Editor’s note: This is a slightly updated version of an article I posted on Examiner.com when, many years ago, I was an RPG and Gaming writer for the site. This was the second of five articles in total, which I’ll slowly be adding to the Codex to give them a permanent home.

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The release of Ultima Online in 1997 and its subsequent success ushered in an era of change at Origin Systems that the company did not weather successfully. As noted previously, Origin went on to release Ultima 9 (1999) and several expansion packs for Ultima Online. The last such release, the somewhat controversial Age of Shadows, corresponded to — and in some respects may have caused — a sharp decline in the subscriber base for the game.

Development teams at Origin did in fact attempt to work on and release other titles, including such notable (but ultimately cancelled) titles as Ultima X: Odyssey, Harry Potter Online, and Privateer Online. Odyssey was cancelled in early 2004, shortly before EA closed Origin Systems permanently; Harry Potter Online and Privateer Online were cancelled some time between 1999 and 2000. It was during this time period that Richard Garriott opted to leave Origin Systems and found Destination Games with his brother, Robert, and another Origin alum, Starr Long.

Lineage

Destination Games opened its doors in 2000 as a massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) studio, and in 2001 it was announced that the studio would be partnering with Korean gaming publisher NCSoft, as NCSoft Austin, to develop a North American version of the Lineage series. Lineage: The Blood Pledge was the first game Destination worked to localize, promote, and launch for North American players (including a free trial and subscription model, and even a cameo for Garriott’s Lord British persona). They moved on to Lineage II in due course, and were arguably the bridge that turned NCSoft from an Asian-centric online-games powerhouse into a real force in the North American MMO market.

Tabula Rasa

In 2007, Destination Games finally released their first original game, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. This science fiction MMORPG told the story of humanity’s last stand against the malevolent alien Bane. Players had the option of playing on either side of the conflict.

The game blended elements of shooters with more traditional role-playing systems and elements, and the game world could shift based on the outcome of battles between players and AI-controlled NPCs. If enemy forces captured a base, players would lose access to the resources – including spawn points, shops, and suchlike – contained therein, until such time as the base could be recaptured.

After a well-received beta test that ran between May and October of 2007 (which ended with a themed event that saw players trying to assassinate General British, Richard Garriott’s in-game persona), the game was released in November. Despite winning praise for its combat system, it was criticized for several other difficult gameplay elements, missing features, numerous bugs, and even memory leaks. And while the technical issues were patched within a reasonable window, the game ultimately failed to attract the subscriber base that both Destination Games and NCSoft had hoped for.

In November 2008, an open letter purportedly from Richard Garriott was released to the Tabula Rasa community in which his retirement from NCSoft Austin was announced. Garriott himself was in quarantine after his return from space at the time of the letter’s publication, and he later alleged that the letter was in fact authored by NCSoft as a means of forcing him out. He later successfully sued NCSoft for $28 million in damages related to this termination.

Tabula Rasa’s servers were shut down in February of 2009.

Robert Garriott, for his part, went on to serve as producer for other NCSoft Austin (also known as NC Interactive) titles, notably the original Guild Wars. He is also listed as the “sugar daddy” in the credits for Dungeon Runners. Starr Long, meanwhile, went on to serve as an executive producer at the Walt Disney Company. He currently works at The Acceleration Agency on interactive tech projects, and is the CEO of a company called GigStan. We’ll talk about what he did after leaving Disney in the next section.

A New Beginning

Richard Garriott did not stay out of the gaming industry for long; in 2009, he co-founded Portalarium with Dallas Snell (a former Origin developer who had also worked on Tabula Rasa) and Fred Schmidt (another NCSoft Austin veteran) . The three men, spurred by a fascination with player relationships and endless gaming experiences, started the company to develop and publish games in the social gaming space.

That exploration ultimately resulted in the release of just two games — Port Casino Poker and Port Casino Blackjack — and the beta release of a third: Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale. A distribution deal for this last title with Zynga was announced, but ultimately failed to cement the game’s success. A few other web-based games —
most notably the lightweight fantasy MMORPG A Mystical Land, which has since rebranded to Villagers & Heroes — were first released under Portalarium’s web player framework, though many of these have since either shut down or shifted to different technologies.

In 2010 or 2011, Portalarium began teasing the idea that all of its then-current and pending titles were a means to
an end: the production of what Richard Garriott began to call his Ultimate RPG, a spiritual successor to the Ultima series. Lord British’s return ultimately shifted away from a web-based presentation and re-emerged as Shroud of the Avatar, a Kickstarter-funded game that never quite figured out how to balance between delivering a solid single-player experience akin to the Ultima series, and delivering a solid MMORPG experience akin to Ultima Online. Portalarium shut its doors in either 2019 or 2020 (depending on how you look at it), and the assets and operations of Shroud of the Avatar were handed off to Catnip Games, a studio founded by former Portalarium CTO and lead developer Chris Spears. Shroud of the Avatar continues to receive modest updates on a regular cadence, and Richard Garriott returns to the game every year on or about July 4th (his birthday), but it would be fair to say that the vision of the Ultimate RPG was never delivered on.

Richard Garriott, for his part, seems to have moved on from the gaming space for now, though he will occasionally post online about his desire to work on Ultima again…provided that some sort of arrangement with EA can be reached. He did briefly flirt with the concept of a game based on NFTs and other related crypto-asset technologies, but that never got past the conceptual stage. In the meantime, the Ultima creator has plenty of other pursuits to keep himself busy, especially as a member of the Explorer’s Club.