Richard Garriott de Cayeux, also known as “Lord British,” is why we have the computer role-playing genre. Ever since his first published work, 1979’s Akalabeth: World of Doom, and through his Ultima series, he has made influential game after influential game that has only served to push the video game industry forward. When he isn’t creating video games, he is exploring the world as President Emeritus of the Explorers Club and he was the first person to visit the four extremes: the North Pole, the South Pole, Challenger Deep, and outer space. He also happened to be one of the Guests of Honor at the very first Dragon Con!
During Dragon Con 40, several journalists sat down with him to talk about a variety of topics ranging from his travel and Dragon Con experiences to his work developing the early Ultima games and his intent to reclaim the rights to that property next year!
This is Part One of a two-part interview. Part Two will go live on Saturday.
You can find out more about Richard Garriott at his official website, on Facebook and Instagram here and here, and on Bluesky and on X.
You can also see what Lord British is coming up with next at QuestoftheAvatar.com.
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Membership tickets for Dragon Con 2027 are on sale now.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Operation Rainfall: Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Richard Garriott: My name is Richard Garriott, and I am sometimes known as ‘Lord British.’ I was actually the computer guest of honor at Dragon Con 1 40 years ago – that was a while back. I make video games, as many of you probably know, but I also do a lot of work in extreme exploration. North Pole, South Pole, orbital space, and deep targets like the [Challenger] Deep of the Mariana Trench.
OR: You were the very first featured guest of Dragon Con back in 1987 [and] now you’re part of the 40th event. How does it feel to be such an integral part of Dragon Con’s history, and do you have any memories from that first Dragon Con that you’d like to share with us?
RG: First, it is important to point out that not only was it an honor to be part of Dragon Con 1, but also what a fan I became of Dragon Con because of the experience starting with Dragon Con 1. The only other returning, original, guest is Lynn Abbey, who was also at the Opening Ceremonies – it was also a good chance for us to catch up.
But, at that first time, I met Gary Gygax, the founder of Dungeons & Dragons, the co-author of Dungeons & Dragons. My work, my whole career, is fundamentally based on Dungeons & Dragons. And, within those first few Dragon Cons, I met people who I not only admired, but I became collaborators in a wide variety of work. Tracy Hickman and I met in Dragon Con 2, and we’ve continued to collaborate to this day with a variety of projects. And so, Dragon Con very quickly became my favorite place to come – both as a creator, to get a chance to talk with the people who enjoyed my work, [as] publishing my work is not a live performance like a rock band might do from stage. And so, to come talk to the players as a meaningful part of [the] feedback loop of making games. But, I also come here as a fan. So, as much as I enjoy talking to my audience, I just as much ‘fan out’ with people who come to Dragon Con.
“And so, I believe in exploration fundamentally. And I got that, I think, from my parents.”
Outlet: As you’ve talked about the extreme exploration, was that something from your video games: ‘Alright, I’ve created all of these words, I want to go see the real world?’
RG: You know, its more integral than that. In fact, I wrote a book a few years ago called Explore/Create[: My Life In Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark]. Its my argument that if you’re going to do original creation – as soon as I started writing not just games, but games with ethical parables – I realized that I needed to know ethics. I was a student of moral philosophy when I was in school; in fact if there was a history or philosophy class, I wasn’t paying much attention. But as soon as you realize ‘[o]h, its useful to the creation process,’ I went and bought and studied deeply.
And so, I’m a big believer. Even if your business is making concrete, you can’t just study other people who make concrete. You have to study what’s coming out of smokestacks of power plants and the way to use something that’s an environmental hazard or an overabundance of some material that’s coming out from some other flow of some other industry that might be helpful to my industry.
And so, I believe in exploration fundamentally. And I got that, I think, from my parents. Not only was my father an astronaut, who was an explorer, but my mother was a naturalist and an artist. And so, she was actually the one who would take me out into the woods and [we] would go follow ants around to see where they lived. Or, my Kindergarten science fair project was the life cycle of the cicada killer, where we followed this wasp around where it would paralyze this cicada and dug up its little burrow where it laid eggs – this living but paralyzed cicada. So, this exploration bent I gained very early on [and] it’s part of my creation process.
Outlet: I don’t know if its true – but I saw that people are reporting that you got the rights back to Ultima.
RG: That is just what I got done giving a talk on [at Dragon Con]. In the United States, there is a copyright law that says ‘after 35 years, if you’re the original creator of an intellectual property, even if you sold it or assigned it or given it away in perpetuity, you can claim it back after 35 years by just giving notice to who you sold it to.’ No questions asked, no money needs to trade hands, you just take it.
And so, I informed the United States Copyright Office, and I informed Electronic Arts some months ago, that my intention was to take it back. Five years after I sold it to EA, which was in 1992 – 1992 plus 35 is 2027. And so, next year, I will own all my original copyrights. It is still complicated, because it is all the copyrights, not the trademarks. And so, the font for the word ‘Ultima’ is likely still in their hands. And so, now we’re in negotiations about what to do about that. But, it’s a much better position than I’ve ever been in, and I absolutely have the copyrights back to my work.
Outlet: But that means that at some point, we may return to the world of Ultima.
RG: That’s the plan.
OR: You did give an interview talking about this, as well, with Brian Gaar two months ago with Inside Games.
RG: Yes, and I was trying to be a little elusive with him, though, at the time. I wasn’t planning on saying anything until I was here at Dragon Con. This is where I was going to make that announcement. But, as soon as I served EA with notice, they went and filed trademarks again. And so, I started getting these pointed questions. And so, I really had to spill the beans – at least a little hint about it.
“I’m actually, as a human, profoundly worried about what the future of humanity is going to be like in this age of AI ultimately becoming smarter than us – which I believe that it will.”
OR: If you’re bringing Ultima into 2027 and beyond, how would you make it Lord British’s Ultima?
RG: That is literally what I just got done doing in a panel – we were dissecting what I think is really important. For example, a ‘Lord British game,’ to me, has things about the world which most people would recognize. Not only is it going to be ethics-and-virtues-based from the story standpoint, it is going to talk about the reflection of your personal journey as a human or a societal problem if it is going to be a new game – if it’s a new story and not an old story.
It’ll be a virtual world where, if you can see it, it will work. If there are cups and plates in my world, you’ll be able to pick them up and put them down and drink out of them and flush them down the toilets if there are toilets. Everything will be interactive. It will have a deep respect for what I’ll call ‘storycraft,’ and what I mean by that is there are things I do that I think are still not completely unique, but clearly markers of the way I work. For example, if I’m going to build a virtual world, its not going to be a procedurally-generated reality, which might look ‘natural.’ But in my mind, ‘natural’ isn’t good story. I build towns to where there are just enough buildings to make you believe it is a town, and all the buildings have a purpose for you to go to them. I don’t put empty buildings or generically populated buildings, because I think that’s just a waste of my time. And when you leave a city, as soon as you’re far enough away to go ‘I’m clearly out of the city,’ I’ll let you go over a mountain or through a little piece of woods, and then you’re at the next city!
And so, that meaningful, purposeful, pacing through the entire experience is also something that I believe is hand-crafted, human-crafted. Although, we’re also now already, even in our explorations as exactly how we are going to do it. We’re already using AI as a tool to do things like do prototypes, and things – to just sit down and go like ‘what kind of perspective do we really want to use?’ We don’t have the answers to those now, but we’re doing those experiments now. I’ve got about a year to do experiments before I can really be cut loose.
Outlet: Do you think generative AI is going to fundamentally change how designers go into developing characters and worlds and things of that nature?
RG: Big question. I’ll try to answer it simply.
I’m actually, as a human, profoundly worried about what the future of humanity is going to be like in this age of AI ultimately becoming smarter than us – which I believe that it will. I believe it will be functionally sentient, and clearly superior to us. And so, that’s something to truly worry about. And there’s other environmental and ethical issues of even how to operate now, much less in the next two years. Environmental in the sense of power and water, ethically in the sense of ‘how are these things trained? What are they trained off of and what are you doing to compensate the creator?’ So, setting that aside, we are going to try to approach all of those very ethically and carefully, but it is absolutely true that even at this moment, for example in coding – I think AI is going to be an important part of the future with the following story:
We’re at a second crash in the entire game industry – the first one being in 1983, and it went down by 97 percent. The revenues went down 97 percent in the industry from $3.2 billion to $100 million in a two year-span when consoles crashed. And we’re now in a similar moment where games, other than say Grand Theft Auto VI, which they can spend a half-billion on and make five-six billion on – you can’t make a AAA game in the ‘old way’ without spending $500 million in three-to-five years. And most of those actually don’t succeed, and that’s causing this crash. Also, as a creator – when I created the games by myself, it was a lot of fun to sit there and make the map myself. The last few games I made, where I am not the mapmaker – I’m the manager, I’m the vision setter. But then I have leads who also aren’t the creators, they also have teams – and like, you’re the programming lead, my CTO, he had a team for characters, a team for UI, a team for this, a team for that. So, they’re not even the creators. And finally, four steps away from me, are the people doing the work. And that’s frankly not fun. And not only is it not fun, I’m not having any fun making it. And what’s being made is not me. And so, I think it’s bad for me and for the audience.
The nice thing now is that as a creator, I can do the creation or close-to-finish creation myself. And that means that if I need a real artist to go do the final art that’s fine, but I can get to the point of communicating it very clearly as to what I’m looking for.
And so, it lets the team, the top-to-bottom depth of the team, shrink quite a bit. And therefore, we’re all back in the creation process again. It also makes it all affordable, and lets us rapidly prototype and rapidly iterate on: ‘is combat going to be more fun if it’s full real time or should it be pseudo-real time and turn based? Where in that pantheon should it be?’ We can prototype that now very quickly and then save the time and expense of false starts.
And that concludes Part One of this Two-Part Interview With Lord British!
Please return on Saturday for Part Two.
Membership tickets for Dragon Con 2027 are on sale now.
Are you excited for a new Ultima game, this time made by Richard “Lord British” Garriott?
What are your favorite Dragon Con memories, even if you weren’t at the very first Dragon Con?
Let us know in the comments below!
