Clearing Out My Backlog of Richard Garriott News and Links

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As I wander through the Internet, I often save links to Pocket for later reference. I also have Google Alert notifications set up to tell me about every new article that gets posted concerning Richard Garriott, Shroud of the Avatar, and a few other things. Normally, I try and keep on top of the trove of links and content that I collect by these methods. However, especially (though not only) as a result of changing jobs toward the end of last year, I didn’t have time to post a lot of the material that follows in a timely fashion.

Thus, this article.

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Yahoo! TV evidently has Man on a Mission available to watch. That, or they once did; the page loads, but the video won’t load for me as I write this. But that, in turn, could be due to restrictions on streaming video which have been imposed on the network.

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Motherboard has a video up entitled Meet Richard Garriott, which discusses Lord British’s game design career.

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Richard Garriott contributed a video to the An Idea Lives On project, which is partly a memorial to John F. Kennedy and partly a celebration of America’s pursuit of spaceflight and space exploration. Touching, and well worth the watch, if you have some time to spare!

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Polygon included a brief mention of Richard Garriott on their list of “50 gaming news makers” for 2013. I don’t think they actually count Garriott himself as one of the fifty, however; Chris Roberts’ name is the one highlighted, and it is Roberts’ picture that appears in the article.

But here’s what Polygon said, at any rate:

Kickstarter is the inevitable culmination of social media in a capitalist society that is intimately connected to its entertainment pastimes. In gaming, the crowd-sourcing service gave us yet more proof that people-power can be mighty indeed. CHRIS ROBERTS (below) has raised a mind-boggling $35 million since 2012, through a hyper-targeted funding campaign for a PC space combat game called Star Citizen, a genre that that mainstream publishers deemed a non-starter. And so other venerable developers like David Braben, Richard Garriott and Brian Fargo are among those who have successfully followed along, raising money and retaining creative control over favored projects.

Of course, they also note that there have been several high-profile Kickstarter failures as well, such as Chris Taylor’s Wildman.

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The Florida Herald-Tribune briefly quoted Richard Garriott at the end of an article about the impact and effect that the view of Earth from space has had on those who have been privileged to see it:

“Media images contain far less information than you think. The brain’s best guess is what you see. When (Soyuz space tourist) Richard Garriott went up, he said ‘I felt like I was drinking from a firehose of information.'”

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More recently, Richard Garriott identified Ultima 4 as his “most important work” to The Escapist:

“I do believe Ultima IV is my most important work,” said Garriott, responding to questions from The Escapist. According to Garriott the game represents “a clear milestone in RPGs” that saw a number of firsts both for the series and the genre. “The introduction of the term ‘avatar’ which is now pervasive, the introduction of virtues, and “role-playing” versus level grinding,” all of these, according to Garriott can be traced back to Ultima IV.

That being the case, Garriott acknowledges that the game isn’t perfect, even with its prominent place in the history of RPGs. “As highly as I think of the high concept of Ultima IV, it still has lots of rough edges, and I think that Ultima’s V-VII have better told ‘stories’ in general,” he said. “The game is too “black and white” once you know to be virtuous. Its relatively easy to ‘walk the line’, I think Ultima V made a better case for questioning what is right and what is wrong.”

Even so, he still hopes that Shroud of the Avatar will be able to channel some of the spirit and mechanics of older games like Ultima IV.

The Escapist went on to review Ultima 4 to complement the interview.

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And wouldn’t you know…it looks like Richard Garriott got an invitation to the White House Christmas Party:

And apparently, he and his wife were the only ones who took to the floor when the band started playing:

Also, I can’t find it on his Twitter timeline, but apparently Garriott also left one of his Silver Serpent pendants on the White House Christmas tree. At least, that’s what I think our friends at the Wing COmmander CIC are indicating happened.

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Here’s Richard Garriott’s interview with Space Affairs, which was evidently conducted in 2009:

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And to close things out, here’s a preview for a production of Romeo and Juliet that was held at Richard Garriott’s Curtain Theatre in Austin, Texas back in June.

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