Ultima creator and private astronaut Richard Garriott, who recently co-founded Portalarium, has got a new game in the works.

Richard Garriott delivered the keynote at Fantastic Fest’s inaugural Fantastic Arcade event in Austin today. After giving the assembled audience his personal history, he offered a hint about where he plans to go with Portalarium (which is evidently both a company and game name).

Displaying a slide about going “back to my roots,” Garriott said his company planned to make “AAA games, meaning the games we find compelling to create and play, but distributed through social media.” Why that medium? “The power is in that you don’t have to make a decision to buy it, you play it by clicking on a link, nothing to pay for up front, no real installation and only if you decide you really want to play it will we decide how to eventually charge you money for it.”

Later, in response to an audience question, he explained his strategy a bit further. “Since everybody else is doing Flash and Java games, I can kick their ass pretty easy.”

It’s generally true that Garriott could, as a game developer, run (code? write?) circles around the likes of Zynga and their flagship product, FarmVille. Any Garriott-produced game, even one based in Flash or AJAX/jQuery, would probably be a superior product to the games available on social networks like Facebook at present.

Of course, this being Garriott, I don’t think he’s just talking about his skill as a game-maker; I think he’s also tipping his hat a bit and indicating that Portalarium — and, in particular, this upcoming Garriott game — will make use of somewhat more advanced engines than just Flash or Java. Unity, perhaps?

The whole “going back to my roots” bit is also interesting, and it’s something we here in the Ultima community should pay close attention to. It won’t be an Ultima game, though unless I am grossly mistaken it could potentially be a Lord British game; EA has the rights to the Ultima name, but they don’t have the rights to the Lord British name (and I’m fairly certain it’s Garriott who does). Garriott’s roots, at any rate, are very much in the fantasy RPG genre…if he’s got something in the works, expect it to be something in that category.

Some of you may be wondering: why social networks? Well, Garriott does explain it pretty well — marketing a game across something like Facebook is quite simple, and getting people into the game requires them to do nothing more than click a couple links. For anyone familar with the whole “pick-up artist” concept and technique, this is what is called “low buy-in,” and it’s an effective (and fairly reliable) pick-up technique. It’s also a fairly reliable and effective marketing technique.

There’s also the issue of cost: developing games for social networks (and, indeed, for web deployment in general) is also quite a bit cheaper, which is to the benefit of a small company like Portalarium.

And, as Garriott remarks this note he posted on Facebook, which reiterates many points covered in the keynote address, “look what is proving to be popular on social media so far: farming games, cooking games, homesteading games, pet management games, etc. Now look at what made the Ultima games, especially Ultima Online, unique in contrast to most other combat centered MMOs from EverQuest to WOW. Ultimas are rich detailed sandbox games, where many players chose to be bakers, farmers, blacksmiths and huge community based villages and thriving towns. It seems to me that many of the new found players who have only discovered games in this recent round of social media are already being well “groomed” to enjoy gaming aspects which were already delivered in Ultima Online.“

It’s not quite a home field advantage, but I think any Ultima fan can attest that if there is one thing a Garriott game should to well, that thing is sandboxing: not just playing through a quest, but playing with the world.