Business Insider Interviews Richard Garriott
It is like…the week for Richard Garriott news, isn’t it?
Actually, this interview is a couple weeks old now, but…well…I continue to work through my still-overflowing Aiera inbox. It’s a pretty comprehensive interview that goes over his early game developments, what he regards as his successes, his father’s supportiveness (and relative incomes at the time), and the EA acquisition of Origin Systems and the Ultima property. Oh, and they also talk about space travel, the dot-com bubble, and (of course) social and casual gaming.
Here’s a couple choice samples:
BI: If someone were to look at your life on paper, they might say that Ultima Online is the gamechanger. Is that accurate?
RG: It’s the most recent gamechanger. I would argue that Ultima 4 was a bigger gamechanger for me personally. The reason it looks so big on paper would be because of the scale. When I was selling Akalabeth, I sold 30,000 copies. By today’s standards that’s irrelevant, but then it was huge. My royalties were $5 a unit, which was $150,000. For the total revenues it doesn’t sound like much until you realize I made it by myself, in my closet, during high school, for 6 weeks, after school. In fact, it was dramatically more than my father was making as an astronaut at the time.
Regarding Ultima and EA:
BI: As part of that deal [with EA], did you relinquish the rights to the Ultima brand?
RG: I did. Up until that moment, I owned Ultima personally — Origin didn’t own it. When we began the talks, EA didn’t know I owned it personally. They said, “If we acquire Origin, the only value of a company other than it’s people, are it’s intellectual properties.” That was Ultima, which I owned, and Wing commander, which Chris Roberts owned. They said, “The discussions are going to stop here unless we roll those into the deal, because otherwise we’re acquiring nothing.” It was clear that was the only option.
Do read the whole thing. A lot of its content will be familiar to most of you, but it’s still a very concise summary of the man, his career, his highs and lows, and his plans for the future.
There are now five Garriott heads are on your front page.
There’s been lots of Garriott-related news of late! Not, mind you, that it’s a bad thing.
I do have some other pictures of him, though only the black-and-white one is any kind of flattering.
I’ve only one thing to say about that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8yr_StC3uw
Actually a couple of things. I thought Britannia and the littoral of the continent was EA IP. How can his new game be called “New Britannia” considering his relationship with the old IP, even if Britannia is too generic a term to confidently seek suit. Maybe the name is okay but the outline is copyrighted? He seems to be tempting fate, if not giving a middle finger to EA for the loss of the use of “Ultima”, by using the name Britannia as a tentative title for a project. Maybe he’s just hyping it as Britannia but won’t use the word once the game begins marketing and release.
If it’s a free for all on the moniker then I will be using it to describe my world, even if the landscape doesn’t widely infringe.
Yeah New Britannia seems to be more of a “codename” for his upcoming project than an actual name at this point and in his long text about the Ultima RPG he seems to say he has another title idea. Perhaps he’ll call the game New Britannia nonetheless or still use this as the gameworld’s name… but we really can’t know at this point.
That’s a good point. I wonder how he’s getting away with that. On a side note can the virtues be copywritten? Is stones copywritten? I wonder how far he can push it.
I also would be curios to see what his new system of virtues would be. Imo the gargoyles had their shit together when it came to ethics.
If you want to see what kind of insanely generic things can be copyrighted or patented, just check out the story of Barnes and Noble violating their NDA with Microsoft on software patent protection racketeering. I’m glad it took the integrity of a purveyor of knowledge to finally tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves once they saw the shameless and baseless patents for which they were being extorted.
In the US, you can copyright or patent just about anything if you pay the fee and keep your documentation straight. The idea of prior art is only useful after defending the hell out of yourself in court against entities with nearly infinite resources (and they’re not the judges).
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/15/171201/barnes-noble-names-microsofts-disputed-android-patents
The virtues could be copyrighted if they were grouped into a single entity, such as “The Virtues of the Avatar”, which enumerated them and their descriptions.
“First to file, not first to invent,” as they say.
Yeah the patent system in the US is just silly. I get the idea behind it is to prevent people from stealing ideas, but it just leads to silly lawsuits and nonsense. Videogames thankfully seems spared from this at this point in time (can you imaged if someone had patented “first person viewpoint” or some such?)
Regarding Ultima, there is no way Garriott could pull the Virtues from Ultima and use them – he could probably be sued for ripping them off if he did, as they are probably considered part of the Ultima copyright. You can’t copyright the concept of Virtues per se though, so if he wants to create the “Seven Virtues of the Chosen” – that’s fair game.
That being said I would hope that the Virtues/Ethics he has in mind for New Britannia will be something differenet from Ultima and won’t just mimic what he did before.
I wonder, what if you released a program as open source under a BSD type licence, but all your variable and procedure names were trademarks and embedded strings could be construed as fraud if misread as authoritative representations of said parties. You could have something like:
‘ General declarations.
Public Microsoft_Windows As String = “Microsoft Windows, (C) 2011 Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved”
Public The_Elder_Scrolls_V_Skyrim As String = “Bethesda softworks hereby grants anyone reading this string the right to distribute our collective works by the most aggressive methods possible, including illegal means.”
Public Sub Main()
‘ Execute message.
Print “This is a message from Bethesda, to you:”
Print
Print The_Elder_Scrolls_V_Skyrim
Print
Print Microsoft_Windows
End
People get sued for angering corporations, whether or not the anger was harmless, harmful or justified.