Richard Garriott to Recieve Lifetime Achievement Award

GameDev.net has word that Ultima series creator Richard Garriott is set to recieve the Lifetime Achievement award at this year's GDC. From the article: "Son of Skylab and Spacelab astronaut Owen K. Garriott, Richard took an interest in computers at a young age. He began programming games in high school and produced his first published game, Akalabeth, at the age of 19. While attending the University of Texas at Austin, Garriott began developing one of the most successful, longest-running game series of all time: Ultima. Garriott and his brother formed Origin Systems, Inc. to begin publishing their own games, and the company was acquired by Electronic Arts (EA) in 1992."

Hail, Lord British!

[egomaniac]

He is truly a gaming legend. I still remember an easter egg in... what was it, Ultima III? A townsperson that said "Hi, I'm Richard Garriott. I made this game."

I always thought that was a classy easter egg.

Awesome

[j_kenpo]

Thats great. I remember a several years ago when I was working for a production company, he hired us to do a laser show for his birthday party in Austin. He had a huge ass ice slide set up in his front yard with ice sculptures, and everyone was in costume. Although I didn't actually witness this firsthand, one of the other production guys told me he had set up a mock "encounter" with his wife where he bursts in with a shotgun and bloew her away. Of course she was wired up with bursts to make it look like she got shot. What a character, too bad I missed it. But I remember being told to keep up a professional demeaner, and although we begged to go up on the slide, we weren't allowed. A second later our boss disapears, only to be spotted coming down the slide with a colored clowns wig and clown nose, gets off the slide and says "Get back to work" barely able to keep from laughing his ass off. That was a lot of fun.

But its good to see Lord British getting the recognition he deserves. I loved the Wing Commander series (especially Privateer) back in their prime.

The oddest thing about him

[Strell]

Is that he is a huge boxing fanatic, to the point where he appears at local boxing gyms quite a bit, and apparently does some freelance interaction/training sort of things.

I only know this because my sister, who goes to UT, did a story on a female boxer (who is some sort of champion now, like featherweight or something) for photography class, and talked to Garriot every day, and even still maintains contact. And then one day she off handedly mentions his name, and my eyes popped. I attempted to explain to her the gravity of the situation, and just who she was dealing with, and then asked her to ask him if he had any job openings. :P You would too if you were in the same position. I had to resort to hyperbole, that he's probably within the top 25 people important to gaming for all time. She somewhat got the point at that time.

He's also really into photography as well. My sister tells me he sports the Rolls Royce of cameras. I'll have to take her word for it.

Long time coming

[WidescreenFreak]

This is so deserving. Richard Garriot almost single-handedly brought fantasy out of the closet spaces of D&D fans into the mainstream gaming realm. Back when most computer games were text adventures or side-scrollers, he brought fantasy gameplay that could last thousands of hours in incredibly detailed and story-rich worlds.

I remember when Ultima V came out for the Commodore 64. If you booted the same discs on a Commodore 128, you got to listen to music throughout the game. Even small things like that helped to impress me more.

I still have the boxed editions for several versions of the Ultima series, not only because I just can't seem to part with them (in some vain idea that I might play them again) but because he also included those extras that helped to bring the game to the real world. The cloth map that came with the later Ultima games was unheard of 15 or 20 years ago, and the trinket that was somehow tied to the story always added to the "coolness" factor.

Even now, two of the ringtones on my phone are the theme from Ultima V/ VI and Stones, which is probably the most memorable of all of the Ultima songs.

Now, if only EA would give Garriott the honor of letting him go back and redo Ultima: Ascension so that it could live up to its Ultima legacy, instead of being the rushed-to-market, bug-ridden, obviously-taken-over-by-corporate-a**holes piece of crap at it was.

Congrats, Richard! We miss the stories of the Avatar!

A fully deserved reward...

[cswiger2005]

Lord British and Origin produced some of the finest computer games made, and in particular Ultima III through V, Wing Commander & Privateer, and Moebius. Games which actually had a plot, and significant interaction between player actions and consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues_of_Ultima [wikipedia.org] ...let's just say it's been a while since I've played a game which made me think as much about such things.

Remake of Ultima IV

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: there is a remake of Ultima IV (considered by many to be the best in the series), for modern machines, called xu4 [sourceforge.net]. Try it, it's fun. No, I'm not one of the devs, just a humble luser.

Add me to the chorus.

[quag7]

Add me to the chorus of admirers. I haven't been a gamer...since Ultima IV.

Even before that my attention span was too short for many RPGs, including text adventures/IF that was popular in the early 80s.

I must say though, Ultima IV consumed me for several months. Everything fell to the side - my online activities at the time, my campaign to pester my father into installing a separate phone line in the house so I could put up a BBS, and of course, my schoolwork.

I have never been so consumed by a single computer-oriented pursuit since Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar, on the Commodore 64.

I'm in my 30s now, and from time to time I try to explain this game to people who haven't seen it, or who can't fully understand the state of the art of computer games in the early to middle 80s, and why this was such a broad leap forward. Most of my friends are not gamers either, or if they are, enjoy what's popular now, which are deathmatch-style games. For some reason I've had a hard time explaining why this game was so, so much better...so much more, somehow...important.

By the time Ultima IV came out, I was sick to death of hack and slash / shoot-to-kill games, owing to several years of blowing quarters on arcade games like Asteroids and countless hours of wandering around my neighborhood trading Atari 2600 cartridges with friends. I was into D&D at the time, but most of the games I (pirated) just didn't have the rich immersiveness of AD&D itself. As a result of both of these I remember wishing it was ten years in the future, because by then, no doubt, computer RPGs would be approaching the detail and richness of the AD&D experience.

And then someone gave me a copy of Ultima III, which was fasincating enough to me that I saved up my paycheck from delivering the Asbury Park Press, and bought U4, which came with the aforementioned cloth map, and a medallion/talisman kind of thing.

And then I didn't see daylight for quite some time.

I haven't been interested in games at all since the end of U4 with a few isolated (but casual) exceptions - Doom, when it came out (who could have resisted that?), and now and again I'll fire up bzflag for 15 minutes at a time.

Still, U4 is major part of the patchwork of my teenage years, and still represents to me, in a word, Excellence.

I usually skip any game-related stories on Slashdot, but I had to make a comment here, because for me, U4 is really the only game that ever mattered to me, in my lifetime.

Thank you Richard Garriott for firing up my imagination, for the idea that you can make an adventure game which involved actual morality, and for creating a non-linear world that seemed impossibly large; limitless, even.

I guess ,for me, it wasn't just a game - it was art; no less important to me than some of the best books I've read, and the finest movies I've seen. I can't think of anything I learned in college which was anywhere as stimlating to me, intellectually, as this game. And that says a lot for someone who hasn't been a gamer for 20 years, I think.