The Ultima series was a genre juggernaut back when glaives and guisarmes were needed to carve through the mob of competitive RPGs. While we’re currently fortunate to get a couple legitimate RPG-of-the-year contenders, in the 1980s it wasn’t unusual to get a dozen. But the Ultima series easily dominated its peers, and continued to propel the genre forward with each revolutionary installment. Current RPGs like Oblivion, Gothic, and The Witcher were heavily inspired by the Ultima series, so young fans of those games all owe Ultima creator Richard “Lord British” Garriott a royal bow (or curtsey) of respect.

While Garriott has retained his profile better than most of the RPG creators he initially competed against, he abandoned single-player RPGs a decade ago after helping to launch the modern MMO era with Ultima Online. Since then, he’s creatively sputtered; his proposed UO sequel was stillborn, and the years he spent working on Tabula Rasa weren’t rewarded with the commercial success of other recent MMO launches. He’s primarily been notable lately for appearing in credit card commercials, and for being an adventurer who dipped down to the Titanic’s wreckage and recently dropped $30 million to blast into space as a pioneering space-faring civilian. He’s also dabbled in professional boxing ventures and has been a lifelong amateur magician. He’s clearly been one of gaming’s most significant contributors and colorful characters.


Ultima IX’s transition to a 3D world was probably too ambitious for its time. It wasn’t until the Gothic series, Morrowind and especially Oblivion that its design plans would finally be more successfully realized

He’s now left NCsoft, foreshadowing the imminent termination of Tabula Rasa, and Ultima fans are hoping that he returns to making single-player RPGs, which seems unlikely given his recent ventures and stated passion for pursuits that arose out of his space journey. It’ll never happen, but I’d love to see Garriott reenter the genre, because despite his lack of recent successes, his Ultima series earned him a perpetual Get-out-of-Jail-free card. To use a hyperbolic metaphor, when the Roman Empire fell in 476AD, it took almost 1,000 years for European society to regain and finally surpass its advances. If Rome hadn’t fallen when it did, mankind might have 1,000 more years of scientific development under its belt. Christopher Columbus could have hopped on the moon in 1492. Martin Landau’s moon space base may have actually been blasted out of orbit in 1999, as it said on the box.

The RPG genre had its own “dark age” after Ultima VII’s 1992 release and the subsequent sale of Garriott’s company to EA, where its pioneering features were lost or ignored. It wasn’t until Morrowind arrived 10 years later that an RPG offered a more interesting world than Ultima VII’s. It took even longer for one of Ultima’s greatest features—NPCs with daily schedules, homes, and their own virtual lives—to finally reappear in an RPG with the release of Gothic. That feature was first offered in 1988’s Ultima V, and yet it wasn’t until 2006’s Oblivion that NPC AI finally surpassed those scripted routines by giving NPCs more dynamic goal-oriented behavior. It also took until then before an RPG incorporated a similar mix of natural animals and fantastical monsters in a simulated ecology. There’s yet to be an RPG that matches the now-ancient Ultima games for offering interactive objects and environments; in Ultima VII you could turn flour into dough that could be baked into edible bread, and relocate cannons or stack objects to breach otherwise inaccessible areas.


As the Gypsy foretold, the Avatar’s journeys have ended. The inspired system of creating a character through questions endures in Fallout 3’s GOAT test

RPG worlds would likely be far more detailed and immersive if Garriott’s Ultima series hadn’t been derailed or detoured after Ultima VII. Garriott may never return to pick up the baton, but his contributions to the genre aren’t forgotten, so I’ll continue to hope viewing Earth from space somehow inspires his drive to get back to creating worlds.

December 16, 2008