Richard Garriott sat down for an interview with the folks at Gather Your Party last week, and talked with them at length about his plans for the Ultimate RPG…and how everything that Portalarium has done has factored in to those plans:

Let me give you the kind of Portalarium story. An MMO scale virtual world is a big game. It’s many years in development and it’s many, many millions of dollars in development. If you’re starting a new company like we’ve done, you have two choices: start by saying, “Okay the first thing we’re going to ship is the new big iteration of an MMO, the reinvention of MMOs”, in which case you raise tens of millions of dollars and you wait many years and hopefully you come up with something that works. Or you do what we did, which the first thing we did was understand how to leverage the “friends graph”.

This is something that a few people — myself included — have discussed before: Portalarium is using its various released and upcoming games, from the poker titles through Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale, as stepping stones on the way toward their masterwork, the Ulitmate RPG. They’re not unlike Pixar’s short films, which exist both to entertain and to showcase new technologies that Pixar are working on…technologies that will be built into later Pixar movies.

We thought we could easily create a game that could at least support itself and support our ongoing development. It would let us build client, server, billing, synchronous play, asynchronous play around a table with a fairly minimal game design and at least prove out or technologies and we did that. It’s working just fine. That was called Port Poker and Port Blackjack. Then we said, “OK, now we need avatars and housing and secure trade.” So with that, we created this game Ultimate Collector. What’s interesting about Ultimate Collector, for us it’s a stepping stone. It’s an MMO-lite in my mind. Very lite, with more what I will call classical leveraging of casual game mechanics than you will probably see in the RPG, but compared to most casual games, to most social games, it is far deeper. It is far richer as a lot more story is involved in it. I think that we happened to have built a game that, which is not terribly surprising since we are the people that built Ultima, that we built a much more Ultima-like casual game than most, if you follow my meaning. I mean, it’s in a cartoon style. It’s in a contemporary setting, so by no means is it an Ultima. There’s no combat or magic or anything of that nature in it. If you really sit back and take more of a distant perspective of it, you can see how, with the tools we’ve built here, we can now obviously come up with a different set of art. We can come up with things like character classes and combat and magic, as well as an outdoor map that connects it all together. You get back pretty close to Ultima if you look at it with that filter.

He goes on to get in some light digs at EA over the ownership of the Ultima name. More interesting is his story, later on in the article, concerning The Syndicate, a particularly hard-core Ultima Online guild that he has been…working with:

We’ve personally invited a bunch of players from The Syndicate and they were at least willing to give me a pass on, “He can’t be that idiotic to be going down this path”. The Syndicate really started as an Ultima Online guild and they were wanting to believe. What The Syndicate players have been doing, even if they were individually concerned or skeptical, once they came in and started playing Ultimate Collector, they went, “Aha! I get it.”

I will keep saying this ad infinitum, I suspect, but even though I hate repeating myself I will say it again: if you approach what Garriott is doing with his intent to create the Ultimate RPG and shrug it off as just some Facebook game that you would by definition have no interest in ever playing, you are quite likely doing yourself an extreme disservice.

Yes, thus far, Portalarium has been playing around with low-key social games, including Ultimate Collector which, superficially at least, bears some resemblance to the Whateverville games that Zynga cranks out periodically. But appearances can deceive, and there’s more to Ultimate Collector — and, indeed, to Portalarium — than looks alone let on.

But, contra Zynga (for whom the games themselves, and the revenue they bring in, are the sole end), Portalarium’s end goal is not just to churn out a Whateverville clone; it’s to test a system, or a series of systems. And yes, at each milestone, they wrap it up in a game that makes heavy use of the system(s), which in turn can be released and hopefully serve as a revenue vector. But the end of all of that is that thing which, thus far, has only barely been teased to us: the Ultimate RPG. Which, though it may leverage many of the systems that Portalarium’s lighter games prototyped, may bear no significant resemblance to anything we’ve seen from the fledgling social gaming company to date.

And the fact that it runs through Facebook, or (more generally) in a browser window? Quite likely irrelevant.