Richard Garriott

Steph is the Les Nesman of philosophy.

So Richard Garriott, was that? No, was that the? Anyway, so there was an actor who played a kind of nebbish newsman, Les Nesman.

It was a very funny character, very funny character.

He constantly had band-aids because he wanted to have the impression he had this mysterious life of perhaps violence or street fighting outside the office.

That's something I'd have to ask him sometimes.

Like, what was his main goal? But he got started in the video game industry working on Ultima games under Richard Garriott, the famous Richard Garriott.

And he... figured out that there were trends that were starting to crop up in America, trends that he could be on the cutting edge of if he decided to make games out of them.

One of the first trends he got into was anime, and specifically giant robot mecha anime.

So let's return to that avatar surge in the 1990s.

We owe a lot of that to this guy, the video game developer and entrepreneur Richard Garriott, who's credited for using the term avatar to refer to a gamer's onscreen representation.

Back in 1985, he was working on the game Ultima IV, an open world role playing game.

Unlike other RPGs at the time, Ultima IV incorporated a deep moral system, in which a player's decisions and actions directly affected their ethical standing in the game.

And just this scene that was burned, and I thought I was going to be in that office forever for the rest of time.

wild and like you know and and again like we're doing this job that nobody even understood was a job and is it even a legitimate thing yeah and then you meet other people like you'd meet Carmack or we'd meet like uh Richard Garriott or somebody the publisher who's yeah you know Lord British who had done the the Ultima games and we'd be like you know it's legitimate we're all here it's okay we own cars yeah it's okay you know we're able to like pay rent and even even make money um So we got to the point at Looking Glass where we were like a real company.

We had revenue and so we thought we should have like insurance and we wanted to have an offsite to improve our whatever.

I can't even remember where it was anymore.

Like those 80s games, like Ultima or whatever.

Richard Garriott's creations.

Yeah, I don't know what that is, but...

Richard Garriott created Ultima, I think.

Oh, okay.

I see, I see.

You see Lord Britain? Richard Garriott, British-American video game developer.

Okay.

Seems like we are in a golden age of developers from the 1980s coming back for one more run, doesn't it?

I really hope this lands better than Lord British's attempts to bring back not quite Ultima.

I mean, this will be not quite Bard's Tale, although it sounds as if it'll be further from Bard's Tale than Lord British was trying with the Treasure of the Avatar and so on.

And from what I've heard today, I'm optimistic about it.

I think this sounds good.

hey? Well, we were talking about who would be great guests.

And we had Richard Garion, who was Lord British, who's huge in the digital gaming world.

We had Gary Gygax, who created D&D.

We had Michael Morty, who did fantasy, created Elric.