Ep 24: Mike Chen Interview

So what inspired the story specifically?

Um, so, you know, I talked about like the, what happens after this will date me, but there's a very, very specific, um, PC role-playing game from the, I believe it's released in like 87 or 88, but I didn't play it until like the early nineties.

The series is called Ultima.

There were like nine games in the main franchise dating from like 1980 to I think like 1999.

Ultima V is called Warriors of Destiny.

So this series was really unique because it's like in many ways, your standard like Dungeons and Dragons style, like fantasy role-playing game.

But the middle part is Ultima IV, V, and VI.

The creators named a man named Richard Garriott, who I named the Land of Garriott after.

He wanted to do more than just like a hack and slash dungeon crawler.

And so Ultima IV is about the character kind of restoring the land by identifying these seven virtues, like courage and truth and things like that, and becoming what's called an avatar for them throughout the land.

And so kind of restoring a sense of dignity and justice to a ravaged fantasy world.

And then Ultima V, is like where this is appropriate for our world where a dictator takes those virtues puts them to an extreme and winds up kind of terrifying the the land by saying like if you do not meet the virtues exactly by my definition then you know you're going to be under like house arrest and he uses it to kind of like steal the resources of the land um which i mean i guess that's always an apt metaphor yeah so at the end of ultima 5 after you go through the journey the player character so the game the games always start by um like this cut scene where the character is in like the real world and then they go somewhere, and they have the portal, and they've done this before, so they know this is the portal back to that land.

And so at the end of Ultima V, after all that happens, you take the portal back to your land, and this is the part that always stuck with me.

Come home, you actually see the little stick figure guy walk home, and they left the door unlocked, and the guy's house is robbed.

And so he comes back and he's like, my TV's gone.

And I love the idea.

It was such an unexpected story beat.

And the idea that really stuck with me is that the real world continues to move.

All of the practical responsibilities continue to go on while... you're on whatever journey like that for like, you know, teens that could be like when you go to college or you go to like study abroad or something like that, the real world back where your family is like that's still happening.

And like I think about even in my 20s, I was playing in like a lot of bands and like doing a lot in the Bay Area music scene.

I would do that at night and on the weekends.

But then at the same time, I still had to return to my day job.

Like those responsibilities were not leaving.

And it all, like from a story perspective, it all kind of started for me thinking about that was that game.

Yeah.