Interview With Paul Sage
Paul Sage worked for Origin Systems on Ultima Online (among other things), and now works for Bethesda Game Studios/Zenimax Online as the creative director for The Elder Scrolls Online. And, as Deckard at the UO Gateway reports, he is the subject of an interview that GameInformer posted as part of their coverage of the recently-announced The Elder Scrolls MMORPG.
Click on over for the video! It features more than a bit of Ultima goodness, as the good Mr. Sage recalls his many fond memories of the series and the way it inspired him.
Heh? I’m pretty sure Paul Save never worked for Mythic Entertainment.
He used to work on Ultima Online indeed, but that was was in the *Origin* days. He left the company to join Richard Garriott’s Destination Games and spend the following years working on Tabula Rasa.
From the timeframe, I’d assume he joined Zenimax Online not long after TR’s release and demise.
That may have been my fault – I may have got it stuck in his head that this was during the Mythic era – I mentioned the huge Mythic/Origin connections between Elder Scrolls Online to WtF. Matt Firor, The guy in charge of ESO helped co-found Mythic and was the producer for Dark Age of Camelot when it first started, along with several of its first expansions.
When you get down to it, the top two people running or influencing ESO were competing head to head for 5 years or so – Matt Firor producing DAoC, Paul Sage working his way up to Lead Designer for UO (Lead Designer from before Third Dawn through May/June 2001). There has to be some kind of irony or destiny there. All we need to find out now is that a few of the other top people working on ESO were working on Asheron’s Call and EverQuest back around that time and it would be complete 🙂
Chances might have been pretty good that Paul Sage would end up as the UO Producer had he stuck around. .
I believe I read he went to Zenimax from TR. He may have been working on ESO from the time it was started, it depends on what “several years” means in regards to ESO’s development. Zenimax Online was formed around 2007-2008, but I think Sage was still working on TR around then.