The above video was recorded at E3, which means that I’m supremely late in posting it. But rather than being placed in the Headlines area on the sidebar (noticed those yet?), this one deserves a full post of its own because of what it is. Ostensibly, it’s an interview between Richard Garriott and Greg Kasavin, the latter of Supergiant Games (think Bastion, Transistor). Kasavin is himself an Ultima Dragon (Kane, the Crimson Dragon); indeed, he joined the group back during the Prodigy days.

Felicia Day is also present for the first part of the interview, and most of you who frequent this site should be well aware that she too is an Ultima Dragon (Codex Dragon), again from the Prodigy days. What some of you may not know is that she and Greg Kasavin became good friends as a result of their shared membership in the Dragons. She discusses it here:

Quick summary, I was homeschooled as a kid and didn’t have a ton of friends because we moved around a lot due to my dad’s military training, so I was on the internet (or what we CALLED the internet back then) when I was VERY young. BBSs, Compuserve, anything I could reach other people with technology with, my parents let me and I took it. So when a new service called Prodigy came out, where you could mail messages to friends and post on “forums” with a “handle” (!!!!), it was the greatest thing of my life!

On that service, I joined a forum called the Ultima Dragons, and there I formed amazing friendships with many people I never ever met that filled me days with geek joy. We loved video games and we shared that with each other (and really bad fan-fic if I remember too, haha).

Some of these friends were particularly close, and we would form private mailboxes JUST to send each other messages that popped up more instantaneously (because the lag on the actual mail was HORRENDOUS). One of these people was named Greg Kasavin (@kasavin on Twitter). At like 12 and 14 respectively I think, we would send pen-pal notes back and forth about the Ultima games we loved, books we read, and inadvertently our dreams about adulthood: I wanted to be an actress, he wanted to create video games.

It’s a great story, made still yet better by the fact that both went on to realize their respective dreams.

And what makes this interview so special is that it begins with a wonderful discussion about the nature of gaming fan communities, their genesis and operation, and the relationships and bonds that are formed therein…and the Dragons are front and center in the discussion. Indeed, there’s just something cool about watching a pair of Dragons interview the man whose works inspired the formation of that group — swapping stories about the Dragons and extolling their (heh) virtues — and hearing that man, Richard Garriott, agree wholeheartedly.