Tag Archives: Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott, the creator of Ultima, has only a few exceptions to his opinion that most game designers are lazy and talentless.

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Richard Garriott has launched his Kickstarter for Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a project he told GI International is “the antithesis of MMOs”.

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Ultimate Collector, Portalarium’s collecting game from the mind of Ultima Online’s Richard Garriott, will be backed by Zynga. The social game which has users running all over the place to collect items to display in their virtual homes will launch on the Zynga Platform. Ultimate Collector is currently in limited beta on Facebook. Thanks, Massively.

Ultima creator Richard “Lord British” Garriott has finally unveiled his new social game, once described as the “spiritual successor” to his MMOs. Say hello to New Britannia.

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A link to a massive batch of screenshots, Garriott tooting his own horn, information on a new mobile/social games developer, and more is below the break.

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Richard “Lord British” Garriott has warned that success can blind games companies to the shifting of paradigms.

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The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against NCSoft in its last bid to avoid shelling out $32 million to one-time employee Richard Garriott.

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There’s a motherlode of stuff through here – come in and skim, or don’t come crying to me next week when you’re ill-informed.

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ThinkServices has announced this morning that Lord British himself, Richard Garriott, will be the keynote speaker at GDC Europe in August.

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E3 is over, and most people who went to the show or who worked through it are screaming: Thank God It’s Friday. So, to those, a happy TGIF , and for the rest of you, get caught up on the last of the shorts for the day. Saturday is looming, after all.

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Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa designer Richard Garriott has said social gaming is the next era, but that developers need to beware of under-estimating – or even overcomplicating – social games.

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Richard Garriott is of the belief that there’s a lot of junk out there for the social gaming crowd, however, a few companies are making real money “in a big way so they deserve their high valuation by all means.”

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In 2008, Ultima creator Richard “Lord British” Garriott was on top of the world. Literally. He had a cushy seat atop one of the world’s largest MMO developers, and he – you know – went to outer space. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there.

Until today.

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Richard Garriott has announced that he is to return to the gaming sphere with Portalarium.

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It’s the stuff of news dreams. Not only is Richard Garriott suing NCsoft for $24 million, but he’s also claiming he was fired while still in “quarantine from his space flight,” according to this GamePolitics report.

From Garriott’s complaint, filed with a US court yesterday:

In… November 2008, Chris Chung, President of NCSoft’s North American operations, informed Mr. Garriott that NCSoft has decided to “part company.” Although Mr. Garriott objected to his dismissal, Mr. Chung insisted that the decision was final – Mr. Garriott had to go.

As Mr. Garriott prepared to leave NCSoft, however, Mr. Garriott learned that NCsoft had internally re-characterized his termination by Mr. Chung as a “voluntary” resignation from the company. This mischaracterization had profound and detrimental effects on Mr. Garriott’s stock options: if NCsoft terminated Mr. Garriott’s employment (which it did) then the options – worth tens of millions of dollars – would remain in effect until 2011; but if Mr. Garriott resigned voluntarily (which he did not), then NCsoft might have terminated those options… within ninety days of his departure…

NCsoft forced Mr. Garriott into a Hobson’s choice of exercising his options… and forced him to sell into one of the worst equity markets in modern history…

More through there. Lesson learned: don’t play cosmonauts if you want to keep your job.

Richard Garriott’s suing NCsoft for $24 million, according to this Kotaku report.

The ex-Tabula Rasa frontman filed his action with a Texas court yesterday, apparently.

Garriott’s claiming fraud. However it falls, this is unlikely to be pleasant.

More through there.

Tabula Rasa will be going offline forever come tomorrow, and NCsoft plans for the MMO to go out with a bang.

Word has it that alien race the Neph has discovered wormhole technology and are invading with “wave after wave of Bane troops without rest or respite.”

If you’ve got an account, log on. Make Tabula Rasa’s last gasp a memorable one.

Thanks, Shack.

Comedian Jay Mohr was the host of this year’s AIAS awards, and what better way to get the crowd warmed than by making fun of some of the most prominent people there?

Here are just a couple of them:

• Cliff Belinski:  (Dropping the “y” from his name to be more adult): “That worked well for Rick Schroder.”

• Richard Garriott: “That guy used 30 million to launch himself into space. Maybe he should have used that to launch Tabula Rasa.”

• Makers of Grand Theft Auto IV: He couldn’t joke about the game: “If you want to watch an awards show about thugs beating up ho’s, watch the Grammys”

More over on MTV Multiplayer.

Not a massive shock, but sad nonetheless: NCsoft’s confirmed that sci-fi MMO Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa will stop for good on February 28, 2009.

Here’s the statement in full, taken from the official site:

To the Tabula Rasa Community,

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we’ve achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn’t performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we’ll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

We can assure you that through the next couple of months we’ll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while. For more details about what we are doing for Tabula Rasa players, please click here.

Stay tuned for more information. We thank you for your loyal support of the game and encourage you to take us up on the benefits we’re offering Tabula Rasa players.

The Tabula Rasa Team

MMO soon to be no longer and everyone that worked on it: we salute you.

NCsoft’s reported a profit drop of 50 percent for the quarter ending September 30, down to to 5.0 billion won ($3.7 million) on sales of 78.3 billion won ($58.0 million).

Tabula Rasa only accounted for 2 percent of the cash, or 1.76 billion Korean won ($1.3 million), in the period.

Richard Garriott confirmed last night that he’s quitting the firm to pursue “other interests” after returning from his much-publicised space flight.

More on Gamespot.