Trip Hawkins Is In Some Pretty Hot Water
Trip Hawkins
Ultima fans will remember the name Hawkins from the Ultima 6 backstory, and the much-hated pirate captain who bore that name. Most Ultima fans are also aware that this pirate was an easter egg of sorts, a not-exactly-subtle dig at Trip Hawkins, the founder and then-CEO of Electronic Arts.
He’s…not exactly popular with Ultima fans, and has kind of come to be the face (if you will) of everything unsettling that Ultima fans felt about EA over a decade ago. That said, he left EA in 1991 and went on to found 3DO. That venture failed, and he went on to found Digital Chocolate in 2005, a company which focused on making games for handhelds.
Anyhow, he apparently got himself into some hot water hiding millions in profits from his days at EA in “abusive tax shelters”, and a US district judge has just ruled that he cannot claim bankruptcy in order to stave off the tax debt the IRS has determined he owes.
Hawkins probably didn’t help his case by living a very extravagant lifestyle even while attempting to claim bankruptcy, something the judge took note of in his ruling. Perhaps the characterization of the man in Ultima 6 was more apt than its tongue-in-cheek inclusion would suggest?
Note: I’ll leave comments open on this one, but please keep things civil.
Heh. You should use one of those older photos where he looks like a Bond villain with slicked-back black hair.
It seems I can learn something new about Ultima even now… never realised the Hawkins connection. I thought the digs at EA started with Ultima 7.
Karma should be Ultima’s One True Axiom.
The digs at EA started with Ultima V actually where EA was considered a swear word if typed in dialogue.
As I recal it goes back to Ultima IV which was distribued by EA in some territories and relation within Richard Garriott and Trip Hawkins were less than friendly as Garriott considered Hawkins’ direction with videogames to be destrucive – hence the pokes at EA in U5, U6 and U7.
In all likelyhood: Richard Garriott wouldn’t have sold Origin to EA in 1992 if Trip Hawkins hadn’t left the company one year earlier. Probably another publisher, but not EA.
That’s because (if memory serves me) according to an interview with Garriott Tripp sued Origin for no reason other than to damage them financially since they were competition. Garriott said that he spoke with him and that he admitted as much. I’m downloading the interview now to get the quote.
If that’s true, I hope Trip not only becomes financially indebted to the government in excess of his holdings with criminal consequences, but that he gets [civil stuff] in his [more civil stuff] for the next decade. Karma, indeed.
Also, trip’s 9-year tenure began at EA in 1982 with its founding and ended in 1991. I don’t know the dates of his employment, but those years spanned the publication of Ultima II – VI. Perhaps he was eyeing them the entire time with the notion of assimilation or destruction.
Origin was acquired by EA in September 1992, the same year that Ultima VII was published. I know nothing of EA’s involvement with Origin or Ultima VII at that time, but EA did publish Ultima VIII and IX and Garriott blamed those games’ faults on EA’s forced timetable.
Don’t forget that other wee tiny Ultima title published during the dark days of EA’s lordship over Origin: the critically-panned and fan-detested Serpent Isle.
Wait…what?
It’s also worth noting that the image you say Garriott tried to paint is…not entirely truthful. Sure, EA imposed timelines on their development processes, and yes, those had some adverse effects. But so did a lot of the choices Origin made during the development of those titles.
As pretty as it is to think that Ultima 8 might’ve been a completely different title had it not been for EA, the fact of the matter is that it still would have been an action-oriented game with jumping puzzles. Ultima 9, similarly, was not restarted two or three times on orders from EA, but because of decisions made within Origin. Likewise, the plot of Ultima 9 would have been more or less the same; Origin made the decision to move away from the Bob White Plot, after all. And the decision to move away from the original 3D-but-isometric engine to the engine that was ultimately used to make the game. Which, by the way, is a pretty decent engine: unparalleled in its day and still quite good from a modern standpoint.
And the fact is, Origin would have gone broke after Ultima 7 had it not been for the influx of funding from the EA buyout. I mean, how much did Wing Commander 3 cost, again? Love ’em or hate ’em, we only have the last three major Ultima titles (including the much-beloved Serpent Isle) — not to mention the last three Wing Commander titles — because of EA.
I can’t stress this enough but… Origin was very much a AAA developper thanks to EA’s funding. They were amongst the best developpers of the ’90 and kept releasing hits over hits.
If you look at every games released by Origin between 1992 (time of the buyout) and 1998 (the time where OSI turned into a online-only company) – they released a lot of hits and really great games. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure they even released a single bad game over this period – even there lesser titles like Cybermage were still pretty good on the whole.
And yeah I agree about U8 and U9 WtF (as I matter of fact I brought the same argument to you not long ago :P). While EA impacted on the development time frame of these games (though with U9 taking 5 years to be made, I do have a hard time blaming EA for giving it a “ship or kill”) – the fact is that even if you added a few month of development to both, they wouldn’t have been drastically different. More polished and complete, sure. But they’d still have been the same games at the core.
And a hack’n slash action RPG with a lot of jumping mostly focused on dungeon crawnling like Ultima VIII, would have been hated by fans even if it had included Moriens’ Birthplace, Water magic and an undead invasion.
As O said before, when you look at the OSI/EA years… there is lot more good stuff we got from it than negative stuff.
What was the beginning of the end for OSI, was when they decided to turn it into a Online only company – which in retrospect even EA feels must have been a terrible mistake (turning your AAA single player company into doing only Online games… talk about putting all your eggs in the same basket).
But at the same time – it’s not like Origin was exactly opposed to the idea. Care to remind me what Richard Garriott did once he left Origin? He went and formed Destination Games and head NCSoft’s newly formed US studios – a game company solely focused on creating online games. And one of the main reasons he left OSI/EA was because EA didn’t want him to work on his “X” project (which mutated later into Tabula Rasa) and insisted he kept working on Ultima Online games. And while they had a stressful relationship, for all we know Garriott might still have stayed at EA had they greenlighted “X” (which he intended at the time to do with the Ultima IX dev team).
While EA has its share of blame in Origin’s demise… I do think people tend to overlook Origin’s own fault in the matter.
I mostly agree with the above two posts. I think ya’ll took my last paragraph as too much of a stab at EA. I was trying to draw a timeline showing the overlap of Trip’s employment at EA, the publishing dates of the Ultima games, and EA’s acquisition of Origin. Throwing in Garriott’s mention of VIII and IX suggests a false conclusion, perhaps, but he did say that whether true or not. Maybe Garriott forgot the virtue of Humility and was trying to escape blame for his own failures. Human nature has a defense mechanism which causes us to first assume we’re blameless and to seek blame elsewhere. Only after some period of reflection, whether ten seconds or ten years, can we admit to ourselves that we f’ed up.
I did read the article that dissected Origin’s demise, so if that’s accurate then I pretty much know how things went down after acquisition. Ultima was already on the path to what it became after VII, EA just provided to funds to make it so. Combine that with a disorganized team not used to a corporate environment and you get failure. I think even if the price of floppies had gone to zero and Origin hadn’t been acquired that VIII and IX would have been much the same games.
Exactly. I mean I’m gonna past what I wrote on the topic while I was blogging my Ultima play through.
Altough I’m gonna stand on my soapbox a bit and argue that in some ways Ultima VIII does feel like a logical continuation of the Serpent Isle philosophy.
I mean when you look at it, Serpent Isle had like barely 3 cities, and a couple of other settlements and NPCs throughout the rest of the world. All the rest, all things considered, was just wilderness and dungeons. When you compare it to Britannia and its dozen of cities/village or so… you could almost say Serpent Isle was a dungeon crawler as well. Now personally I tend to think Ultima VII focused too much on the city side, and Serpent Isle striked a better balance – but in essence you could argue Ultima VIII just pushed the same philosophy forward (to the point that IT became more dungeons crawling than anything). I mean, jumping aside, the dungeons design on the whole are also very much in the same kind of design as Serpent Isle as well – even the whole fireball coming from everywhere was very much present in the Ultima VIIs – except the arcadish approach of Ultima VIII actually makes it possible to avoid them.
When you consider the original design of Ultima IX aimed for an even more arcadish approach than Ultima VIII – it also says something at the direction the series was aiming.
The final version of Ultima IX did went back a bit as Garriott did felt they went too far with Ultima VIII but it did maintain some obvious cues.
For all the talk there is today about how consoles dumb down gaming and all… the thing is developpers have always aimed to bring more people to their games, and that meant simplifying and streamlining things.
I mean Ultima VII was very much streamlined compared to previouses instalments, it was made easier to play, more accessible. I actually know someone who considers the U7s are more adventure games than actual RPGs – which I find ludicrous, but I can see his point when I consider how other RPG series have evolved.
I would argue that U8 was basically an attempt to streamline Ultima as much as possible to bring more players (it worked: U8 was the best selling game of the series), while U9 would be more about trying to strike a better balance : ie streamlining enough to bring new players while at the same time trying to mainting the things that brought fans to the series in the first place.
One criticism I have of LB was his insistence on ensuring that each new numbered Ultima was completely written from the ground up. This made sense in the early years, and helped distinguish his innovative sequels, but imagine how great Ultima 8 and 9 could have been with an incrementally improved U7/SI engine? That engine was genius (despite the difficult memory manager) and could have brought a lot of extended life to the series — and the development focus could have been on the stories and improved gameplay (after all, the games were already ahead of their time!). Failing that, Ultima 9 and its successors could have worked very nicely with the UO engine, I’m sure!
But I’m sure things look very different and are much more complicated on the inside. Ultima has been surely missed…
I don’t know.
The U7 engine was good for its time, but it also had a lot limitations: the world flat, you couldn’t really craft multi levelled dungeons, buildings could only have a couple of floors and such…
Revamping these stuff would most likely have required the engine to be rebuild from the ground up: and when you have to do that it’s saffer to start from scratch that build things on tops of an existing engine (a lot of the instabilities issues the Ultima IX engine suffered came from the fact the new Full 3D engine was built upon legacy code from the old overhead 3D engine).
The fact that Ultima (and Origin games on the whole) always pushed technology forward was what make the series groundbreaking right up till the end – because even Ultima IX was a damned groundbreaking game technologically speaking.
I really wouldn’t have it any other way.
I think Lord British saw the future of the industry and built in a failsafe mechanism by which his progeny would self terminate. Having to code the entire engine without using previous code was a guarantee that no half-assed studio would take things over. A claim to independence, perhaps.
While it made things harder for Origin, it is a sound principle for making a new AAA title. Engine improvements are no excuse for a new game. One of the reasons I don’t play most recent games…
It could have been an independent streak and a bulwark against the direction the industry seemed to be moving.
Or it could have been arrogance. Or even simple — perhaps willful — ignorance of the flexibility and power of a solid, re-usable & enhanceable engine.
Side point: Darren’s remark about using an upgraded version of the Ultima 7 engine made me think of the failed Exult 3D project. I mean, surely Origin would have noticed at some point (if they hadn’t already) that the engine could be extrapolated from 2D to 3D…and perhaps they could have made a very excellent 3D RPG engine out of it, as a result, and then one that would have provided a very solid foundation for future titles.
Then too, while I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the Ultima 8 engine — the angle of its isometric view just bothers me, although its artwork and animations are quite excellent — I absolutely love the Ultima 9 engine. It would be better if it supported modern shaders, but it’s still quite good-looking even after a decade and more. And it actually is very functional, as an engine for an RPG.
What interests me, and this may be a controversial statement, is whether Garriott’s abandonment of the single player game is really because he believes massive multiplayer games are the future, or is it because he feels he just can’t compete in the single player arena anymore? That he just doesn’t have what it takes to make a single player RPG of Bioware/Bethesda-esque proportions?
I think that it would be completely understandable, if that were true. We’ve talked before about how in many ways Ultima IX seemed like an attempt to make a late 90’s game using early 90’s practices. Sometimes the world moves on and leaves you behind.
I think it’s that just Richard Garriott always has this pioneering kind of view of things. Which is a bold word in a sense (though probably fitting for someone who’d want to make space tourism a reality), but I guess we could summ it up to him always wanting to try out “the next new shiny/big thing” which he why he always tried new technology and medium even what that didn’t lead anywhere.
Remember the short lived virtual headset craze of the mid ’90 for instance? Garriott was deep into this, they had a team at OSI experimenting on it and he was convinced Ultima X would be released with this technology.
And regarding online games even if UO didn’t came out until 1997 they actually began experimenting with tis in the early ’90 (with the first “Multima” versions using the Ultima VI engine even!) which obviously demonstrate there was interest. And while there were MUDs and other attempts like Meridian 59 before – UO really was groundbreaking in how it trully crafted a virtual world for people to “live in”. This goes with this “new frontier” philosophy I mentionned above.
I don’t think Garriott left single player gaming because he felt he could not compete anymore. I would argue things might actually have been easier for him if he had stick with single player RPGs. I mean imagine if having formed Destination Games he set up to a new Ultima-ish RPG ? Ultima IX was a sound concept – if he had just taken and improved upon it we would basically have a had Gothic and most likely a solid game. What he set up to do with X/Tabula Rasa was nothing short of revolutionising MMOs with the aim to bring a single player experience into a MMO environnement. While this was arguable a failed attempt (but then the final game had little to do with this, I always wonder if the arrival of Guild Wars had something to do with this change of direction)… this does stand again in the “trying new stuff” category.
And Garriott is right about one thing: after SP games and subscription based MMO, social network IS the next big thing, so it feels consistent for him to explore this direction.
Arguably, he might not be in a position to do AAA SP games even if he wanted to in any case, considering how expensive this kind of game are to make nowadays. This would most likely require to join with a big publisher like EA or NC Soft – and I can’t shake the feeling that part of the reason he went with Portalarium the way it is know is to not be dependant on these huges companies anymore and stay independant. It should be noted Garriott still loves regular CRPGs, and did evocked that he’d like to do more single player games down the road – I think he just finds the idea of trying new things (like Portalarium) more appealing that threading old grounds even with the improvements of technology and such.
Regarding this discussions about engine, I realy like the U8 engine personally – my biggest beef would be the lack of a seamless world. Arguable it missed other things like day/night cycles or schedules, but I think this stuff could have been coded in down the road if needed. Not to sure the engine could have been revamped to be seamless however.
they actually began experimenting with tis in the early ’90 (with the first “Multima” versions using the Ultima VI engine even!)
Wow. I did not know about this.
Perhaps the true answer to RG’s motives is a combination of the two – both a genuine desire to constantly explore new territory, and an apprehensiveness of a genre that’s gotten too big and complex to be fun anymore.
I agree that ‘fun’ and breaking new ground was probably a big factor in decisions. It is a lot of fun to be able to design something new from scratch, learning from your experiences in the previous design. I would have probably done the exact same thing (and probably have in my own way numerous times). Unfortunately, the better and more complicated the games got, the more difficult it was for the growing teams to complete them in time. But sometimes you must sacrifice fun to ensure your economic capability to have future fun, and I see this the second half of Serpent Isle forward as an unfortunate examples of this. And I imagine that authority within EA had a heavy-handed way of making that point, which did not help matters at all.
If you ever get a chance (and have hours to kill) take a look at the online interviews of RG before the releases of U4, U5, U6, etc.
It just strikes me that U5, U6, and U7 were very rich engines, and were great platforms for telling a story. There could have been more great stories told. I didn’t mind at all that Serpent Isle used the same engine as 7 (I just wish they had more time to complete it).
I guess I’m different in that respect — I’m not completely satisfied with how things turned out because I keep thinking about what might have been. Perhaps this is a negative approach, but I can imagine all of the great Ultima-like games that could have existed alongside games like Diablo — but 1000% more compelling. Despite the silliness in a lot of places, I found I really enjoyed the stories of Ultima and wanted it to continue. But maybe I should just take the advice from the Quake user manual: “Story: There is none, if you want a good story, go read a book.”
I look at this: which seems like the u5/u6 engine on steroids:
http://myweb.cableone.net/gmcnutt/nazghul.html
And I see so much potential, even today.
“It just strikes me that U5, U6, and U7 were very rich engines, and were great platforms for telling a story. There could have been more great stories told. I didn’t mind at all that Serpent Isle used the same engine as 7 (I just wish they had more time to complete it).”
Ah but you see, this IS what Origin wanted to do at the time – that was the plan, reusing engines to make more games.
There was the obvious idea of Worlds of Ultima games: use the engine to make more Ultima games was the new one was being developped for the core Ultima games but obviously it just did not work out in term of sales which is why it never went that far after that. Eck this is probably the reason Serpent Isle mutated from an unrelated Worlds of Ultima kind of game to a part of the Core series – OSI probably feared it would not sell. Arthurian Legends was also meant to use the Ultima VII engine and it was cancelled.
They actually did that with other stuff : the expansive Strike Commander engine was reused for a couple of games, and so was the Ultima VIII engine for the Crusader games.
Hmm, yeah, you’re right. The numbers just didn’t work out, I guess.