1983 Infomania Interview With Richard Garriott
Dungy, from the Codex of Ultima Wisdom, sent me this scan of an Infomania article from March, 1983, the primary focus of which is a bug in Ultima 2.
What? Bugs in an Ultima game? Never...
Apparently, when engaged in ship combat, you can board the attacking ship. This will stop it from attacking, but will also cause another ship to spawn beneath it, to take its place (presumably as the combatant). This is evidently a repeatable trick, meaning that with some careful work it is possible to create artificial bridges of ships between continents in the game.
The article ends with a summary of a brief interview with Garriott, and also features an inset of an interview that the National Enquirer did with a young Lord British. It’s quite a neat little piece of history, overall.
Not only is this a neat piece of history. This shows just how badass Richard Garriott is. Look at those sweet sunglasses, and looking brazenly away from the camera. He knows he’s hot stuff and everyone is looking at him. He just doesn’t care!
What a total badass! Bad boys get all the girls, no wonder he has such a smokin wife!
I’ll concede the point on the…I guess those are some sort of aviators, aren’t they? Smeg-off-big sunglasses, regardless.
It’s interesting, too, to see bugs in Ultima games being discussed to this level of detail even back then. Not much has changed in the intervening 28 years.
That really is an awesome bit of history.
Ah for the days when the gaming industry was like the wild west! When a swarthy young man could carve a name for himself with nothing more a few lines of Basic and a smoked bus windshield for glasses! That was the golden age!
Seriously though, that’s pretty crazy awesome to see.
LOL, he looks like Kip from Napoleon Dynamite.
Cool find though. Neat article.
I was unbelievably proud of myself when I found that article. I wanted to share it with the world. http://cgw.vintagegaming.org/ Computer Gaming World Museum is a brilliant resource for anyone interested in computer video gaming history. They have scans of every issue of the magazine from 1980 to 1998, and they have Softtalk too, which is featured in the Computer Camp in Ultima II.
Grr… WTF, your spam checker ate my post despite being logged in.
I’ll find it.
Wow. I love the inflammatory and exploitative nature of the print. Look at the two photos, and in order say, “WHIZ KID Richard Garriott displays his new game” (mad grin) and “What Can You Do with a Drunken Sailor?” (thoughtful look at best).
And yes, making bridges out of ships was a common strategy. These days we’d call that kind of accident emergent gameplay and file it as a bug in the “Oh shit, players are destroying our world” department. Sad, no?
My friend Donnie showed me that when he first introduced me to Ultima II (pirated) on his Apple ][ PC. He also pirated his satellite connection, getting the encryption key and such. Newscasters are funny when they’re just standing there waiting for the live feed.