Lone Star Gamer caught up with, and interviewed, Richard Garriott at Fantastic Arcade, and independent game development expo that took place in late September:

It’s not the longest interview, clocking in at 13 minutes and change (compare that with the two-hour marathon interview Lord British did with Stratics/TGN!), but it hits a number of interesting points concerning Garriott’s own involvement with independent game development and what he sees the gaming industry as being headed toward.

Garriott begins by talking about being one of the youngest developers in the industry when he first began writing games, and how as the years rolled on by the new, rising talent was always younger than him. Looking back from his commanding, north-of-50 age, he enjoys being recognized as a senior game developer and an old industry veteran…but evidently it didn’t always sit well with him being one of those.

Garriott also praises indie game development as the major source for innovation in gaming, and takes a couple jabs at larger publishers for their lack of innovation and the way in which, in his view, they actually stifle innovation.

More interesting, I think, is some of the discussion that happens nearer to the middle of the interview. Garriott talks about the tools that are available to game developers — even indie developers — today, and compares these with his own experience. For the earliest games he wrote, he had to draw templates for graphics on graph paper, convert the images into binary or hexadecimal, and then write a program to copy that data and display it to the screen. Tools today, Garriott notes, are significantly more sophisticated, though he notes that it’s not necessarily easier to use them. He thinks indie developers have their work cut out for them in learning to use and master these tools, but he praises their skill and ability to rise to that challenge.

He also talks a bit about the “three eras” that have been the core theme of his interviews and addresses for the last few years. Every major upheaval in gaming, Garriott asserts, lets new companies and publishers come to power in that space and in the wider industry. He dismisses some common contemporary criticisms of mobile and social games, and rather confidently states that “this era is ten times bigger than the last era”, comparing the scale of social gaming to that of MMORPGs. And just as Ultima Online revolutionized multiplayer gaming, he believes he can do the same in the social/mobile space.

Garriott’s space travel also gets a bit of a mention (of course!), and I think this quote is worth highlighting:

“Exploring the reality in which we live…those same feelings, that same reward of discovery is just as true in the virtual world as it is in the real world.”

Just so.