RPS Highlights Origin Fandom (February 17, 2018)

[ChrisReid]

Rock Paper Shotgun has run a neat article on longtime Origin collector Joe Garrity. There's a really interesting Q&A that delves into how Joe got started many years ago buying up spare copies of Ultima games and meeting with their creators. It also highlights some of the good work that fans have done to preserve historic material, such as our 2008 trip to archive Origin source documents at Mythic or the assistance Wingnuts gave Raylight to develop Prophecy for the Game Boy Advance. Check out the full article here.

RPS: We talked about how the museum got started, but what was your own first Origin game? What got you started on this kick?

Garrity: I’d bought Ultima IV for my C64 back in 1985, but didn’t play it much. The real breakthrough for me was my first PC in early 1991 – a 386 DX33 with four megs of RAM and a Soundblaster! I went to my local Walden Books – back then, games were sold in bookstores – to take a look around. The salesman asked me what type of system I had. When I described my beefy PC, he instantly put Wing Commander in my hands, and said, “This is the game you want.” It’s been a love affair ever since.

--
Original update published on February 17, 2018

 

[Wedge009]

That's a funny story about how Mrs Garrity greeted Lord British. And also a nice photo of Lord British 'knighting' Joe.

Joe isn't kidding about Hobbes falling apart, he really does look quite terrible.

It's a been a while, but why was Richard fired? Was it because of Ultima IX not selling well?

 

[Quarto]

It's a been a while, but why was Richard fired? Was it because of Ultima IX not selling well?

Wait, was he fired, or did he quit? I'm pretty sure he quit, but maybe I'm wrong.

The story was a much longer one, and wasn't just about Ultima IX. You kind of have to look at the broader context with Ultima Online. When UO begun, EA had no faith whatsoever in the project, so Garriott was barely able to get any resources at all for it (if it hadn't been Garriott, it just wouldn't have happened, nobody else at Origin had the "weight" to ram through such a risky project). Ultima IX was going fine then, because it was the safe project. Things got to a point where when the open beta of UO started, the team had the bitter experience of having to ask interested players to actually send them money to cover the disk and postage, because their budget didn't allow for it. And then the open beta was the biggest success imaginable. And suddenly, everything turns around: now EA is pushing to accelerate UO, and to cannibalise the Ultima IX team if needed. Which is exactly what happened. So, Ultima IX didn't ship in time, and soon had to be basically restarted, because it had missed its technological window - 3D graphics had arrived, and a sprite-based isometric game was no longer viable. To cut a long story short, Ultima IX finally shipped in 1999, which was at least two if not three years later than it had originally meant to. And nobody was happy with it - not Garriott, not EA, not the players.

All this time, Richard Garriott was in the middle between UO and UIX. Not a fun place to be, because whichever one of the two was being criticised or questioned at any given time, that was aimed at him. And in the meantime, Origin was going through so many other changes, and none of them were positive. So, I think ultimately it was a case of Richard Garriott looking around, and just saying, "where the hell am I?" one day. If you're curious to find out more, there is a book out there, "Dungeons and Dreamers", that covers the story very well. Ok, I'm not sure if "very well" - it seems credible, and it's well-backed with interviews, but who knows what the truth was, right? As usual in such cases, Richard Garriott got to speak his piece, but nobody from EA was allowed to (I can only assume the authors tried, but hit the usual wall of "no comment"), so it's quite one-sided.


Now, if only there was a book that covers the Wing Commander story at least to the extent that Dungeons and Dreamers covers Ultima. Hmm. Doesn't that sound like something a person could try doing after wrapping up his games research PhD?

 

[AD]

Wait, was he fired, or did he quit? I'm pretty sure he quit, but maybe I'm wrong.

The RPS article is pretty badly written and researched... and includes a lot of Joe creatively re-interpreting history to make the OM sound like more than it is... Like EA coming to him (cough) to have the Origin stuff archived.

 

[Quarto]

The RPS article is pretty badly written and researched... and includes a lot of Joe creatively re-interpreting history to make the OM sound like more than it is... Like EA coming to him (cough) to have the Origin stuff archived.

Yes, I did notice that. I do wonder, though, what the actual real story with Garriott specifically is. I checked Dungeons and Dreamers, and there the authors do say that Garriott resigned. But that would be based on what he had to say, and certainly not with any voices from EA. At the time (this was, after all, a moment in history the CIC also covered in detail, as it was the end of Wing Commander as we knew it), all the reports were very vague, nobody would say clearly if Garriott jumped or if he was thrown out. The fact that twenty other employees were fired that day, and Garriott's own project was cancelled, suggests that even if Garriott jumped, he may have actually been pushed. In other words: it's not that Garriott was fired, but rather that when Jack Heistand cleared his overhaul of Origin with higher-ups at EA, it was clear to everyone that Garriott would quit, and this was probably the intention.

What a time that was. Just out of curiosity, I googled Jack Heistand. From his LinkedIn profile, it seems that his two-year stint at Origin was the last time he worked in the games industry. Hmm, good riddance? Needless to say, from his LinkedIn description of his role at Origin, you definitely couldn't tell that under his watch the studio was essentially ran into the ground. But I did notice something very interesting, which I think at the time we had no idea of: Heistand claims that one of the goals he had been set at Origin was to prepare the company to be spun off for an IPO. That's very surprising, as I don't recall EA ever doing that with any of their companies - and of course, it could have been a total game-changer, had Origin gone public and got cashed up with all the money from an IPO, while still owning all of those brands like Ultima and Wing Commander. Although the studio would still have been EA-owned, ultimately, it would have had more control over its finances at that point. But Heistand's "achievement" list at Origin ends with this bullet-point: "Convinced management that it was not in the corporation’s best interest to go public". I'm not sure if this isn't a roundabout way of saying his time at Origin ended with the company being in no way fit for an IPO, but maybe it's as he said - he had a look around, and saw that Origin is in no condition for going public. Which would have been absolutely true, of course - Origin could only have had a successful IPO with Garriott still onboard as a figurehead, and Heistand's restructuring of the company eliminated him, along with all the projects Origin should have been pursuing, leaving behind only UO2 and UO3. Those worked out real well .

 

[ChrisReid]

What a time that was.

Yeah, and no better for WC either. You have this swirl around UO, then UO2/UXO/etc, and then that took P3/Strike Team/etc all down with it, and then the Earth & Beyond mess scrambled the WCO/POL hopes. It's kind of amazing how quickly everything got so convoluted and screwed up.

 

[Quarto]

Yes. The CIC's news update for March 30th 2001, the date when that memo about Richard Garriott reached the press, was simply titled "The End." That memo was the end point for that whole mess - Richard Garriott gone, a bunch of people fired, and POL cancelled, all in one memo. That part of Origin's history would make for really fascinating (if sad) reading, I would imagine. That little bit about the IPO plans, for example - what a story that would be!

 

[ChrisReid]

Yes. The CIC's news update for March 30th 2001, the date when that memo about Richard Garriott reached the press, was simply titled "The End."

And then the next day was April Fool's Day!

And we've managed to carry on now for 18 years past the end, so not bad...

 

[Wedge009]

Maybe this is why the history is so vague in my mind (aside from getting on in years). It all sounds pretty depressing with the big franchises and their creators quitting / being pushed / getting fired (or whatever mix of those was the truth). I remember reading those daily updates of the internal Origin newsletters from the early years. And how the tone changed as the company became larger and was ultimately bought out (not necessarily bad things in themselves but obviously it changed the heart of what Origin was about).