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 Two of a two-part interview. If you missed Part One, you can find it here.
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.
You can also check out Dragon Con on the official website, on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, on Bluesky, on Pinterest, and on Discord.
Membership tickets for Dragon Con 2027 are on sale now.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Outlet: You’re in a small group of people to go to space that weren’t government astronauts. How did that kind of change your perspective of Earth from seeing it up there?
Richard Garriott: Again, I’ll try to be succinct! Interestingly, as you might know, my father was also an astronaut. And my father was very Spock-like – he was not passionate about saying ‘[h]ey son it was really cool! Space was cool, you’re going to love it!’ He was more Spock-like: ‘[y]es , it is a very interesting place to go, you’ll deeply appreciate it. The thing you’ll remember the most is the view out the window.’ And he was my mission planner, and he said ‘I’m going to plan as much of your time as possible when it’s daylight and over land. I’m going to have you either some free time near the window or at least working near the window, so you can appreciate the view. And if it’s nighttime or you’re over the Pacific Ocean, then you can do things away from the window.’ And boy was that an understatement.
When you are in space, floating around, going 17,000 miles-an-hour, going around the entire planet every 90 minutes, seeing a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes, crossing whole continents like North America in 20 minutes, you cannot take your eyes off of the window. Because, as you’re going around, the Earth is also rotating, and so each time you go around, say North America, you’re not seeing the same things twice. In fact, I was up there two weeks, and I rarely, if ever, saw the same places twice. And you know, if I don’t see it now, I’ll never see it. And so, you want to see it.
And it’s this profound pile of, you know, first you notice how thin the atmosphere is. And then you notice how little fresh water there is that is still available. Then you notice how all the forests are being clear cut. And then you notice how forest fires, or the clear cutting of the Amazon or Africa are creating the soot that covers whole states that creates all this air pollution. You then think about how we’re eating all of our food, and you’re going like ‘[b]oy that’s pretty limited where we’re getting all the food from, and we could fix that if we have more fresh water, we could fix that if only we had more energy. And the problem is energy is making all the pollution.’ And you’re seeing how all these problems just stack up, and finally, for me, as it happens for a lot of people who travel in space, after seeing the Earth for a bunch of orbits, I passed over Texas where I was still living and I had grown up. And I go: ‘[o]h, there’s my hometown! There’s where I grew up! There’s the beach where I used to go play! There’s main highways that I used to circulate on when I finally got a driver’s license.’ So you’re like: ‘I now know, not only what part of the world I’m looking down on, but I now know the true scale of the whole planet, because I’ve been paying close attention to it by direct observation.’
And as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I literally shuddered, I got goosebumps – the Earth didn’t change size out of the window, obviously, but it felt like one of these ‘Matrix moments’ where the reality warps around you, and suddenly the world went from being ambiguously large to extremely finite and deeply interconnected, and your place within it is also part of the connection. And so, I learned after the fact that its called the ‘overview effect.’ But I actually never heard of that term before experiencing it.
Operation Rainfall: What led to the decision in Ultima VII: The Black Gate to move away from a world that is tile and grid-based and to make the game mouse-driven instead? Along those lines, how was it developing dialogue trees for the first time in the Ultima series?
RG: Every Ultima always was, and probably always will be, a huge experiment. There are things that go as good or better than planned, and there are things that are total flops. I’m going to jump ahead though – for Ultima Online, we built virtual ecology where grass actually grew and created a resource that herbivores would eat, and then we had carnivores respond from somewhere else, and they would eat the herbivores. And so if the players kill off all the deer or the sheep in the wilderness, and the wolves would go further into town and maybe kill off some of the villagers, and that would set up a quest flag – to send the players out to kill the wolves or something like that.
And, in isolation, it worked beautifully. As soon as we had any real players in the game, they slaughtered everything. They slaughtered all the wolves, they slaughtered all sheep, they slaughtered all the deer. There was no spawn that would get put in that would make it work, and we eventually just ripped it out and no one even knew it was there. We spent human-years on it, and it was useless.
But there are others that worked as good or better than planned – like the dialogue trees. It turns out that was a big success, and I started with the name/job/health/buy-kind of era where characters began to have this kind of interaction. Then, I think it got a lot better when we also day-night cycles and players would actually get up out of bed, go to work, go maybe have a meal, and then ultimately go back to bed – for most of them. But some of the characters would actually get up at night and sneak out and do something dastardly. Dig up graves, or something. And so, for you as a player, you often would sleep at night but you also might choose to wander the graveyard and find some weird side plot. Or, the shopkeepers would go to bed themselves at night and so, it’s set up [as] an interaction with the NPCs that felt more like everything’s not just waiting there for you to ‘[h]ey adventurer, here’s my quest flag! What do you need to do next?’ And so, those kind of experiments worked out very well. And, I think that now in the next round – we can do far, far better, with more of the tools that are available to us now. We can create characters that I think are very, very lifelike.
Ultima really did have a chance to do a lot of things first. Akalabeth[: World of Doom]- Ultima 0– was really the first 3D graphics back on the old Apple 2. At least, high-res graphics. There was a game I’d seen called Escape, which was a los-res, blocky graphics, thing that had some perspective. But, the first high-res 3D, amongst the first roleplaying games – you can argue there are some others that came out at about the same time that might have beat me. But, first tile-graphics for scrolling tile graphic maps. The first NPC conversations, the first NPC schedules. But as you mentioned with the user interface – look, in hindsight, they got worse for a lot of years. It used to be arrow keys on an Apple were on the right, so you use your right hand for navigation, and the letter ‘x’ to go into the dungeon because the dungeon looked like an ‘x’ on the map. And ‘a’ meant attack something, ‘b’ meant board a vessel, ‘c’ meant to cast a spell. I had those 26 plus ‘u’ meant use and you had to tell what thing you wanted to use. And so, to play one of the later pre-mouse Ultimas, going back, it is a nightmare. To get a young person to even consider that now is impossible.
And if one of the things we do is go rewrite those, we’re not doing that. We’re going to give things a modern interface by all means. But, there are other things that had kind of gone by the wayside over time. Things like what you had to map. A lot of people remember having to map those games in the early days. They remember fondly, in a sense. But you could never get anyone to do that now. It would not be possible. Yet, if everything that you do, whenever you get a quest, there is a walking path that is outlined on the map to take you exactly where you need to go next, that’s not really exploring to get there. And part of what I thought was important about the hand-crafting of Ultimas was that I would purposefully do things like, say, to go from a town near me to a town near you, there’s a mountain range in-between and there’s some forest before that, so you can’t even really see the mountains because of the forest. And so, there’s a pass in those mountains, but the only way to find the pass is to go into the forest, get up against the mountains, and explore along the boundary until you find this secret passage through the mountains. And, that to me is an important part about exploration that a lot of the tools that we give people to get over a real problem, which was not having to make manual maps, also can easily take you into the ‘its not really exploration anymore either.’
We’ll figure it out.
OR: I also believe that the second Ultima game [Ultima II: The Revenge of Enchantress] was the first game that was shipped to stores.
RG: And the first game in a box. Ultima II was the first game in a box with a cloth map and all those things.
OR: What was the logistics like putting together this brand-new ground of physical ‘feelies,’ to use the old term for it, and getting it into the stores?
RG: It was fascinating. The early games industry was tumultuous. And all of us, as authors – I was pretty young, I was 19 years-old when I published my first game, Akalabeth[: World of Doom]- and the publisher I used was a place called California Pacific. When they called me up and had seen a pirated copy of my original Akalabeth[: World of Doom] that I sold myself on the pegboard of the store that I was working at – I used to number them. I had number 19, so I sold 18 myself at the store that I worked at. And then, when they called me, they were one of the very first publishers. They were already working with Bill Budge, and Bill Budge was someone that I really admired.
And so, I was really excited to publish with Bill Budge’s publishing company. However, it turns out the publisher was a cokehead, and he quit paying all of us. And so, can’t really stay there, and so after I published Akalabeth and Ultima I with him, and wasn’t getting paid, I said ‘[w]ell, I gotta find a new publisher.’ And so, I suddenly became a free agent after I had already had two really strong-selling products in a row. All five that existed at the time, all the early publishers – that would be Sierra [On-Line], Broderbund, a couple of others – all of them said ‘[y]es! We’d love to take Ultima II, we’d love to publish Ultima II.’ But I already had a vision for what I wanted it to be, and a sense of the box and the cloth map.
And, because most games at that time were things like… instead of Asteroids, they would publish Apple-Oids and it would be little apples bumping around. But it was something they made over two weeks, and if that one didn’t work, they would throw another one in a Zip-loc bag and get it out. I was already taking about a year to make each of these roleplaying games that I was envisioning as a real world and had all other real aspects to it. So, I wanted my game in a box and I wanted these cloth maps, and so all these publishers said: ‘[y]es, we’d love to publish Ultima II’ and then I said: ‘[h]ere’s my request, which is going to go in a box and have this cloth map with it.’ And all of them disappeared, except Sierra, and that’s why I went with Sierra.
And Sierra allowed me to push them in that way, for which I am very thankful. And almost immediately, the entire industry switched to boxes. But Sierra had a different problem – their problem was marijuana and alcohol. And so, they also quit paying me. And so, I yet again, took my trademarks back, and that’s when my brother came to me and said: ‘Richard, you know we can start a business together, and at the very least, if the company gets paid, I will make sure you get your money.’
And I said: ‘[t]hat’s a better deal than I’ve ever had before, so let’s do business together.’ And we very happily started Origin [Systems, Inc.].
Outlet: You think some of the more modern challenges in gaming, as you discussed earlier, had something to do with things moving more and more cloud based, and they are not being that tangible product. Or everything now, by and large, is rent-to-own.
RG: I do think the rent-to-own is a big part of it. And, it’s interesting, one of my partners, Starr Long, and I talked about this on a panel we did together. And he was talking about when you are free-to-play, or rent-to-own, you are almost forced, as [a] developer, into this gambling model, where you’re buying a power-up or an egg or something to hatch or some kind of little microtransaction to keep going or get better to keep you, to feed your crawl outside of the level grinding. That is, in my mind, pretty boring in games. But, [it] has a science to it. I’m sure you are all familiar with the old adage that if you literally put a chicken in a cage with a level that can be pecked to get food, that 100 percent of the time provides food, they only peck when they are hungry. But if it’s a 50/50 chance they get food, then you don’t know if you’re going to get food, then they peck at it more often to make sure they’re not going to run out of food and they overeat and have other kind of problems.
And so, the science of game making uses that too, but we’ve now made games which are very addictive, which are extremely costly to the player. They’re all based upon this fundamental mechanic of gambling, in a sense. The science of addiction of gambling. And they don’t have the depths of – if I’m making my money off of the initial sale to you, then I don’t have a vested interest in how you get from beginning-to-end. I’m not getting more money based on how you play the game. And so, I’m not motivated to drive you to these other behaviors. And so, I think that is a big part of the problem.
OR: Lord British – you were the first person to visit Earth’s four extremes: Challenger Deep, outer space, the North Pole, and the South Pole. What exploration challenges are left that you would love to accomplish?
RG: Wow, so you know, the Earth is an amazingly beautiful place. And so, for example, just before Dragon Con, I just got back from Indonesia, where I was diving around Komodo Island where the Komodo Dragons are. I saw Komodo Dragons for the first time, ever. They also had an earthquake a week or so before we got there, and so we actually found the fault zone in the coral reef that we were diving on that was caused by that earthquake. Awesome thing to get a chance to do.
And so, there is tons of exploring left to do on this planet. There’s tons of exploring that I want to redo because now I have young children that I want to take on some of these places. But, there’s also more extremes I want to go to. Like, I want to go outside of Earth’s orbit and get on the moon or Mars or other places. Whether it’s large or small explorations, I have a very long bucket list.
As part of his trip to the International Space Station, Richard Garriott created a series of educational videos that are hosted on his website, on the Challenger Center YouTube channel, and more.
Outlet: I think we’re getting the warning to wrap it up here. Where can people find you, follow you, pick up your stuff? Promote all the things you want to promote!
RG: Excellent! Thank you. To follow me, its Richardgarriott.com. You’ll see a lot of things I do, a link to the book I’ve written, link to my collections of antique armor, antique scientific instruments, automatons, gaming history, a lot of those things that are involved in my pantheon of things like that. Since it is likely- one of the things we’re thinking about, one of the things we’ll bring back, is basically Ultima 4: The Quest of the Avatars, so we’re putting some experiments up on QuestoftheAvatar.com. So, if you want to just follow along as to how we’re imaginating over this next year, QuestoftheAvatar.com is, at least, where it is right now.
Everyone: Thank you!
RG: Thanks everyone, this was great!
Membership tickets for Dragon Con 2027 are on sale now.
Have you played any of the original Ultima games? Which was your favorite, and why?
What kind of experiments are you hoping that Lord British will have on QuestoftheAvatar.com?
Let us know in the comments below!
