roles of programmers, designers
and writers were therefore blurred, without a clear and defined line of
demarcation. Cheryl Chen, for example, was mainly in charge of the
UCS, the Ultima Conversation System, the code for managing dialogs
with NPCs, while others had to learn the scripting language in order to
implement the conversations as planned in the design.
Among the latter, there was another new enlistment in Origin. Manda
had recently joined the company.
[“My whole name is Manda, no name. There’s actually someone else called Amanda
Dee, and she’s a video game producer.”]
In 1988, when she gave in to three invitations
from her acquaintances, Denis Loubet, Jeff Dee and Dr. Cat,
she submitted her candidacy and was hired mainly as a graphic designer.
Her first assignment was with Greg Malone’s Windwalker, for
whom she did some small graphic work “like pandas and bamboo”, but
her technical skills were remarkable and allowed her to create a small
software for scanning images, connecting a fax machine to the Commodore
64.
It’s no surprise in the Ultima VI team, Manda ended up playing two
roles at once: as a graphic designer, drawing different portraits of PNG,
and as a writer, using Chen’s UCS to implement characters dialogs. This
was not an isolated case.
Cheryl Chen’s creation was much more user friendly than the parser implemented in the previous chapters. Instead of forcing the player to
use the usual terms such as “name”, “job”, “health” or guessing the
keyword with which to activate an NPC response, the new dialog engine
highlighted the sensitive words that the player could use in dialogs. In
truth, at least in the first versions, the useful words were not immediately
recognizable. Manda: “The scripting language let me introduce
more keywords, which I had it highlight. In the very very first version,
there was no highlighting. Highlighting keywords came in later, which
made it less challenging– less like an actual conversation. The trade-off
was that it guaranteed players wouldn’t miss anything important.”
In keeping with Richard’s habit of including characters inspired by
real people in his games, he was invited to meet and get to know them,
in order to be able to represent them in the best possible way with his
portraits. Therefore, to be able to make the portrait of Iolo, Manda went
to the workshop of David Watson, where the master bow maker taught
her how to build real crossbows. When Manda met Sherry, whose nickname
was “Mouse”, a girl Richard was seeing at the time, she was very
impressed with her ways and character: “I thought she has such a big
heart, the little portrait has to have a heart-shaped patch on her front.”
This is how the image of the character of Sherry the Mouse was
born, even if the shape of the mouse, apart from the stain, was actually
inspired by Peanut a.k.a. Hamsterball Lecter, the hamster of Dr. Cat,
a very adventurous animal, who used to escape and was recaptured in
one way: the owner, or Manda, had to lie down on the ground and keep
a hand open with some sesame seeds, until the hamster approached to
eat.
Even some programmers ended up in the game. Manda’s virtual
alter ego is Penumbra: “I’m into herbs and gardening, and Richard created
the character as the resident of a cottage with a naughty garden
full of sleep and poison patches that the Avatar has to cross”. Penumbra’s
drawing was a self-portrait of Manda, who granted himself a small
license and disregarded the rule of Richard who had decided to make
the world of Ultima different from other fantasy populated by the usual
dwarfs and elves. Manda: “If you look carefully, you might notice she
has pointed ears. Perhaps there are still elves in Sosaria, after all.”
The team of writers was very large and, in addition to Manda, obviously
included Richard and Warren Spector, Greg Paul Malone II, John
Miles, Herman Miller, Todd Mitchell Porter and Dr. Cat. The latter, in
truth, had a leadership role on the team, although not official at the level
of accreditation. On the cover of Ultima V he was given the credit for
the game’s port, which had never happened before. He didn’t do as well
as the writing manager, and the episode remained in Dr. Cat’s memory
with a hint of disappointment: “On Ultima VI, the in-game credits only
listed me as one of the writers rather than give me the Head Writer title
they used for me at the office, they said they hadn’t decided to credit
head writers.”
Herman Miller, besides dealing with a generous portion of the Ultima
VI code, implemented the monster “spawn” system and came up with a
name for: “I also came up with the idea of monster spawners, which we
called ‘eggs’ as the icon in the map editor looked like an egg.”
Since Ken Arnold, the programmer/musician who had dealt with
the previous titles had left Origin, it was Miller’s turn to write the code
necessary for the chosen soundtrack to be played on the most popular
sound cards: AdLib Music Synthesizer Card, Creative Labs Sound
Blaster and the cards based on the industry standard for music hardware,
the Roland MT-32 synthesizer module. The music itself was composed
mainly by a new recruitment of Origin: Todd Mitchel Porter.
The history of the latter’s entry into Origin says a lot about Origin’s
recruitment policy and informal culture before the 1990s. Porter’s
dream in the drawer was to enter the video game industry and he had
devoted much of his free time from work to write a role-playing game
called Knights of Legend. When Porter felt he was ready, he asked a
friend at Penguin Software, the software house from which many of
Origin’s first generation of programmers and managers had come, for
help to get in touch with OSI executives.
Fortunately, the contact between Porter and Origin was established
just when Richard was visiting Austin to arrange accommodation for
his company’s detached headquarters. It was thus relatively easy for
the candidate to arrange a meeting with Garriott.
Porter: “I could not believe my luck! I drove to Austin and met
Richard who was looking at properties to open up an office of Origin
in Texas. Richard was unbelievably nice. He spent the entire day with
me and I showed him my game. We talked for many hours and I think
it was around midnight when he said – ‘Let us publish your game’ and
literally wrote out a quick contract on a napkin. I could not believe that
a random call had led (not 24 hours later) to a publishing contract.”
Knights of Legend was released in 1989, just before Ultima VI, and
was supposed to be episodic in nature, prompting its buyers to buy the
next expansions to complete the adventure, a bit like the Apshai saga.
Unfortunately, sales were not good, although the reviews were positive.
This put an end to the series, but Porter’s career in Origin lasted a little
bit longer, before he left the company for California, landed at SSI and
worked on the series of D&D games well known as the Gold Box series.
For Ultima VI, Porter proposed some pieces he had composed on his
guitar. As the great-grandson of the famous Chet Atkins, Todd Mitchell
had learned to play since he was a child, even though he had never
learned to write music: his way of composing was instinctive, by ear,
and translating his productions into machine code was a challenge.
Porter: “I did so by ear using some software to lay in the notes. I’d
play a sequence on guitar and then note by note (listening to the tones)
transcribed them to the computer. Funny note, many years later I was
playing one of the songs at a Game Developers Conference and some guys came up to me and said – ‘Oh my gosh that is so cool, you transcribed
an old Ultima VI song to the guitar!’ I laughed and told them
that actually the song started on the guitar and I translated it to the
computer!”
Miller’s work of rearranging the music written by Ken Arnold for the
previous episodes of Ultima and those written by Todd Mitchell Porter
and lent to Ultima VI, did not prevent him from creating an original
track, “Audchar Gargl Zenmur”, which in the Gargoyle language means
“Song of the Gargoyle people”. Miller’s track had a very interesting peculiarity:
it was designed to be played for the first time alone and, at
the end of the game, at the same time as “Rule, Britannia”, the readjustment
of the famous British patriotic song, written by Ken Arnold for
Exodus and later become the hymn of Ultima and the solemn accompanying
music of Lord British.
The reasons for this curious choice are explained below.
For the second time, the ballad Stones, the piece written by David
Watson and his wife Kathleen Jones, returned to the 12 tracks chosen
for the published version.
Among the team of writers there was another new entry: Siobhan
Beeman, then known as Stephen, was a student at the University of
Texas in Austin. Passionate about role-playing, she attended a center
called Hexworld, led by a freelance game writer named David Ladyman.
At Hexworld, Beeman had the opportunity to meet the man who would
set her career in the gaming industry in motion: Scott Haring, the head
of Car Wars’ line at SJG.
Siobhan was a fierce Car Wars player and the meeting allowed her
to participate assiduously in the testing sessions of the game designed
by Jackson. When Haring left SJG in 1987, Beeman was immediately
hired to replace the game designer and in Jackson’s company had the
opportunity to meet and get to know Warren Spector and Jeff George.
A little less than two years later, in the summer of 1989, Origin was
looking for staff, mainly writers, to join the team working on Ultima VI.
Beeman applied and thanks to the assurances of Spector and George,
who had been able to work with her, got the job and was put to work on
the characters of the Gargoyle race.
It wasn’t a simple task because, it was necessary for Beeman to find a
way to make the individual Gargoyles special and unique. Beeman: “We
were painting with a broad brush, I’m afraid, but the results were fun”.
The only human character that Siobhan had to create was Pridgarm,
who guarded Yew’s cells, and to characterize him was inspired by the
advertising of a company of biscuits named “Pepperidge Farms”, depicting
a twentieth-century Yankee old style.
[The advertising character of “Pepperidge Farms” will then be the subject of a tribute
from the animation series Family Guy and will become a widespread Internet meme.]
.
The team of artists also collaborated with all the programmers and writers, but first and foremost, Denis Loubet. According to an internal
structure that would survive for a short time until 1992, the year
of the Electronic Arts acquisition of Origin, designers and artists were
a resource shared by the whole company, organized into a group of
autonomous work, whose services could be requested by the teams,
working on different projects. For Ultima VI, Loubet touched an important
part of the work: the cover of the box, several portraits and a
large amount of tiles. The new graphics engine, in addition to having a
higher resolution and a wider palette, was able to draw the world using
an unprecedented tile set of 2,048 pieces, creating a huge mosaic.
It was too onerous a job for anyone and Loubet, looking for helpers,
suggested that his superiors hire an old acquaintance of the paperbased
gaming industry, Jeff Dee. The latter had long been looking for a
job and had sent his curriculum vitae to several companies, forgetting
OSI. The call from Origin came as a surprise, but the interview went
well and Dee was hired and immediately put to work on a Paul Neurath
project, Space Rogue. Once finished helping the programmer, Jeff
was hijacked for Ultima VI and then for Worlds of Ultima: The Savage
Empire.
In addition to Loubet and Dee, the team of artists consisted of Keith
Berdak, Daniel Bourbonnais, Glen Johnson and, of course, Manda. All
contributed to varying degrees to the completion of the graphic part of
Ultima VI, by far the most ambitious of all Origin projects to date.
In a hurry, Richard was convinced that the game would be published
exclusively for computers with VGA video cards, the best available at the
time, without the backward compatible features on older cards such as
EGA and CGA. It was Gary Smith’s turn to write the code needed to
readjust the graphics and scale them to lower resolutions with fewer
colors. Not without a great effort, the programmer surprised Garriott
by managing to implement in time a driver that automatically converted
the images to 256 colors in a palette of 16, 4 and even monochrome, for
those who had only a Hercules Monochrome.
Given the huge number of NPCs (202 were counted by fans, but Dr.
Cat remembers that he included almost 250), Richard also had doubts
as to whether it was possible, for each of them, to write the daily activity
chart, dialogs and even draw portraits in tight times. Dr. Cat set to work
on at least one-third of the dialogs, assigning to the team of writers
those whom he could not follow personally, and supervising the work
of his colleagues. Also Manda, who was already engaged with portraits,
gave a hand with the dialogs. Beeman had been hired for the Gargoyle
dialogs and focused on them, while Todd Porter, who had just finished
lending his music to the soundtrack, offered to populate the cities that
had been drawn, but were still deserted by inhabitants, all to be created
from scratch.
It was a tour de force, a “death march” in Porter’s words. Portraits
were the most critical phase. With the artists available, each designer would have to make six portraits a day in order to finish on time. Dr. Cat:
“The other 5 artists in the company finished 1 to 4 a day, depending on
how fast they were. Manda lowered her usual art quality level to turn up
her speed, and finished 6 a day. Since she hadn’t done much other art
at the company before (just converting the Windwalker art from Apple
4 color to the 16 on the C-64 for me while I was programming it), some
people at Origin on her next project were concerned she wasn’t a very
good artist. Then they saw the work she was doing on that one, and
realized that she was.”
The Gargoyle portraits, to have the same style, were entrusted to a
single artist, Berdak, while Jeff Dee took care of the fortune-teller.
With so many characters, even naming each one of them was a challenge.
Richard had always been inspired by friends, family, colleagues
and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Dr. Cat
started with the characters who had already appeared in Ultima’s universe,
but discovered that they weren’t enough.
At that time he attended, together with Manda, a group named Amtgard,
later known as High Fantasy Society, an association of fans similar
to the SCA. With the exception that the latter had as its purpose the
recreation of the medieval world, while the members of Amtgard were
interested in the fantasy world. Dr. Cat and Manda, decided to get help
from Amtgard’s friends and to create NPCs based on the members of
this association.
The idea was successful and the NPCs were completed on time, but
the most entertaining consequence, without a shadow of a doubt, came
when Richard was invited, along with other SCA members, to participate
in an Amtgard event. Dr. Cat: “Various members of the group
came up to the head table to bow and greet our visiting noble. And
a number of them thanked him for the privilege of having a character
named for them in his game. So multiple times that evening I got to
watch the expression on his face briefly betray his bewilderment as he
tried to be polite and friendly, but was clearly thinking ‘What’s going on
with all these people I never met and heard of being in my Ultima?’ An
experience he’d clearly never had before! I found it quite amusing.”
Without the staff knowing, it was a race against time that had as its
prize not only the success of the game, but the salvation of the company.
Richard and Robert, deciding to move forward, had put everything they
had on the plate, in the biggest bet of their professional lives.
Dr. Cat: “They didn’t tell any of us staff, but the company was running
out of money & couldn’t get any more bank loans, so if Ultima
VI wasn’t finished by the beginning of March, the company would go
bankrupt. Richard Garriott loaned the company all the money he had
at the time, except he kept just enough that if the company went out
of business, he could pay everyone one month’s pay to tide them over
while they looked for new jobs. Of course since they didn’t tell us about
this, we weren’t worried and could just concentrate on making a good game and trying to finish by March 1st as they asked us to.”
Extraordinarily, Garriott’s staff managed to complete the work on
time and send it to print. As usual, the staff celebrated the completion
of the project, but did not get time to enjoy a deserved rest because
Warren Spector, believing he had a particularly interesting product in
his hands, almost immediately moved all the resources available to a
project that Chris Roberts had been carrying out for over two years, a
simulation game of space fighting with the temporary name Wingleader.
Happy with the work done, and confident that he had saved his company,
Richard was still exhausted from the tour de force that led to the
completion of Ultima VI, when some users reported a problem with the
game’s operation. Attempting to reproduce the malfunction, Origin engineers
concluded that Ultima VI could not work properly if played directly
from the 51
⁄4” or 31
⁄2” floppies, while the problem did not arise for
users who had the game installed on Hard Disk.
Investigating the matter, OSI’s managers soon came to the conclusion:
the game had been programmed on advanced hardware, i.e. PCs
equipped with Hard Disk, a device that, in 1990, was not yet standard,
although it began to be relatively popular. Since no one had tested the
floppy game, the defect had escaped everyone and the game had gone
to press with a very serious bug that prevented it from being used on
PCs not equipped with HD.
Richard Garriott: “It turned out that if you tried to play the entire
game on floppy-disc drives and did not have a hard drive, it failed. That
wasn’t true only for the person who called or for our programmer, it
was true for every person on earth who did not install this to a hard
drive. And at that point less than 10 percent of consumers owned a
hard drive”.
[Garriott, Richard (2017). Explore/Create. (Chapter 5)]
When the bug was finally found and reproduced, Origin had already
printed and shipped hundreds of thousands of copies and Richard and
Robert found themselves having to seriously consider that, in spite of
everything, Origin would fail, taking all their savings with it. With nothing
left to do, the two prepared for the worst, but to some surprise, the
reports soon indicated that the percentage of users who had reported
malfunctions, and made the game, was substantially unchanged from
that expected for printing errors and defective magnetic media. So it
was then that Richard had discovered that the choice to create games
for the most advanced hardware was a good one and that, indeed, the
first to buy Ultima VI were those who had, for the most part, platforms
with latest generation components and hard disks. As Garriott had
to remember later, even though only a minority of PC users had hard
drives, almost all Ultima VI purchasers didn’t notice the bug, not using
the game directly from the floppy, they didn’t run into the fateful
crashes that made it impossible to complete.
Origin was saved and, indeed was about to publish a masterpiece
that would make it known throughout the world, dispelling forever the
myth that OSI was only the company for the Ultima series.
(if you have any...)
