Cover

Advertisement
Sony
Indian Point Resort

Printable version Send this page to a friend... Share this page

BUSINESS PROFILE Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott on how he worked his magic on the online gaming industry.
November 2005

Published in ::

It's all fun and gaming

WORDS LEE GIMPEL

 

From teenage tech wizard to bigwig at NCsoft North America, Richard Garriott tells how he worked his magic on the online games industry.

ichard Garriott fell in love with computers as a teenager and developed his first computer game while in high school. It’s a fairly typical story these days. But Garriott’s game came out in 1979. In a nascent market he sold 30,000 copies and, with a $5-per-game royalty, it made an awful lot of money. Garriott continued to pursue computers in college.

However, it soon became obvious that his lucrative programming sideline was overshadowing his studies and he dropped out.

We built Origin over 10 years and sold it to Electronic Arts for a pretty good chunk of money. Then a year after I retired, they gave it back to me for free.

From a highly educated family—his mother, a professional artist, has a masters and his father is a NASA astronaut with a doctorate—forsaking school was a tough choice for Garriott, but his parents were supportive, if a bit cautious. “Remember that this windfall will come to an end, and when it does, you’re going to have to go back to school, finish your degree and get a real job,” Garriott recalls his parents saying. More than 20 years later, Garriott, 44, seems tickled that the ride has lasted so long.

Known for the rat-tails in his hair, and referred to as simply “Lord British” in the gaming community, Garriott has become a star in the $25-billion industry. He largely invented the “massively multiplayer online” (MMO) games that join hundreds of thousands of people around the world in collaborative quests. The New York Times compared his personal involvement with his Ultima series to that of George Lucas with Star Wars.

In 1983, after leaving school, Garriott and his older brother, Robert, founded Austin-based Origin Systems to develop and publish games. Building on its highly successful Ultima franchise, Origin grew steadily but was only barely among the top 10 computer gaming companies in

1992. Fearing for the company’s long-term survival in an industry coalescing around the very biggest players, the Garriott brothers sold to Electronic Arts. Richard stayed on and pushed for the Ultima franchise to go online. Rather than simply one player at one computer, he envisioned a whole world of people interacting with one another.

In retrospect, it may seem easy to presage the explosion of online gaming. But when Ultima Online was set for release in 1997, the brass at Electronic Arts were not very enthusiastic about Garriott’s

MMO strategy and did not anticipate selling more than 15,000 copies.

However, right out of the gate, the idea of an online world resonated with customers who were jumping on the wired bandwagon. Needing pre-release feedback, Electronic Arts offered players the chance to test-drive Ultima Online for $5. Fifty thousand requests poured in, and when the innovative Ultima Online went on sale, it garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Still, Electronic Arts continued to neglect the MMO market, preferring to focus on games such as its Madden Football line. Frustrated by the company’s lack of foresight, Garriott retired in 2000.

A year later he decided to pick up where he had left off and felt thrilled by the industry’s disinterest in MMOs. “It turns out neither Electronic Arts nor Microsoft nor any other major company had figured out the business model of Ultima Online and begun to make more of these games in any significant way,” Garriott remembers.

Gaming has come a long way since Richard Garriott (left) started out in 1979. Known for practically inventing online gaming, his new release Tabula Rasa (below) looks set to be a blockbuster.

Garriott’s new company, Destination Games, began with a mission to harness the swell of online access for a new generation of MMOs. By coincidence, just as he was starting up, Electronic Arts consolidated and laid off most of the former Origin employees it had absorbed. Garriott saw a golden opportunity to rehire his old cohorts and hit the ground running.

“We built Origin over 10 years and sold it to Electronic Arts for a pretty good chunk of money. Then, a year after I retired, they gave it back to me for free,” he says wryly. He asserts that the online market is now the fastest growing segment in the gaming industry. Other companies’ MMO games, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, have several million subscribers today.

“Ultima Online was the first one to generate large amounts of revenue, and since that time there’s been an explosion in that business,” says David Cole, president of gaming industry research company DFC Intelligence. He adds that such games can reap revenue for years, with potentially hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying $10 to $15 per month, making for a “very attractive” market.

In 2001, Destination Games became the North American arm of South Korea’s NCsoft, a leading player in Asian gaming. The company has more than 2,000 employees around the world and puts out two titles annually. Its Lineage game counts 6 million subscribers, and half a million players might be interacting with each other online at any one time.

The customers are fanatical. Virtual characters built by players over months can sell for thousands of dollars on eBay. Garriott says he often receives impassioned pleas from banned players who want to return. The company’s Korean office—which contains what Garriott says is the country’s largest internet center—has security to safeguard its customers’ digital hordes and also protect employees from rogue fans who sometimes storm the gates.

Crazed customers aside, teaming with an Asian giant appears to have been a savvy move. Garriott appears to again have his finger on where the future—and the money—is. Technology research company IDC reports that online gaming revenues in the Asia-Pacific region (outside Japan) rose 30% to more than $1 billion in 2004.

Such growth is a double-edged sword. In order to capture customers with offerings that may bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, gaming companies are engaged in an arms race with budgets resembling Hollywood films. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that developers have tended to play it safe. “They’ve all been fantasy role-playing games. You’ve got dwarves and elves and magic spells—that’s pretty much been the genre that’s dominated,” says Cole.

In order to capture customers, gaming companies are engaged in an arms race with budgets resembling Hollywood films.

Still, NCsoft’s cash cows, which draw heavily on Garriott’s childhood Dungeons & Dragons pastime, allow the company some latitude to try new things. His pet project, Tabula Rasa, slated for release in 2006, is, he hopes, an innovative compromise between single-player games and those that bring together the population of a small city. Garriott’s creative process is a laborious one and he draws on office bookcases lined with tomes that cover history, period fashion, linguistics, symbology, mythology and morality, rather than with programming bibles.

It is a formula that has paid off for Garriott, allowing him to create his own incredible world outside of his computer-gaming universes. He is in the process of upgrading to a new 25,000-square-foot home outside of Austin, which one-ups his current abode that boasts a dungeon and secret passageways.

And, in the pursuit of other worlds, he’s visited the sunken Titanic and is one of the first people on the waiting list for a $100,000 suborbital commercial space flight. He’s even contemplating a $20-million orbital trip like those undertaken by space tourists Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. Whether online, on earth or in space, it is ever onward and upward for Garriott—it doesn’t look like he’ll be needing that real job anytime soon.

Published in ::

Recent features


Browse Go Features: