The Digital Antiquarian: Lord British, Akalabeth, and California Pacific

For those who don’t know him, The Digital Antiquarian is the handle adopted by one Jimmy Maher, formerly of Dallas, Texas and currently living in Norway. His blog, which bears the same name, is principally devoted to an analysis of the history of interactive entertainment.

In the last little while, he has put up three articles which are recommended reading for Ultima fans. The first, concerning Richard Garriott personally, looks briefly at each of Garriott’s parents and their backgrounds before going on to chronicle the early history of the man himself, from his youthful days through to the creation of Akalabeth.

If you’ve read [amazonify]0874552648::text::::The Official Book of Ultima[/amazonify], most of what he covers won’t be new to you…but if you haven’t had a chance to read said tome, give the article a look. The Ultima creator had an…interesting…childhood, to say the very least.

The article concerning Akalabeth is a fairly in-depth look at the game, and again is comprised mostly of material that will be familiar to long-time students of Ultima history. The Antiquarian’s lament, near the start of the article, is humourous, and worth highlighting:

Why do writers of medieval fantasy (including plenty who ought to know much better than our young Mr. Garriott) always turn to the Renaissance-era Shakespeare when they want to make their English diction sound all high-falutin’ and authentic-like? There is a fellow named Geoffrey Chaucer, you know…

Finally, there is the article about California Pacific, one of the earliest publishers of computer games and the company that gave Richard Garriott his big break as the distributor of Akalabeth, and later Ultima 1. It begins thusly:

There are two conflicting stories about how the game that Richard Garriott sold in that Houston-area ComputerLand store made it to the West Coast offices of California Pacific, one of the most prolific and prominent of early Apple II software publishers. One says that the man who had prompted Garriott to start selling Akalabeth in the first place, ComputerLand manager John Mayer, did him a second huge favor by sending a copy of the game to CP for their consideration. The other says that the game got to CP’s offices within a few weeks of appearing in that ComputerLand via software-piracy channels. The latter story is the one Richard himself tells today, and, for what it’s worth, the one I tend to subscribe to. Perhaps the former was invented closer to the events themselves, to avoid anyone having to explain just how pirated software made its way into CP’s offices. However Akalabeth came to their attention, CP’s founder, Al Remmers, called Richard before the summer of 1980 was out, offering to fly him to Davis, California, to discuss a publication contract that would give Akalabeth nationwide distribution.

Honestly, I’ve only ever heard the “first story” myself, which I am inclined to think is the true means by which Akalabeth came to be known to California Pacific. But it is true that software piracy existed even back then (and, indeed, it was a lot easier to pull off back then).

Anyhow…I get the feeling that the Digital Antiquarian will be covering a lot more ground pertaining to Richard Garriott and Ultima in the weeks (and months?) to come, so do be sure to stay tuned to his site!

16 Responses

  1. MicroMagic says:

    Software piracy was easier to pull of back then? Maybe there wasn’t as much antipiracy coding, drms, etc. But with the advent of bit torrent and other software sharing programs. I don’t think it’s been easier to pirate software.

    I wasn’t around for the early 1980’s, the usenet groups and such. Was it even possible to download stuff back then?

  2. Infinitron says:

    “Piracy” in the 80’s and early 90’s refers to people copying floppies from their friends, not downloading.

  3. renaak says:

    Piracy in the 80s/90s most certainly refers to downloading. Crack groups existed, linked intros onto their cracks and spread them via BBS and mail trading.

  4. Infinitron says:

    Sure, but how important a factor were those? I had a 14400 bps modem in the (early) 90’s – it took me about 10 minutes to download a single megabyte. Imagine how bad it must have been in the 80’s.

    It’s not for nothing that the anti-piracy slogan of the time was “Don’t Copy That Floppy”.

  5. Odkin says:

    I was an early 1980’s Apple II user and MANY of the DSK images available today have hacked title screens advertising the pirate BBS they were downloaded from. There was no Internet of course. Individual pirates and groups had dedicated computers with dial-up lines connected. You called their phone number, got a modem carrier, and logged into their BBS software. Download speeds at the time were generally 300 baud, less then 1/10 of today’s SLOWEST DIAL-UP.

    I never had a modem then, but I used to trade software with friends in the comic book store back room, where they had an Apple. A LOT of software was traded via “sneaker-net”, which is to say walking it around between friends houses.

  6. Renaak says:

    I was downloading from BBS at 300 baud in the beginning, I don’t have to imagine anything. I was there in the cracking scene in the mid-80s on my favorite machine.

    You do realize that games were usually 50k-170k in size? Eventually multi-disk games were released for the 8bits, but still, you’re talking about 200-400k for a game transferred by modem at 1200/2400baud.

    It is quite obvious you’ve only experienced modern PCs. Like everything else, the younger generations really don’t have a clue how things were. 😉

  7. Odkin says:

    My math is off – baud isn’t equal to bps. But I assure you 300 baud is DAMN slow. When I watched a friend use one once, text characters actually appeared on his screen at the same speed as if someone was typing them.

    Also remember an Apple ][ 5.25″ disk was only 140kb, and you could usually fit 3 or 4 games on one. Ultima was on both sides of a single disk, and mostly filled it, for a total of about 280k.

  8. MicroMagic says:

    Wow, that’s really interesting! So if you were downloading something at 300 baud, how long would it take you to get a 50k or 100k game? Would other people try to connect at the same time slowing down the download? If it didn’t slow down, how did these pirates with the servers speed up their connections? I’m assuming to connect to other people’s modems was free?

    I got a few burned copies of games back in the early 2000’s from my friends, back in highschool. I remember, one of the only new games I had back then was Gothic 1. And I let a about 4-5 friends borrow it. They would’ve never played it otherwise. Because of that 3 out of 4-5 of them became lifelong fans and bought themselves copies of g2-g3. In one way piracy isn’t so bad.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      This seems like a good time to insert my usual warning: we can discuss the moral/ethical implications of piracy, and I don’t mind people identifying as “for” or “against” the practice.

      But, you know, keep the open advocacy to a minimum, and don’t post links to sites hosting illegal downloads (including abandonware).

      Not that anyone has done this, and it’s not my intent to imply that anyone intends to. This is just the standard caution I throw into piracy discussions now, since in the past I have had to deal with such issues.

  9. Infinitron says:

    I was downloading from BBS at 300 baud in the beginning, I don’t have to imagine anything. I was there in the cracking scene in the mid-80s on my favorite machine.

    I believe you, graybeard, but I doubt it was ever the major vector for pirated game distribution the way it is today. You had maybe one or two superhaxx0rs like yourself in a region who’d download the game, and they would distribute it to their friends the old-fashioned way.

    And, sheesh, “younger generation”? I was there for DOS, man, I’m not young. 😛

    Wow, that’s really interesting! So if you were downloading something at 300 baud, how long would it take you to get a 50k or 100k game? Would other people try to connect at the same time slowing down the download? If it didn’t slow down, how did these pirates with the servers speed up their connections? I’m assuming to connect to other people’s modems was free?

    It was a phone call, and worked like a phone call. If somebody was connected, you got a busy signal.

  10. Sergorn says:

    Yeah seriously, as much as publishers wants us to believe it begins with the evilness of Internet, back in the ’80s piracy was *everywhere* down to simply copying tapes for the Amstrad CPC! Sure there was little downloads, but wether it was at school between classes, or near computer shops at all, everyone was pirating games (and sometime trying to find clever ways to circumvent the weird copy protections, like text you could only read with red glasses or such :P).

    In all seriouness (and note that I am in a no way condoning piracy) back then in the Amstrad, Atari and Amiga day… I knew very few people who actually *bought* games, and most people just had tons of disks with pirated games. Perhaps the “initial release” came from downloads from craking groups and such, but they spread quickly beyond that and were widely distributed, copyed amongst kids and teens just craving for new games.

    Basically? It was no different in essence from today and it certainly was widescreen considering the state of the times.

    The thing that changed though, is that consoles have become easily prey to Piracy since the PSX era while that was a near impossibility during the cartridge days. 😛

  11. Infinitron says:

    Sergorn:
    What’s changed is that we now have the means to measure the amount of piracy going on, by looking at the statistics on the Pirate Bay and similar sites.
    That’s how managers operate. If something doesn’t have a ‘metric’, it doesn’t exist. I think they can’t justify that situation to the investors – that some site on the Internet is distributing their product for free by the hundreds of thousands, and nothing can be done about it. And they’ll keep trying and trying as long as that metric exists. It’s a case of “too much information”.

  12. MicroMagic says:

    I think you both have a very valid point about piracy. Look at u6 for instance. RG put in questions part way through the game to make it just a little harder on you if you hadn’t bought the actual game. They knew about piracy back then. But as these companies get more and more money they get more and more sophisticated in their antipiracy measures.

    Now that I’m older, and I can afford to purchase games, I have no need to pirate anything. But when I was just a youngin’ with no allowance and no methods of bringing in money for myself, there’s only one way to kill the boredom. And those freeware games from download.com… well they were free for a reason, they sucked.

    In my eyes, there’s a big difference between a pirate that takes a game, cracks it, and throws it on tpb and puts it on a t3 connection of something ridiculous like that. And someone who lets a few friends borrow the game. Especially if it’s an obscure game that people wouldn’t have an interest in buying otherwise.

    It makes me wonder sometimes, what is the motivation of a pirate? What makes someone say, “Hey I can crack this game with a little help from friends, then we can put it on a dedicated server for everyone else to play for free.” I guess it lies in the challenge of just being able to do it. And if it’s done, it doesn’t mean as much unless other people see it, the more people that see it the more important that individual is.

    But if you have that sort of talent and ability to crack a game like that. Don’t you think you’d take that same talent to make yourself boatloads of cash legally? To my knowledge, pirates don’t make a dime doing what they do. Does anyone know if pirates have ever been caught for posting a game they’ve cracked onto the internet?

  13. Odkin says:

    Definitely the early pirate motivation was the same as the “taggers” of the time, which was, “hey, look at me, I win!”. Except with computer nerds and their “crew”, they weren’t going to climb any billboards.

    Most of the pirate-defaced Apple software references not an individual pirate, but a “crew” of some kind. Many also contain insults directed at others.

    Another analogy would be to the people who make viruses. There’s nothing in it for them. They just want bragging rights in “the scene” to being the first and the most widely spread.