It has been a busy year for Richard Garriott and Portalarium as they develop their premier product, the Ultimate RPG. The Ultima Codex takes a look back at some of the developments with Richard Garriott and his new project during the past year, including Ultimate Collector.

January 2012

Shortly after the onset of 2012, the Portalarium website revamped and cleaned up their website a bit, and also teased the gaming world with this image:

The imagery on the shield, it was later revealed, was a combination of the de Cayeux family crest (hence the Templar cross) and Richard Garriott’s silver serpent symbol (which he wears on his person constantly). Its use in conjunction with the Ultimate RPG, however, teased the possibility that the game would take strong cues from the Ultima series.

Later in the month, Garriott’s documentary of his journey to space (entitled Man on a Mission) was released. It was also revealed that whilst in space, Garriott and the other astronauts filmed Apogee of Fear, a short sci-fi horror movie…the first to be shot in space, arguably. NASA initially blocked its release, but later relented. A brief synopsis of the movie was also released.

January also saw Garriott profess his willingness to take a “one-way trip to Mars”.

February 2012

Richard Garriott was interviewed by VentureBeat, mostly about his trip to space. He followed this up, later in the month, with some comments of his own in his column at the Huffington Post, asserting that humanity is “destined to live beyond the…Earth”.

March 2012

2011 was a big year for Lord British, as it was the year in which he tied the knot, marrying Laetitia Pichot de Cayeux in a lavish ceremony in Paris. In March of 2012, however, an interesting little story was published about how Garriott’s mother, unable to make the lengthy journey from Texas for health reasons, attended the ceremony and associated parties with the help of a telepresence robot:

Later in the month, Garriott gave a presentation at SXSW in Austin. He also continued arguing the need for human space travel in his Huffington Post column.

April 2012

Ultimate Collector goes into open Beta, and many new players get a chance to add to their own personal collection. Players can search garage sales for some of their favorite items, bring them home and put them on display for others to see. Players can even collect Akalabeth and all of the original Ultima games without spending a penny on Ebay. If only it had been that easy for me.

Oh, and news also broke that Garriott had been swindled, apparently, out of a cool half-million.

May 2012

In May, Portalarium teased us with another Ultimate RPG-related image, a glowing mask:

Richard Garriott sits down with Stratics to talk about Portalatium, Garage Sale, and Ultimate RPG, and also wrote (at the Huffington Post) a touching eulogy for NASA’s space shuttles. His space documentary, Man on a Mission, also went on sale around the same time.

Towards the end of the month, Portalarium sets up a support network to help with technical issues related to Portlarium products.

Lord British’s obsessive love of geocaching also merited a mention in May, probably because he currently holds a couple of notable geocaching records (although some would argue that a geocache on the International Space Station doesn’t count since it arguably doesn’t have GPS coordinates).

June 2012

In addition to being featured on the Science Channels Oddities programme, Richard Garriott sits down for more interviews in June, including an interview with Gather Your Party in which he discusses Portlarium’s development model, releasing increasing technologically advanced games to build revenue and expertise towards creating Ultimate RPG.

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”.

He also gave an interview to The Critical Bit, and mused on the nature of astronauts in his Huffington Post column.

At the end of June, it is announced that Zynga will be partnering with Portalarium, although few details are revealed.

At its ongoing Zynga Unleashed event in San Francisco, the social media game giant revealed three new partners: Majesco, 50 Cubes, and Portalarium.

It was also revealed that Garriott carried the DNA of a handful of celebrities into space with him.

July 2012

July was a big month for Richard Garriott and his wife, as it was in July that they welcomed their daughter Kinga into the world:

Actually, Kinga was born right at the end of June, but news of her birth didn’t really come to light until early in July, when her very proud papa posted a couple of tweets about her.

Portalarium announces that they have raised over $7 million in venture capital to help fun development of Ultimate Collector and Ultimate RPG.

Richard Garriott also sat down with MMORPG.com to discuss his Ultimate RPG.

…while we did not get into the full scoop of Ultimate RPG (I was hoping too), but what we did learn is Richard’s clear philosophy for the game. He wants to make sure hardcore players know they are not abandoned. It is one of the guiding principles of the design for the game. It is being made with the hardcore players at the very heart and soul of the title.

August 2012

Early in the month, Portalarium asked for input from gamers about topics such as PvP combat, player housing, and other such things that might conceivably be incorporated into the Ultimate RPG.

Richard Garriott took time out of his busy schedule to do several interviews in August, including an interview with IGN, where he mentions that Ultimate RPG is still at least a year away. He is quite mum on further game details, though.

Richard Garriott also sat down with Stratics for a rather extensive video conference about Ultimate RPG.

The game will feature what Garriott terms a “scene-based” design, which will be realized using a dual-scale map. The game will feature an overland, which Garriott terms the “travel map”, and numerous smaller, hand-crafted scenes or zones used for towns, encounters, and suchlike. Much of the game is to be centered around these scenes, with the travel map there to connect them together.

September 2012

Portalarium announces that Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale will be published by social gaming giant Zynga. It is noted that Ultimate Collector should be released in the next four to six weeks. (The official press release is here.)

Garriott, who gets his Lord British moniker from his historic Ultima role-playing game series, said in an interview with GamesBeat today that his startup is focused on “mid-core” titles that are more engaging and are much more like real games than traditional casual fare. He believes a shift toward these kinds of games is taking place on Facebook and that Zynga can capitalize on the trend through third parties.

Garriott also explained his reasons for partnering with Zynga to Games.com, and spoke with Engineering.com about his trip to space.

Also during that month, Gamezebo posted a review of Ultimate Collector, and gives it a marginally positive review.

Granted, Ultimate Collector looks pretty ugly, and it comes with the usual social game trappings like a limited energy supply and long waits between offers. Still, if you love hunting for yard sales and running your hands over a sun-warmed G1 Transformer that’s been discolored by another person’s cigarette smoke, there’s no question that you’ll get a kick out of Ultimate Collector.

October 2012

Richard Garriott sat down to an interview with Eurogamer explaining how Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale will serve as the backbone for Portalarium’s new Ultimate RPG.

“Ultimate Collector really is the backbone of the next game,” Richard Garriott told Eurogamer.

“None of the art is the same, of course, and there are absolutely no roles in Ultimate Collector, like there will be in the next game, but the tool-suite is continuing to evolve.”

Rather than develop and test all of the necessary Ultimate RPG features at once, Garriott had Portalarium make simple casino games to establish (and help fund) “fundamental” back-end tools like friends lists, buying and selling, real-money transactions and Facebook integration.

The Los Angeles Times also caught up with him for some brief comments about “the Portalarium”, and Lone Star Gamer interviewed him about several topics, including indie game development.

Also in October, Pix had the opportunity to visit Portalarium’s studios, and presented us with a brief glimpse of the Austin studios.

And of course, the Ultima Forever team from Mythic Entertainment managed to catch up with Garriott at GDC Online. Garriott gave the Ultima Forever cloth map a “thumbs up”, and the Mythic team secured his permission to feature Lord British in a cameo in Ultima Forever.

December 2012

According to a Game Industry report, Portalarium was hit with a number of layoffs during the month of December.

“We are reducing staff to the appropriate levels to support and grow our recently launched products, as well as continue development of Richard Garriott’s Ultimate RPG,” a representative from the Austin-based studio told GamesIndustry International.”

Garriott also used the “Mayan apocalypse” craze as an excuse to throw a big, $1000/ticket party on his property in Austin.

There you have it. Quite a busy year for Richard Garriott and Portalarium. Let’s see what Ultimate RPG and 2013 brings us.