RSI MUSEUM: Ultima Underworld 1 & 2

13 February 201501:05:081,854 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

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Yeah, I'm one of the co-founders of Origin. Uh, you know, prior to that I had actually published through a couple of other companies, uh, California Pacific and Sierra. And in both of those cases these companies uh, uh, in the middle of selling a top-selling game, they quit paying me. And so, uh, that was pretty good impetus to go do something a little different. And it was my brother's Robert's idea to start Origin. He said, uh, you know, at least I know if if you're going to business with me, when we get a check in from the sale of a game, the first person I will pay is the author. Uh, and I said, well, that's a that's a better business practice than I've been accustomed to. And so, uh, that is literally what started, uh, Origin. Uh, and interestingly, I think it is that um, founder is an independent author for the company and another brother is the manager of the company. That dynamic of
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the two of us constantly fighting over what was fair and being co-founders helped keep Origin to be a very author-oriented company, uh, that that I think really benefited the growth of the company because uh, every other author that came used my contract as the basis of their negotiation. So, I had the worst deal, uh, and yet I had leverage to make sure I didn't get a bad deal. And so, uh, that kind of set up what Origin became and uh, through the works of the people around the table plus Chris, uh, you know, uh, we had a uh, 10 or 20-year run of of creating worlds, which I think turned out pretty darn good. Your turn, Paul. Paul, you want to go next? Uh, yeah, I'm Paul Neurath. So, I got in the games industry in the mid-80s,
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1980s. And started as an independent developer. And first game I did with uh, Sir-Tech Software, the the guys who were doing the Wizardry games, was a space combat game in 3D, and that's how I cut my teeth. I learned how to assembly language programming and uh got up to speed on the Apple II. When that game was finished, I wanted to do another space themed game and that was Space Rogue. And that's where I really connected up with with Richard and Robert, and you know, Origin in Dallas. Uh they were actually in southern They were in southern New Hampshire at the time. Uh and I was in just about half hour south in Massachusetts. And I had finished playing, I think it Ultima III, and I noticed on the back of
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the box they were you know, a short drive away, so I just drove up one day and introduced myself. it was a it was a great next uh uh three or four years where we all collaborated together. I was one of the, you know, independent authors who was working uh with Origin. I completed uh Space Rogue. Um and, you know, got to work with Richard and Dallas, uh Chuck Bueche a little bit uh the early year or two. Uh Chris Roberts. We all learned from each other and it was it was a very uh you know, it was a great experience. I think we we learned from each other's craft. Um and then Origin ended up uh for some reason uh Richard has something against cold weather, so
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uh he wanted to move down to uh Austin, Texas, so uh the company ultimately moved down there. And that gave an impetus to start my own studio, uh which I which became Looking Glass. It started as Blue Sky in 1990. We We two years later renamed it to Looking Glass. And first game we did was Ultima Underworld. Let's see. Uh like Richard, I started out as a freelancer in the business. I got started programming, uh writing, um engineering software on my Apple for um uh Brown & Root Construction, an international paper in in Louisiana. Uh and I got enamored with with uh uh the games on the Apple and yeah quit that job, went to work for a um uh the computer store in Shreveport, Louisiana, sold me the Apple, bought it, I mean uh uh um bought all the games that were on
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the marketplace including the Ultimas. Uh I think Ultima 1 and 2 were were the only ones out at that time. Uh this is 1980, '81. Um and really just got hooked. Uh um and I uh um sold a bunch of Apples. One of them was with a fabulous artist who was a uh a captain in the Air Force there in in in Shreveport. He drew some beautiful pictures. I said, "Joe, we got to do a game based on these pictures." He drew like Boris Vallejo who did a lot of the Tarzan uh uh covers in comics and whatnot. And yeah, so we did. We threw something together in about uh 6 months, which is all it took back in those days. Um the first publisher we showed it to, uh which was Penguin Software, picked it up. Uh um it went on to be their number one best-selling game. It's called The Quest uh in 1983. Just like Richard as well, they decided that they were paying us too much money.
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And we had already signed a contract for the sequel Ring Quest, uh had already finished Ring Quest, and we said, "No, we're not going to we're not going to change They wanted to change that contract, both contracts for both games, and reduce the royalty." We said, "Well, that just doesn't make sense. We don't think so." So what they did was they blackballed Ring Quest and refused to publish it by just doling out problems. "Oh, it's got this problem. You got to fix this. You got to fix this." And they stretched that out for 2 years. Now by that time I'd already um run out of the good revenue from The Quest, was kind of broke, and yeah, uh had a family to support. The only guy I knew in the industry was Dave Albert, who at that time had quit his job as the producer at Penguin and went to work for the Garriott brothers as their vice president of product development. I I him up. I said, "Dave, I need a job, man." And yeah, he said, "Well, come on up and talk to everybody." So, I did and yeah, wound up hitting it off with these
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guys both of them for different reasons. I can relate to to both of Gary, it's the business side and the creative side. That's when I first met Paul Neurath. This was 1985. And I drove all the way from Shreveport, Louisiana to join them up there. I just want to say real quick, it turned out that Shreveport kind of became a breeding ground for a lot of developers. One of that also joined Two of them that joined us at Origin, one was Greg Malone who did Night Mobius? Mobius, yes, which is another good selling game. And yeah, and I helped start a users group in Shreveport that wound up hiring a couple of young teenagers to help them work on some stuff. The group was called Softdisk and the guys they hired were John Carmack and John Romero as teenagers. And yeah, and y'all know where they went on to. John actually
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joined us for a few for a little while, maybe less than a year up in New Hampshire. And yeah. I helped them with build one game and then I got stopped making games as a programmer. Ogre was the only one I actually wrote any code on other than Slipstream. That's true. That's true. Origin published Ring Quest. They did publish Ring Quest, the one that Penguin refused to that was blackballing me on. And yeah, and I went into management after that and yeah, became the producer and then the executive producer of 40 of the games that we did at Origin. Including these. And yeah, it was me and Richard that suckered Warren Spector into quitting TSR and joining us and he he hooked up with Paul and and became a producer for for Paul's products including Ultima Underworld. Well, I had been I played D&D games,
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paper you know, pen and paper D&D going back to about '75. And you know, I was a fan of the fantasy literature, you know, Tolkien and everything else. Um and I played a lot of the fantasy role-playing games. So, I I played, you know, every each Ultima that came out and the Wizardries and all and all the classic fantasy role-playing games. And a few of them like Wizardry and Bard's Tale and the Ultimas had dungeon exploration as often a part of them. You know, the the earlier Ultimas was done with a third uh 3D perspective, but back then it was kind of a fake 3D perspective cuz the technology wasn't able to to generate, you know, a true first-person real-time fluid
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experience. Uh so, they were Wizardry or it was line drawings and you uh you typically took, you know, you you stepped like 10 ft and turned 90° at a time. So, it was very abstract and still a lot of fun. Um and uh in and uh but I think it was about '89 I started experimenting with uh 3D texture mapping on an Apple II GS, which was a basically a a a turbocharged Apple II. And uh as I remember I could get one texture map scene to render, very simple scene, 3D texture map scene. It took about 3 or 4 seconds to render a single image. So, it it wasn't anything that was pragmatic for the Apples of that time.
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Uh but then when the IB you know, with the IBM PC uh yeah, more powerful and having more horsepower, uh come 1990, uh it seemed that you could actually pull this off and do a real-time fluid 3D environment. And so, uh when I started Blue Sky uh in early 1990 uh within a couple of months we had a prototype just to prove cuz we weren't sure it could happen, but we tried it out and we were rendering just you know, simple dungeon corridors that you could run through in full 3D texture mapped environment uh which had never been done in a in you know, with personal computers before. People had done uh you know, Lasseter and and others had done uh
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uh texture mapping on graphics workstation, but it wasn't a technology that had you know, made the leap to personal computers. So, we were sort of on you know, on the cutting edge there. But, the vision behind that was to create a more immersive experience. Um you know, I when I pen and paper role play or read, you know, Lord of the Rings, you know, my mind's eye is in that world as if I'm really there and I think that's true for you know, most people who are you know, get into this literature or or you know, do the gaming. And so, that goal of really uh submerging you into that fantasy environment as if you were really there was a core part of the experience you wanted to try to deliver. So, that that's really where the vision came from. And then we wanted to do it as a role-playing game and you know, I I love
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the Ultimas and the role-playing games. So, uh you know, we wanted to wrap it in this context of you know, you being a fantasy character who could develop and grow and skills and explore a whole narrative. Um so, that's that's where it all came from. Well, we started I think we started development in uh early spring of uh 1990 and for about 6 months, we were developing it as just Underworld. That was our name for it. Um and we didn't have a publisher yet. I mean, we knew we were going to get a publisher. But, because it was such a new concept and we were taking a lot of technical risks, we wanted to make sure that we could pull it off and have a prototype.
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So, we worked on it for it was about 5 or 6 months. We we had a good prototype that was was pretty cool. Uh to show that they could work and and and what the concept would be. Um and start to show it to publishers and and and including Origin because I work closely with Origin and had huge respect for for Origin. And uh you know, Richard and and and Dallas and and and Warren uh they saw the potential for this and and really wanted to work with it. And I Richard I think it was you who suggested you know, that we put it in the Ultima fiction um uh which I think was was a you know, a a great approach cuz it gave it an instant sort of particularly for a game that's so
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groundbreaking in terms of technology and approach to ground that in something that the fans already know so that the entire experience is not 100% novel. There's sort of an approachability there and something that's already understood. And so uh we ended up folding in you know, we set it in uh the the Underworld was set in an island in Britannia. And uh you know, we brought in some of the characters and some of the back fiction. Um and that created the the back fiction context for it. And you know, if I can throw in some thoughts here, too. Um you know, when we did see that demo, you know, when when all of us who go back to paper gaming uh and then made this conversion over into computer gaming, you know, the computer offered two big advancements. One was it was the game master, so it
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could determine you know, what would happen next, what monsters you would face, what problems you would face. Uh but another one was the visualization. Uh and in that instead of uh you know, only seeing things in your mind's eye, uh the the the the computer could begin to simulate what that world would actually look and feel like. And and at least for for me in Ultima land, you know, we were always using either tile graphics or these line drawn dungeons. And so we were following you know, I think we we're making a rich interactive world, but we were falling well short of the hypothetical virtual reality that we've still never reached. And but when Underworld when you when when Paul showed that demo, everyone realized this was now finally the first really big step into not just
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visualizing the world, but he also had some other innovations in user interface. Where we were just emerging out of the era of keyboard only interfaces. You know, early Ultimas, you know, you hit letter A for attack, B for board a vessel, C for cast a spell, D for drop an item, etc. through 26 letters. and Paul had made a truly mouse centric user interface that allowed a level of engagement into this newly realized virtual world in a way that had never been done before. And so we were really excited about what what a statement this was to the industry about where role playing games could go. And in terms of the IP, we had already started down a path of trying to capitalize more on the on the Ultima IP.
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It was our largest investment from a standpoint of technology. Um we had Warren Spector, the producer of Underworld had had was our his first job as a producer was on a Worlds of Ultima product called Martian Dreams. And and we had another Worlds of Ultima product called Savage Empire. And this this particular product was not considered a Worlds of Ultima product, but but we were already in the in the frame of mind that we were trying to find ways to to to utilize that IP beyond just the Ultimas that Richard would push out. Well, because you know, one of the one of the things that you know, companies like EA have done very well with things like their sports franchises is they come out with a new Madden Football every year at the beginning of football season. And it makes as many improvements as you can
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manage to squeeze in in one season. And uh and so you just keep iterating on that engine. Well, with role-playing games, not just mine, but every one of us in the role-playing game business, we would often take two plus years to make one role-playing game. And so that actual cycle is not not the best from a marketing standpoint. And so that's why we were looking for ways we could continue releasing properties uh that were related to each other on more like a yearly basis as opposed to multi-year basis. And um uh and so we all kind of got together and said, "Look, it's since it's going to be we're not going to step on each other's toes cuz we're so many years apart." And uh uh and we were developing, you know, Ultima remained developing in the tile graphic uh Ultima 1 2 3 remained in the uh you know, tile graphic environment. Uh and that left this opportunity to really explore the more virtual reality uh methodologies that Underworld
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represented. Yeah, in the worlds of Ultima, the other thing they shared in common was we actually reused the tile graphic technology from an Ultima. So, I think that uh Martian Dreams was based on um Ultima 6 technology. Whereas Ultima Underworld was was totally unique technology in itself. Go ahead, Paul. Um well, the the the teams tend to be much smaller. I mean, going into 1990, we had five people on the team uh for most of the uh Ultima Underworld development, making the game. Um and compare that to a AAA, you know, PC or console game today that might have, you know, 100 plus people on it. Um so,
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you know, you had much smaller teams. Uh the platforms, you know, working on an IBM of that era was, you know, it was less powerful than, you know, your cell phone. Um and so you had them very significant hardware constraints that you had to build around. A lot of your design decisions and technology decisions were were constrained and you had to design around those based on the hardware that you have. So but in the original Ultima Underworld, you know, we we barely got 3D texture mapping working and in one of the ways we could pull it off is the original Ultima Underworld, the rendered screen was only about a third of the, you know, VGA screen uh on a PC. We had to create UI elements all around it. We originally wanted to create a full street screen experience
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because we knew that'd be more immersive, but when we tried full screen, we got down to about three frames a second and said, you know, that's not going to work. So there's a lot of constraints that you had to design around and and sort of smoke and mirrors to to to work around those uh those elements. So uh and and a lot of the engineering and software engineering got into the real, you know, the hardware in the weeds. We didn't have, you know, there were no rendering cards back then. So all of the rendering was done in software. We had to write assembly language uh you know, texture mappers and image warpers and shaders and um it was very specialized coding to to make that all work. You know, I I I what I find interesting about the moment we're in time we're in right now is to me
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even though it's not exactly come full circle, it has returned to its roots in some very important ways. All of us here go back to the time where our earliest games we made, you know, by ourselves, literally one person made one game. And you were the designer, the programmer, the writer, you know, the artist, you did everything. Um and uh but a lot of the sweet spot, you know, the first Underworlds, the uh, you know, the the the middle Ultimas, uh, the emergence of Wing Commander, uh, you know, those were games where we at least did have a team. But the teams were still relatively manageable and the years of development was relatively manageable and the millions of dollars required to make a game was relatively manageable. You know, we're now at the point where uh, you know, there are a lot of games a lot of the games made by large studios
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now are spending truly hundreds of millions of dollars, truly five plus years, and uh, and and and there's a lot of incredibly notable failures. And so I'm actually not sure it's a better time. I actually think it's, you know, when when games take five plus years and they're that big, your career will only have a handful of games in it, you know, at that point. And uh, and the risk rewards at the pain to reach the end and the risk reward of even a success is is is not nearly as fulfilling as a lot of those earlier times were to these to me. Uh, and one of these great aspects of the new era of crowdfunding uh, and community involvement within the development cycle, uh, and uh, using engines for some of us in that case, which saves a a fair bit of time and money in our case, um, that has
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actually now allowed us to go from hundreds of persons on a team uh, down to uh, a couple of dozens of people on a team. And I have to tell you that just feels so much nicer uh, combined with the fact that uh, you know, we'll be able to produce a game now in a, you know, a few fingers of a hand number of years as opposed to multiple hands. Uh, and uh, and I think that uh, is at least for me something I'm I'm really enjoying about the modern era of uh, community supported games. Well, you know, it's it's really the matter of the funding um, because I can guarantee you that if we were, you know, bringing in double our crowdfunded revenue for this game, we would spend it all. Uh, uh, We would double our team size and we would deal with the headache cuz there's cuz our freaking creativity
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of the of the teams, there's so much more they want to do than the budgetary constraints. Now, you take something like Star Citizen that has generated a $70 million crowdfunded campaign and you can see that they've, you know, grown to to to that size cuz Chris always grew to whatever size that that that his budget was starting with the very first game he did with us, which was Times of Lore. And yeah, and then the second one Bad Blood. And then third one where he really hit his stride with Wing Commander and then the budget just kept growing and the team size just kept growing. So, I'll have to agree with Richard though, it certainly is less stress and you're able to actually enjoy the process a bit more when the team size is, you know, less than than 30.
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Once it gets beyond that, it gets a little You have departments. Yeah, it takes a little bit of the fun out of it. But there's other downsides to it as well, which is you don't always get to realize the full design of the product that you really wish you could build. I knew John Romero because he worked he worked overlapped with me at Origin as as you know, Dallas said earlier, he was at Origin for I think it was about a year. It wasn't a long time, but but he had an office it was just a few offices down from where I was working out of at the time in the right in the late '80s. And so I got to know John and and, you know, you know, like John, we had a lot of
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common interests in terms of gaming. And after he left Origin, I kept in touch. And when I started up Blue Sky in 1990, Uh, were corresponding and we'd send each other kind of updates on what we were each working on. Uh, in in John's case, he had joined up with uh John Romero and and and it was getting going. And so I remember he sent me a a build of it was called Hovertank, which was one of the very early uh, 3D games that they were working on. Uh, and it was kind of a Wizardry kind of look but but fluid. Um, and it was their kind of early stabs at at trying to do a first-person
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uh, gaming. around the same time I was sending them, you know, keeping them updated on stuff we were doing and and including showing that early prototype we had by the summer of 1990 of uh, Underworld. Uh, which had all the texture mapping and all. And um you know, so I I'm I'm pretty certain that that both John, you know, both Johns uh, saw that demo. Um, and I remember uh, you know, uh coming across uh, that at least one of them at a CES show and I think it was 1990. Um, and showing them the demo. And so, you know, I don't know what degree that that John Carmack got inspired by kind of knowing what we were working on. But we were publicly starting to show this stuff by the by
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the mid-1990. you know, I I'm sure that he picked up on that and uh thought about, well, what can I do with this technology? Um, and they ended up doing with, you know, through Wolfenstein, uh, the first shooter uh, style gameplay. And they used a ray casting uh, technology. It wasn't true texture mapping. It wasn't a true 3D in the sense that you couldn't look up or down or rotate the view, move in three space entirely. It was you know, sort of two and a half D. But the advantage of limited 2D and a half D was it they could run at a higher frame rate, which good for a shooter. Um so they went down the path of kind of creating the shooter category with, you know, with Ultima Underworld
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Wolfenstein 3D and then uh Doom where, you know, we always had a vision for creating a role-playing game that went for us was much more than just about the 3D rendering itself. Um uh commercially they ended up being better than us, you know, there was it turned out to be a more of a mass market, larger audience for a pure shooter, but um uh you know, I've never regretted the direction we took. Yeah, you know, I I find it interesting also to reflect on um there were some very early developers, you know, my uh if I had to describe somebody as my mentor uh unbeknownst to him other than hearing me say this comment since uh it was a guy named Bill Budge. And even back in the Apple II days, he could do 3D work on the Apple II. The The it was wasn't even often line drawings, it was often just a few points hovering in space, but
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in three he could do enough points to represent a space shuttle, you know, free tumbling or orbiting another planet. Also just have, you know, enough dots to make it clear that of what it was, but always in real time and it was always so far ahead of what I could do. It was one of these things where I the the gap was too large for me to personally cross uh technically. I really just frankly just wasn't up up to it, which one of the reasons I I stuck with tile graphics and it was one of the things I could do. Uh it was Underworld was the first time that I saw somebody take uh you know, this the the 3D technology that we knew was going to emerge that I had already seen a taste of it through people like Bill Budge. Uh and and now it go out of just dots or lines like I had done line drawing dungeons. Uh and and take that now to really uh a true fully rendered 3D. So that was a a
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a a magical moment. Mo- Mostly of the development was done, you know, the core development was done in Blue Sky. We had offices up at in New Hampshire at the time, southern New Hampshire. Uh but we did uh there was a tight collaboration with uh with Origin and and the guys down in Austin. Uh you know, Warren was our producer and you know, Warren's always had a uh uh a really deep vision and insight into into game design. And so, you know, he was he was extremely helpful in helping us refine and work through some of the creative issues as we were getting further along in the project. You know, Richard had, you know, a lot of insight and and and was really helpful in thinking about, you know, how we tie the gameplay to the fiction and
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the story. Because that's that's the thing about uh you know, the the the Underworlds, which is not just a 3D dungeon experience. You're really immersed in this fantasy world that seems real and is believable and engages you for, you know, hours. And it's it's own microcosm. And a And a big piece of that is the narrative and the story and the characters. And uh you know, a lot of that it was informed from from Richard and the the work he had he had been doing and was doing on the the Ultimas. So, you know, there's a lot of learning and sharing uh you know, that was going on. You know, and I'll I'll throw in some big kudos for Warren also. You know, I've uh been on record many times saying that I think the the the best Ultimas I
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produced were the were the Ultimas I produced with Warren. And and Warren was really the link between us as well. And uh you know, where I think you know, where where Ultimas from went from being just a game to a a valuable intellectual property really started with uh with Ultima 4 uh where about in the virtues. And that was that was really myself so to speak but then starting with five and six and seven which is where I began to work with Warren and where we began to also collaborate. Uh it was really Warren's uh far superior story craft. Uh uh and uh his experience in game design that really came from paper games. Uh for you know balance and scenario all those things that make uh you know a game go from just being a tech demo into being a rich real place to live and breathe and desire to be. Uh you know Warren really helped us both immensely
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on that front. Let me take that one first Paul just cuz I let me give you a a little prehistory if I could. You know back when we formed Origin in my parents garage in Houston we the reason we chose the word Origin and not you know Excalibur or something more fantasy oriented was that we weren't sure if Origin was going to just make games or might make operating systems or might make hardware and we actually experimented with hardware. The Apple II had the ability to run four uh paddles like a Pong paddle. And or two joysticks but no one ever manufactured a dual joystick for like Crazy Climber kind of stuff. So we actually made a prototype dual joystick. Uh we also made a prototype of something I have an image of around in the office here. We made a
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wooden enclosed uh 360° gimbaled simulator uh that made it to never we never finished it. We only got it to the point of being incredibly dangerous uh before we decided this was probably a bad idea. The nauseator? The nauseator exactly the nauseator. And uh uh and so when any virtual reality device came out you know anybody that sold a either a head tracking set of 3D goggles or flicker goggles to look at a screen or a full head mounted display we bought every one of those. We you know we as a company and me as an individual, we are uh I would always describe myself as a huge virtual reality enthusiast, but I remain a huge virtual reality skeptic. Uh I have so often thought, "Okay, well, this one's this one's surely going to be
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way better." And we're now at the point where they are getting they are way better than they've ever been before. But, you know, but in my mind, you know, virtual reality requires either the Matrix plug-in or a cave that is you perfectly uh simulating a holodeck. a holodeck something. Uh we're still not there yet, but uh but now I'm curious what what Paul really thought of the phrase virtual reality in with regard to uh Underworld. So, we we weren't thinking seriously about VR goggles and and the like when the Underworlds were developed. Again, this is 1990 when we wrapped up the the Underworld 2. we did it Looking Glass though because because in in in '93, '94, we changed the name uh to to the studio to Looking
00:31:43
Glass. And we started working on one of the games we were working on was Flight Unlimited, which came out in 1995. Um and so, a few years later, that's when the as far as I know, the first generation of consumer VR headsets were being uh uh made available. And we actually supported a couple of those headsets around it was around '95, '96, I think. Uh for Flight Unlimited and uh another game we were doing at the time, Terra Nova, which was a a science fiction uh 3D game. Um and what we found with that generation is that the devices just weren't ready for consumers. Uh the the the they give you headaches to wear them for most people for more than a few minutes. Uh they were so laggy and the resolution was so poor. They just they were, you
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years away from being anything that that you'd actually want to use as a consumer. They were fun for a tech demo. We had fun using, you know, kind of supporting them, but they they weren't anything that we could use commercially. and you know, I I obviously they you know, with Oculus Rift and and other uh headset manufacturers they're getting all, you know, a ton of attention uh over the past, you know, year or two. Uh there's this new wave, new generation. Um and you know, we're intrigued and you know, we're playing with these devices and trying to figure out. I I do think that Underworld the new version Underworld Ascendant um you know, the time may when cuz we've got a little work to do yet before the game is done. So, by the time the game is done
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uh you know, it might be right to uh to really uh uh uh put it in that VR environment have that as a as a one way to play it. Um we're we're certainly going to we're certainly exploring that. We can't help but explore it. It's just too damn fun. Uh you know, as soon as the Oculus Rift one came out and we got one here at the office as a prototype. Uh first thing the Shroud of the Avatar team did was create a, you know, and take our map and and and put it into their system. And we just all start taking turns around the office walking around our, you know, our our Shroud of the Avatar map at that time. And it was amazing. It was just truly amazing. But then, you know, you we have the immediate complication of how do we, you know, how do we interact with the uh with the game. Cuz we can't see the keyboard, we can't see our hands. And yeah, it didn't
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stop us from having fun with the uh with walking around the the the visuals though. So, I'm very much on Richard's camp, which is very excited and and and and and want to be tremendously enthusiastic about this as a as a gaming system, but very skeptical of of how it's going to work until we have a a holodeck. It's ideal. Well, I think for VR to take off for games and work well, it's not a just about supporting a headset. There's a lot more to the art than that. You you need the controllers that work well with it to give you a sense of okay, now I'm in this environment. Okay, how can I control it and feel like I'm moving around in the environment and taking actions in an immersed way? Uh because, you know, a joypad, a joystick just doesn't really cut it for
00:34:57
that kind of uh contextual interaction. And there's game design stuff to be done. This isn't just about rendering in a VR headset. Um there's a lot more thought to really making the full VR experience come across. So, I think, you know, we want to experiment. It's not just about the hardware. We also, you know, are going to experiment with gameplay and interfaces uh to see what can work. And it's it's a question mark right now. We don't know how far we can push it or or other people can push it, but it's a lot of fun to try. That was an old uh working title, I think. Never actually made it um Yeah, but it Tony Zurovec? No, it was uh it was actually a uh well, I think I think Ken
00:35:45
Demarest? Demarest was probably the the the longest period we had a lead on it. Uh but but yeah, it came out of uh you know, when we were first had in-house 3D going, we talked about it being full VR. you know, we we we had even built some very simple prototypes. Uh it I think it then switched to being called green guns for a while. Um cuz we were all we always just played laser tag in the office with these green guns. And uh uh so it it it morphed into that project for a while. Uh but then we just finally concluded again that the, you know, the the combination of hardware and software really just still wasn't wasn't ready for prime time. So, uh you know, like like these guys have been alluding to, you know, I think the the best VR game when we finally get the right hardware, the best game for it is going to be a game that was designed for it
00:36:32
uh that actually won't play very well without it uh rather than being a game that is just attached to it. Now, this is after EA had purchased Looking Glass, I'm pretty sure, and we had become part of their green-lighting process, which we actually kind of welcomed because it brought some structure to how internal teams or individuals could propose ideas uh and if it got past the idea stage, they were given a little budget uh uh and a little more team to go a little further. And Bounty Hunter must have made it through three or four of those processes as you pointed out before it was finally concluded. Um well, one one thing to understand is Ultima Underworld II was uh I believe less than a year development cycle. It was 10 or 11 months. So, it was a very quick
00:37:22
uh sequel from the original one. part of the goal there was to try to get something out cuz we we knew we already had this this groundbreaking technology with the original game, and so uh you know, the focus was without really changing the engine and reworking the technology, can we get something out uh that in terms of new story and narrative and and setting can leverage that uh because in the back of our minds, we all wanted to do uh uh push the engine and and and you know, do some really cool stuff with the engine, but we knew that would take several years. So, it was seen uh as something we could get we could get out fairly quickly that would leverage, you know, this leading position we had just opened up in terms of the platform
00:38:10
while we're also, you know, uh thinking towards, you know, the next kind of full sequel, if you will. So, I always viewed uh Ultima Underworld II was kind of like a 1.5 from that standpoint. And so, that bigger tech that big that bigger rework of tech he's still the bigger rework of tech it's only taken up about 20 years. A little longer than we thought, 23 years. So with with Ultima Underworld II, uh the other thing is that now we were working we did unlike the original we started at you know from day one with Origin and so the Ultima fiction is more tightly uh I'm sorry the Underworld the Ultima Ultima fiction is more tightly bound uh you know based in uh the second game. Uh the other thing we did was which was
00:38:57
a narrative design experiment uh which didn't work out as well as we had hoped in some ways in other ways worked great. The original Underworld was very much a you know you're in a eight-level dungeon that you go from you know deeper and deeper and deeper in the very classic dungeon crawl kind of configuration. For um Underworld II, uh we decided let's let's create a a hub and spoke model where you you sort of magically and otherwise go to these little these realms uh and then you come back to the hub each time. Um in ways it was very uh freeing and it allowed us to explore some different kinds of configurations in gameplay but the downside is it didn't feel as cohesive and I think it was harder for
00:39:45
players to necessarily have a sense of place. Um so it was an experiment we learned from that no question. For everything you get in the game there's three or four or five things that you had to cut out. You know make making games is is kind of like sculpture you're you're cutting down until you get the core of what you can actually do for that game with the time and resources. Um and and that's a good thing Those constraints are good cuz it forces you to make decisions. But it also means there are some important things that you really wanted to be able to tackle that you just you you you can't. And so you put those in on the on a you know
00:40:31
in a big bucket, a huge bucket sometimes of we'll we'll revisit this on the next game. Um, so there were yeah, there was there was lots of stuff we wanted to do. Um, and that's one of the things that's kind of neat now that that's 23 years later, but you know, we we had all kinds of plans for for Ultima Underworld III and things that were all put on the back burner for for a long time. And you know, all this magically is we we can go revisit some of those things uh, today. It's uh, it it it's a long and complicated question. Uh, the the the the maybe the short answer is that uh, and and Richard uh, you know,
00:41:19
Richard Garriott may may may probably have better perspective on some of this than I do, but I think after Origin uh, was acquired by Electronic Arts and there were some changes in priorities uh, for Origin as a studio uh, I think effectively it became harder for us uh, uh, at Blue Sky and then Looking Glass to figure out how we would work with Origin to do the next uh, Underworld. Uh, and there were discussions about it. We looked at it, but the the the green light process and getting EA you had to approve over all of that. There were there extra hurdles. Um, and so it just never you know, things never aligned to let that go forward. And it was kind of an odd uh, uh, contractual thing. Uh, I I actually have
00:42:09
you know, myself rights to future versions. And so it was one of these things where ultimately EA had the underlying rights to publish the game. I had certain creative rights. We sort of had to agree together to make anything new. And it just we we we couldn't come to the, you know, we couldn't make that happen and I'm so in various occasions three or four times over the last two decades there'd be discussions about let's do something with the Underworld franchise and it you know, there'd be discussion and talk about it and it was always tabled for let's revisit this again and it wasn't until this past year that finally that door got opened up and in the in this case we're actually able to bring it forward as an indie studio. Um we don't have the Ultima brand
00:42:56
itself. Uh EA has been doing Ultima branded games on their own and they didn't want market confusion. This is my understanding. But we have all the IP. We can use anything from the original games. We just can't use the Ultima brand itself. We uh renamed the studio to Looking Glass um and started working on we did Ultima Underworld II. And then we we continued to work with um uh other publishers but we shifted our focus more to doing our own games. Uh our goal at Looking Glass was to try to, you know, do what what Origin had
00:43:44
done and and others to, you know, grow into our own studio and publish our own games. So Flight Unlimited in '95 was our first self-published game. and then we did uh Thief a couple years later. Uh we did the System Shock games. Uh the first one which we did with Uh that was actually interesting game because that came out of uh after Underworld 2, we said, "Let's do something that's in a very different genre. Let's do something that's, you know, totally different from fantasy, science fiction." Partly because we've been working on these fantasy games for uh going on 4 years and we just, you uh some of the team wanted it uh go in a different direction and try a different genre and take what we had learned from
00:44:32
the System Shock from the Underworld, apply that to a new genre, which which is what System Shock was all about. so anyway, we ended up at Looking Glass doing, you know, games like, you know, System Shock and System Shock 2 and Thief and Thief 2 and Flight Unlimited. We mentioned we did a couple of Madden Footballs. Uh we did some golf Uh we tried to, you know, grow a fully self-sufficient developer and publisher. It was challenging and and that was an era, this was getting into the, you know, the the later 1990s where the large companies were really starting to, you know, dominate, you know, the the Electronic Arts and the Activisions. And it was really challenging being a small publisher with only a few a few titles to be both a developer and
00:45:22
a publisher. So it was a struggle for us. and ultimately we couldn't we couldn't make that work, but we got some some pretty wonderful games done. uh after Looking Glass, I started up a new studio in in 2000, uh Floodgate Entertainment and I decided I wanted to try a whole new focus, which was uh mobile games. So we were doing some very early mobile games on feature phones. Uh we did as I said, a Pirates of the Caribbean game, uh which was the first uh arena multiplayer game, as far as I know, on cell phones. Uh we had up eight players, uh kind of like League of Legends, uh each other, teams of eight players. And in little multiplayer arena battles. Uh we did a Neverwinter Nights mobile game. Uh we did uh
00:46:11
uh some Madden mobile games. Uh we were more focused because it was mobile and then particularly in those earlier days of mobile, having a big brand like Pirates of the Caribbean or Madden was was pretty important. So, we tended to develop games like that that that were based on a strong IP and well-known IP. Uh we did that as a development studio for a number of years. I sold that studio to to Zynga a few years ago. And then I did the whole social Facebook thing, which was very different. We learned learned a lot about that. Mhm. Uh but you know, it it's great to be back into core gaming and uh you know, role-playing games. Uh it it's my passion and so it's it's great to be back doing that. It's interesting how uh you know, Paul was mentioning uh taking a break from medieval fantasy. Uh you know, I I did
00:47:00
that same sort of thing. I I lived in medieval fantasy from uh well, really the mid-1970s up through uh basically 2000. And uh and so uh you know, that's 25 years in in largely one virtual world. And uh and so after that after after uh parting company with EA, uh I was actually very happy to do anything that was not medieval fantasy. And so that's why when we started uh Destination Games, which became part of NCsoft, uh you know, we went in the directions of games like Tabula Rasa. And uh uh and and again, it was to have something more science fiction or uh more more specifically not medieval fantasy uh to to at least take a break in that. Um interestingly, like like Paul, uh you know, I missed it. There's it's
00:47:49
absolutely true that uh you know, as a gamer, I still did I've always done fantasy gaming. Uh and as a creator, I was eager to get back into fantasy gaming. So, uh so even though we have had had stepped away with the for one corporate cycle, very excited to be back in medieval fantasy again. I'll just briefly add to that that I was probably one of the first of the group of management at Origin that actually left Origin after we were purchased by Electronic Arts. I stayed on for about 3 more years and um and then finally decided that I needed to leave. I was I at that time was pretty burned out. So, I went on a a 10-year sabbatical. Left the whole industry and um did a lot of research and study in in the fields of psychology relating to
00:48:37
happiness and well-being. Um and it was those studies actually, especially in the areas of of how much of our well-being comes from social activities and from our social connections and relationships that actually got me back in the industry. I kind of missed the MMO industry and it's starting because we hadn't shipped Ultima Online yet when I left. Um and I was gone for the first 10 years of that MMO business. But then when I was, you know, studying this research again and a lot of the research was actually being done by academicians who were pulling their data from MMOs. Um um these online virtual worlds where they could where they had massive amounts of data they could study. And and I went, "Wow, okay. Now I'm now I'm interested again." um I wasn't burned out. My passion actually was was figuring out how to incorporate this wealth of knowledge
00:49:27
coming from social psychology into these these these massive quantities of relationships that are being created online and the interactions with each other. And I briefly joined Richard and Robert again at NCsoft. Uh but you know, it that that didn't work out real well for for several of us. So, we spun off and and I was actually the one that that planted the seed for Portalarium. And um and talked Richard here into uh getting back together again so that we could actually we could both realize our passion, which was his for getting back into his roots and making a fantasy RPG and me for want to be able to apply you know a lot of the new science and technology that's coming out into actually making these games even more engaging not just for the entertainment value of the story and
00:50:16
the and the adventure but but for what you can have in doing it with other people. And and then like Paul, we made a bit of a of a of a mis-turn in that instead of immediately starting on Richard Shroud of the Avatar and at that time we called it a Akalabeth Online because he still had the rights for Akalabeth which was his very first role-playing game. It was the prequel to to the Ultimas. And so that was our working title Akalabeth Online. Instead of working on that immediately, we thought we would do a quick a couple of quick knock-off games in this Facebook social market and we did a a poker game and we did Ultima Collector. And and we also joined up with Zynga to publish not publish but distribute our Ultima Collector. Now we got that out in the
00:51:04
sometime in 2012 just at the time that the Facebook market was doing this and Zynga was doing this and um and we had to scramble. We had already spent all of our investor money and this was when Richard and and probably Chris Beers at the time was the champions of this new Kickstarter thing. Now we'd all been watching Kickstarter for the last year and and seeing things like Shadowrun and Brian Fargo's Wasteland and the kind of money they were getting and we we couldn't get any more investors to step up to the table so we decided to to kickstart it. And we got a lot of help from from from Brian Fargo and from Chris. Chris Roberts who had actually done his own thing both the
00:51:53
Kickstarter known as website. Matter of fact we use some of the same software plugins for our website that that Chris used on on his side. So it was a big help there. And and and even that sort of brings us all back again you know with Paul. When we heard that Paul was thinking about making this turn you know I I find it both ironic and incredibly pleasing that there are group of us who go back to what I think of as as a one of the first real golden eras of computer games that had worked together during you know one of the most productive most creative most innovative periods where we saw games like Underworld, we saw games like the original Wing Commander where Ultima really came into its own as an intellectual property
00:52:40
where Ultima Online was ushered in massively multiplayer. That that era was was I think very important to the industry and to all of us as individuals. We've spent now 10 or 15 years you know exploring activities independently. And while technically right now we have separate companies each of us have our own companies but all of us still feel that same tribal bond that we that we you know we we lived through this fire together. We've helped each other in the past. There I think there's nothing more than we want to see from each other than to see each other succeed. Any way we can still tie our futures together or at least take part of our future and give it to another one of the members of this tribe to make sure that their future also goes well.
00:53:27
We want to do it. And so to me this sort of feels like a again since we're technically separate companies it's it's it's not like we've all come together to do this again but we really have all come together to do this again. And so I think it's great that we you know, I think the I think the only person that we need to get back around our table is Warren Spector who's over there teaching at UT for a while. But, if we could get him to come over and join us on this side of the fence, we'd have the whole, you know, you know, the majority of that of that Renaissance group He didn't have the benefit of, you know, I had the 10-year sabbatical, you know. He may need 10 years away cuz he just left recently. He was He was pretty productive while the rest of us were on our hiatus. He was, yes. It's one of the most satisfying things
00:54:21
to see, you know, you make a game, you don't know where that what's going to happen to that game after you launch it. And the fact that, you know, we hear from players who have just discovering it, you know, you know, this past, you know, past year for the first time and really, you know, really digging it, really getting into it. I would have never imagined that, you know, what kind of game that would still hold up, you know, more than two decades later. And the graphics are quite primitive by today's standards. But, once you get beyond the, you know, the the the 1992 era graphics, I think the gameplay really holds up and it's still very modern. You know, I think there's some things that we were doing back then that, you know, really haven't been materially surpassed even There's been
00:55:10
innovations in the industry move forward more than just graphics have all gotten phenomenally better and production values have gotten phenomenally better. There have been absolutely innovations in gameplay. But, when I think back to 1992, I thought there'd be a lot more innovations in the interactive media, you know, PC gaming would have pushed a lot further than it has. Um and you know, so I think it's cool that the game holds up, but there's a lot to be done, and I think it's still, if you look at the long vision here, the industry is still very young. We're still experimenting, and I think one of the coolest things about this sort of renaissance of indie studios like, you know, Portalarium and Otherside, RSI and and and and, you know, our our
00:55:58
studios is that we can innovate in a way that, you know, a lot of the the big publishers and triple-A teams can't necessarily. There's there's too much too many dollars at stake or, you know, it's just it's just a different model with going through retail with digital distribution and crowdfunding. You know, I think it opens the door to do the kind of, you know, fundamental innovations and and really push this as a genre forward, and there's a lot of head room left to do that. Well, of course, we are we are deep in Shroud of the Avatar at this point, and and unlike the early Ultimas where, you know, when I was doing Ultima I had of course it wasn't even called Ultima I was called Ultimum, and and Ultima II and Ultima III were
00:56:44
completely unrelated. They were different worlds, they were different IP. It was just my next fantasy game. And even four, five, and six it was sort of pick up where the last one left off. There was really no forward planning. At least this time with Shroud of the Avatar I'm going, you know, I I at least hope this game survives more than one iteration. So, so not only will we hopefully get Shroud of the Avatar more solidly in the user's hands, although it's already in the in its alpha form and the in the user's hands now, but not only will we get that, you know, completed here in this year to the users, but I but we have plans for episodes two, three, four, and five. So, we've got I've got at least five years, and that's if time goes that's if we're really efficient. It might be 10 years if things go slowly, Uh, it'll only be five or 10 years if, uh, the users grant
00:57:33
us that, uh, that privilege. Uh, but hopefully that's, uh, that's my next decade. Yeah, and mine's very tightly linked to that. Um, you know, I, um, I want to start Portalarium not just as a, as a, uh, one game company, uh, which was also one of my passions at Origin, um, which was bringing on uh, more teams, you know, more products, uh, as we could support it. Now, we had the luxury at Origin of already having a cash cow with Richard's Ultima series, which funded all of our other experiments. And yeah, and then when we managed to, uh, uh, adopt Chris Roberts into our Origin tribe, uh, um, and he, you know, in his third game did, um, um, um, Wing Commander, we had two big cash cows, which which allowed us to to to bring on more people and more teams and and start up more projects.
00:58:20
Uh, we had a pretty good hit record at at Origin, about one out of every three products, uh, was was successful marketably as compared to maybe one out of six or seven for for the industry as an average. So, you know, my purpose at Portalarium is to is to continue to, uh, uh, um, first of all, make it sustainable, uh, with Shroud of the Avatar, and then, as as we can, uh, start growing it. Uh, letting internal people, uh, come up with different ideas to explore, as well as bringing on more that might be interested. Like you said, we we we definitely have our sights on Warren Spector long term, uh, to to adopt him in. And yeah, um, and then the other difference was for me and Richard both was where Portalarium was concerned was, um, uh, you know, we're not viewing this, uh, as as an exit strategy from the beginning.
00:59:07
And yeah, I mean, Richard never did with the with the Origins and the Ultima. Uh, but his brother did, and yeah, and a few of the other investors. Um, for us, you know, uh, we'd be happy going to our graves, uh, uh, with these games and with Portalarium together. It's like you said, you know, once you're a member of a tribe and you've you've created that bond with each other, you never actually leave the tribe. And and and and our goal is to is to is to make this company sustainable, you know, even beyond our ourselves. Which we we we were too young to know how to do with Origin. We didn't know how to codify the the the the culture that made it such an awesome place. And because of that the culture eroded when when us those of us who embodied the culture
00:59:54
left. And that's it for me. Your turn, Paul. Yeah, well, I'll pick up on that the culture in the in the sense of being part of a tribe because it was really one of the things that I appreciated most about working with you know, Richard and Dallas and Warren at Origin is that there was a real great it was a great culture and a sense of being you know, you're all trying to push forward and and create create these wonderful games. And when I started my own studio with with Blue Sky, you know, Looking Glass, the thing that was I was proudest about was the culture that we created there in this group of developers who just shared this this deep passion for making wonderful games. And it's the process that I like most. It's being involved and seeing these games go
01:00:41
through their stages where they start with a vision and that vision starts coming into you know, the pieces start falling into place and you're solving the creative problems and the team is gelling. Um I mean, being there and doing it is to me the greatest reward. And so, you know, with OtherSide, it's an opportunity to do that again um and starting with this great franchise, the Underworld franchise. Uh you know, the team is really just incredibly psyched about it. Some of them have told me that this is the most fun they've used the word joy that they've had in many, many years. And I mean, that's that's where it's at. And I think great games can know, come out of that. If you can create that culture and that sense of we're all in a shared mission to make this wonderful game for ourselves and
01:01:31
for our fans, you know, that that's where that's where it comes from. That's what I enjoy most. And I would just, you know, I want to continue to do You know, I want to add to that real quick. When he mentioned the thing about the uh the the the teams enjoying uh the the development of the products, um back in the old days and again now, we're actually, in my opinion, able to enjoy it slightly a bit more now than we did even back in that golden era because of this uh this this release cycle that we're on. You know, even back then, we would still work as a team for up to 2 years uh to create a game. And then when we were done, you know, as a publisher, we'd throw it over the fence and cross our fingers and hold our breath and hope for the best. Um um and if the, you know, in product development, you're always running behind, always. And so you always feel like you're failing all
01:02:17
the time because you're never getting it out as when you said you would or how much you said you would. And uh um and then if you pushed it out there and it wasn't received very well by the market or didn't sell that well, then you had disappointment magnifying disappointment. Um the way we're doing it now, uh um and I'm pretty sure Paul will probably adopt something similar with uh with the new Underworld, is after about 8 months of development time, uh we pushed out our first pre-alpha release. And we did that by accident uh because we were supposed to have alpha out at that time. But of course, as I said a second ago, we're always behind. We didn't have alpha anywhere close. So Starr and Chris and Richard came up with this brilliant idea. He says, "Okay, it's not ready. We think it'll be ready in 3 months, but instead of waiting 3 more months, let's push out a little bit of it."
01:03:03
And we did. And then the And and that little bit was an avatar in a room. With a chicken. With a chicken. The chicken room. The chicken room. They loved it. They they they didn't they didn't give us any flak at all, they being the community and the backers, about the fact that we didn't push out alpha when we said we would. They saw that and at the same time we published a three-month schedule and said next month we're going to push this out, next month we're going to push this out. Now, we had thought by three or four months that oops, sorry, dropping my microphone here. We thought by three or four months that we would reach alpha. Well, it's 14 months later and we're still in pre-alpha release. But and and where you define alpha is secondary. So, that what I've observed in this team that we put together here out of the avatar and I'm sure you'll experience the same thing, Paul. And Star Citizen is getting to experience that, too, cuz they're doing
01:03:51
a similar model, perhaps not every month, but they're pushing out releases more than just waiting, you know, for the game to be finished. The team actually feels a sense of achievement and accomplishment even if we're getting criticism from our backers about they don't like this feature, they don't like that feature. There's enough of the features that they do love that the mixture of praise with criticism is very well balanced. And and very importantly, the criticism when it becomes and it's usually on a system we've just exposed to them that's only partially completed and we can correct it before the next release. And so, it means everybody is happier along the journey. They are. These these you know, probably at least a third of our backers are are are um experiencing the game every month. There's a larger body I'm going to say they want to wait until the game is finished. But that third to a half that is
01:04:39
experiencing on a monthly basis is helping us guide the game and they're actually feeding the souls of the team spiritually by playing the game on a monthly basis. And that's that is just really cool to see. While this these backers are actually paying for the development at the same time. They're feeding the team physically and they're feeding the team spiritually and it's working both ways. They're getting a having a great time of it.

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