The Digital Antiquarian is back — not that he ever really left, but he hasn’t touched on the topic of Ultima for a while — with another article about Origin Systems, this time focusing on their acquisition by Electronic Arts. As you might expect, it’s a lengthy piece, and it sets the stage by noting the long-standing bad blood between the two companies (though one is left with the impression that most of the bad vibes flowed from Origin toward EA):

…Richard Garriott wasn’t one to forgive even a small personal slight easily, much less a full-blown threat to destroy his company. From 1987 on, EA was Public Enemy #1 at Origin, a status which Garriott marked in ways that only seemed to grow pettier as time went on. Garriott built a mausoleum for “Pirt Snikwah” — the name of Trip Hawkins, EA’s founder and chief executive, spelled backward — at his Austin mansion of Britannia Manor. Ultima V‘s parser treated the phrase “Electronic Arts” like a curse word; Ultima VI included a gang of evil pirates named after some of the more prominent members of EA’s executive staff. Time really did seem to make Garriott more rather than less bitter. Among his relatively few detail-oriented contributions to Ultima VII were a set of infernal inter-dimensional generators whose shapes together formed the EA logo. He also demanded that the two villains who went on a murder spree across Britannia in that game be named Elizabeth and Abraham. Just to drive the point home, the pair worked for a “Destroyer of Worlds” — an inversion of Origin’s longstanding tagline of “We Create Worlds.”

Still, feuding aside, Origin was in a significant financial bind. Some of that was due to the changing nature of the gaming industry, but some of it was a monster of their own making:

The fact was, Origin was in a serious financial bind — not a unique one in their evolving industry, but one which their unique circumstances had made more severe for them than for most others. Everyone in the industry, Origin included, was looking ahead to a very near future when the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM, combined with improving graphics and sound and exploding numbers of computers in homes, would allow computer games to join television, movies, and music as a staple of mainstream entertainment rather than a niche hobby. Products suitable for this new world order needed to go into development now in order to be on store shelves to greet it when it arrived. These next-generation products with their vastly higher audiovisual standards couldn’t be funded entirely out of the proceeds from current games. They required alternative forms of financing.

For Origin, this issue, which really was well-nigh universal among their peers, was further complicated by the realities of being a relatively small company without a lot of product diversification. A few underwhelming attempts to bring older Ultima games to the Nintendo Entertainment System aside, they had no real presence on videogame consoles, a market which dwarfed that of computer games, and had just two viable product lines even on computers: Ultima and Wing Commander. This lack of diversification left them in a decidedly risky position, where the failure of a single major release in either of those franchises could conceivably bring down the whole company.

The article goes on from there, discussing the terms of the sale and some of the early teething pains that were experienced as the two companies integrated. Origin’s growth during this time also merits some coverage, as does the performance of the games that it had in release when the deal was struck. I want to draw attention to one particular detail regarding the Ultima games in particular here, which I gather the Antiquarian mentioned when he discussed Ultima 7 back in February (albeit I missed seeing it then, or else do not recall having seen it):

…Ultima VII: The Black Gate, while it had been far from an outright commercial failure, had garnered a more muted response than Origin had hoped and planned for, plagued as its launch had been by bugs, high system requirements, and the sheer difficulty of configuring it to run properly under the inscrutable stewardship of MS-DOS…Ultima Underworld, a real-time first-person spinoff of the core series developed by the Boston studio Blue Sky Productions rather than Origin themselves, had already gone a considerable distance in that direction, and upon its near-simultaneous release with Ultima VII had threatened to overshadow its more cerebral big brother completely, garnering more enthusiastic reviews and, eventually, higher sales. Needless to say, had Ultima Underworld not turned into such a success, Origin’s financial position would have been still more critical than it already was. It seemed pretty clear that this was the direction that all of Ultima needed to go.

As usual, the entirety of the article is well worth a read, so do click on through and check it out. But don’t go venturing into it expecting to find a stern indictment of Electronic Arts; if anything, prepare to come away with the impression — if you did not already have this understanding — that EA afforded Origin a large degree of freedom and leniency, more (perhaps) than it should have.

(Hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)