YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Garriott

lines on the record: 66
first: 2022-07-15
most recent: 2022-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Manager of EA called me into his office and said, Richard, we just don't need you anymore. I left the office, drove to a grocery store parking lot, and wept for several hours. It was the end of my personal Camelot. This was no game. This was my life. It had been painful for me to fire other people, but as I had just learned that was nothing compared to being fired. I got blindsided by a deep and complex range of feelings. I felt like a failure. I was angry and depressed and confused. It was a hurt that lasted a long time, and frankly, I don't think I ever fully got over it.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so starting games, you're not finishing a bunch, you're firing them. There's all these turnovers. You had like the small band of this incredibly gifted team working together. Most of these people are churned out. Then you have all these different people in charge. And so it says EA kept sending a second string replacement managers who would immediately start by undoing all the things that his predecessor also sent by EA, by the way, had tried to put in a place, replacing them with his own initiatives. The manager then would start their own new projects and fire all the junior people who weren't on their team and then bring in other junior people. None of them stayed in place long enough to see their new projects through. So every year the entire culture changed. And because he came up control, he has no influence. He's trying to convince him, hey, we should go back to the way things we were doing them before. And EA said, no. None of my suggestions were accepted. Then one afternoon a general...”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They wanted us to change our development process to meet their deadlines. Ultima 8, EA wanted on the shelves in time for the following Christmas. And they told me, Richard, you need to cut whatever needs to be cut to get this game done. So I cut it. I cut it and I cut it and I cut it. And as a result, I shipped the most incomplete, dumb, buggy game that I've ever shipped. The creative joy they had once shared in developing a game had been replaced by the prosaic demands of running a business. It was hard to believe how much it changed. Only a few years earlier our people would happily work all night and love every minute of it. And now we had become a sweatshop.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once when we announced that we had to cancel a game in development, the project manager laid down on the floor while another manager outlined his body and masking tape as if it were a crime scene. And this is the punchline, the most important sentence of this entire section. We felt this was symbolic of the death of the entrepreneurial company that we had built. They also make him rush and compromise quality. We released games when we were done with them. That was not the way EA did business. Richard, they told me, your release of games is incredibly uncomfortable.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you see this play out over and over again, they're like, hey, wait a minute, I need to really pause and make sure I'm not going down the same route that I've already seen multiple other smart and productive people do and then regret later on. And so part of this is like you go from having one great team to now two okay teams. The first thing we did with Split Our Teams in half, which meant that some teams had second tier leadership. We brought a brand new building that was twice as large as our existing space. Then we doubled the size of our staff. And then they're also working on a bunch of games at once. Two years later, we realized about half of the games that we in development were not going to be successful, and EA told us to abandon them. For us, this was a new and very different way of doing business. We had never canceled a single game, but now we were playing by EA's rules. And so he goes into the fact that he just hated the way that EA was building games and he no longer had control. At EA, there were large teams aside to each project. So when a game was canceled, we had to fire people.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resources we needed to double in size. This was a huge strategic mistake. We couldn't manage the type of rapid expansion and we wasted a lot of their money. The first thing we did was to split our team in half, which meant that some teams had second-tier leadership. So essentially the reason I want to bring this to your attention is because he's talking about all the mistakes he made, and it's very likely if you and I were put in the same position, we are prone. Like Richard's obviously very smart, these are smart, driven entrepreneurs, very gifted what they're doing. And yet, as we've seen time and time again in these books, they make the same, they make insane mistakes. Like smart people make mistakes all the time. And so realizing, hey, if I was in that situation at that time, I might act the same way. So the really benefit of downloading all these experiences into your brain is realizing it's going to be very difficult if all these other smart driven people are making mistake. Like what hope do I have? Like it's very likely that if I was exposed to the same decision like choices, I'd do the same thing. That's why it's so difficult to avoid the mistake.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now he gets into why he sold his company and what the result was. So, again, it's not in chronological order. Says the experience had come at a substantial personal cost. Even while it made me a fortune. Origin had long been among the top publishers in the industry, but as the industry matured, it began consolidating. The biggest players acquired many, many, many smaller companies and then became much, much, much bigger. To survive, we had to make a very tough decision. Even today, people ask me why in the world we did this, and all I can tell them is that in order to compete, we just had to get bigger. We either had to gang up with several other small companies to become a single larger entity, or we had to sell origin to someone else. Ultimately, it became obvious that we were not going to be able to engineer a merger of small companies in that EA was the right fit for us. So in 1982, we sold origin to EA for $25 million. They immediately provided the”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So even though he's having a lot of success with his Ultima game series, he hates working at EA, and we're going to see him get kicked out of and fired from his own company. Before I get there, though, this is just a fantastic line. And he says, the art of business, which I had to learn, was how to stay in business long enough to give yourself the best chance to get a big hit.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they could pay someone to do it for them. Then he also sees another analogy in the virtual world, very similar to what takes place in the physical world. Real estate starts to becoming incredibly valuable. In the real world, you might be able to buy a small piece of land in a New Mexico hill country for a dollar, but a piece of land that exact same size in New York City would sell for many millions of dollars. The same thing is true in virtual worlds. And so the value of property near the entrance to the cities rapidly escalated within months of the game going online, a piece of virtual property sold for more than $10,000.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Virtual items like property and magic swords, but were not willing to put in the time to earn the virtual gold needed to buy them. Instead of spending months playing the game to earn the virtual objects they wanted, players began making side deals, often through places like eBay, buying virtual assets for real US dollars. He did not expect us to have him. So those people who were willing or able to put in the time necessary to obtain these items discovered that they could sell them in the real world for real money. I remember the first time I found an object from our game was being sold on eBay, a rare and magical sword was for sale for $100 and we were flabbergasted. The obvious question asks, why would anyone pay real money for nothing? Remember, these are conversations that are happening in present day. History doesn't repeat human nature does. That's why I'm reading this section to you. But for some people, it actually makes a lot of economic sense. A player could spend two weeks in the game collecting treasure before they had enough gold to purchase a big sword.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product was going to be like. And so this is where he actually accidentally creates a real world economy from a virtual world. And this is going to be relevant to the day and age we live in because this is happening, what 25 years ago maybe? One thing's for sure, people are very, very willing to spend real money on all types of virtual items. And he sees that here. No one anticipated that the game might enable students to work their way through college or allow criminals and drug cartels to launder money. or lead to the creation of Chinese gold farming businesses. We had no idea we were creating a real money economy that would generate billions of dollars in revenue and would obscure the lines between virtual world and reality. We just thought we were making a game. And so I'll give you like a summary of what's happening here. Players could earn virtual gold in a variety of ways and use what they earned to purchase everything from virtual meals to a virtual house. People began to covet these.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was out. It was time to focus on what's next. This was completely different. We were going to be running a live service. There was no one in our group with any level of experience. We didn't even think about this when we were working. We were too busy just running around. So there's a great line in Mark Andreessen's blog post, Blog Archive I did back on Founders 50 when he's like, you know you have product market fit because the market will pull the product out of you. And when that happens, it's just this huge rush and there's just, you don't have enough time or resources. You can't keep up with demand. It's very similar to what's happening here. We were wildly more successful than we ever imagined. We had designed servers that would allow for thousands of people to be connected simultaneously, but we were completely unprepared for the game's success. Suddenly we had millions of subscribers and our servers could not handle it. Not only could he not predict the level of success that he was going to have, he didn't predict what millions of people interacting with your”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one had tried before, asking people to pay for the privilege of volunteering. We didn't know what kind of response to expect. The EA marketing team had projected lifetime sales of Ultima Online at about 30,000 units, which they thought was wildly optimistic. We put it on the internet and we held our breath. Within a week or so, 50,000 people had signed up to pay $5 for the disk. Ultima Online instantly became the most important thing happening in the EA world. We got all the money and the development people we needed. EA now decided we needed considerably more management oversight. This is also going to be a mistake. Having money made the situation much better. The managers made it much worse. In the past, once we shipped a game, it was done. So he's now talking about, I've skipped ahead a little bit, sorry, he's talking about the fact that there is, no one's ever had an experience on working on a game that is never finished. So it says in the past, once we shipped a game, it was done.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't give us proper office space. The building that we were in were being refurbished, and every other team was given new space as it was completed. My team was literally put out in the hallway. We were working in the middle of a construction site. So he actually gets it done with this very limited budget, like this prototype, and then check that this is very unique. This is a very unique marketing ploy that he used to launch Ultima Online. For the $252,000, we managed to build a nice little prototype. When we put up one of EA's, we then put up one of EA's first websites to introduce the game. Basically, we introduced ourselves. Hello, we're the ultimate team. We spent $250,000 making a prototype for a new game, and we need people, a lot of people to help us test it. We can't download it to you, we wrote, because it's too big. We need to send you the game on a CD, which is going to be expensive for us to manufacture and mail. So if you want to volunteer to be a beta tester and help us develop this game, please send us $5. This was a marketing strategy.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was zero. EA would not budge. When I have an idea I believe in, I am tenacious. Six months later we went back for the second time we were told no. Six months now, I'm telling you all this because think about this is going to be one of the most successful games they ever make. And think about like he had to fight just to get them to do this. So six months later we went back. For the second time we were told no. Six months after that we went back again. I literally would not take no for an answer. This time I went into the CEO's office and told him, look, we spend $5 million or more on any game that we develop. Just give me a quarter million dollars to prove to you that this is viable. He truly was not interested, but I would not leave the office until he agreed. Finally, he agreed to sign a note that I'd already written out that said basically, I hereby grant Richard a budget of $250 in pursuit of this Multima thing that he wants to do. ES gave us minimal funding and no other support. To make matters worse, EA”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I explained to EA for whom we were then working that this new concept, massively multiplayer online gaming, was the wave of the future and they needed to be prepared to write it. It's amazing that he knew that back then because that's the reality we live in now, right? No interest, they said. They pointed out that there was no data to support the belief that anyone would play an online game. And then he describes the difference between having a small entrepreneurial company. Now he's got to get used to working with this gigantic bureaucratic company. He doesn't really like that EA had a very formal process that its developers had to go through before the company would even consider funding a game. To make the case for funding, we had to get together a huge set of documents that demonstrated why it would be a success. The sales department would then do an analysis based upon the sales of similar games in the past. Now that's obviously a big problem because there was no like the only past historical data is these text-based MUDs, right? The sales projection”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marching on this new thing, the internet, you can use it as much as you want. Now this is possible. In this game, he's going to wind up having millions of subscribers on this game. So he says suddenly a million people could be online at the same time. Not just a million, a hundred million people could be on at the same time. The potential was almost incalculable. So we set out to create a game that would appeal not just to the few who played text-based MUDs, but the millions of people who were playing any type of computer game. Ultima Online proved that a huge market for multiplayer online games existed.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just apply that idea to what we're working on and make it so you're not just playing by yourself, you're not just playing if you were having to be networked with a person in the same room as you. It's just like, no, you can play all over the world. These games never really appealed to me, nor did they inspire me beyond seeing the potential. He's talking about text-based mods. These games never really appealed to me, nor did they inspire me beyond seeing the potential they offered for something much more exciting. We watched this segment of the game meaning industry very carefully for at least a decade. That's so important. He was studying the history of his industry, collecting information, and it took a decade before he was able to capitalize and profit on that. That's really cool. We'd meet regularly with the companies making the best dial-up games to discuss producing a multiplier ultima. But with the fee structure that existed at the time, we couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it. So again, this is like the first time I got on the internet when I was like a young kid. I was probably like 12. I was on an IBM PC and it was American Online and you would pay, like, you know, you called the internet. I try to explain to my dog.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They got together through dial-up services like the original American Online a decade before we produced Ultima Online. We were already dreaming of producing a game that allowed many people to play in the world at the same time and interact with each other. We were not the only people with that dream. Since the availability of computers, some people were producing text-based MUDs. And so MUD, I don't remember hearing about this before. They were called multi-user dungeons. So text games, right? that are multiplayer text games. These multiplayer games were quite simple. Players could chat, they could write to each other, anything that's on the screen would show on all the screens of all the players at the same time. But these games had user bases in the few hundreds or low thousands and were not competitive with mainstream games. So that is really his innovation. It's like, well, you were doing this for text-based. You already have this capability. I'm creating entire new worlds. They're visual worlds. They have this elaborate storytelling. Like, why not?”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All over the world. And so the reason I want to bring this to your attention is because his coin's like, yeah, they credit with me for inventing the term in the category. I didn't invent it. I just was, it was the first, I took an idea that I found in the history of my industry, and then I added something new to it, and it winds up being the first massive success. And so because most people didn't take the time to study the history of the industry, they actually didn't know that I wasn't the first one to come up with this. And so what's the main, why is that important? Because we've seen this over and over again. Like, I can't think of one founder that you and I have studied that did not study the hell out of the industry that they're in. And they do that because you just never know when you can profit on that.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chapter started to where it ended up, it's like imitation precedes creation. Yes, I'm successful imitating and maybe being heavily influenced, maybe just taking a story that appears in a book and adapting it to a new format. And then eventually I'm learning all these other things that were on their way and I'm understanding myself. He's getting older. He's not a teenager anymore. And he's like, all right, I'm just going to combine all these experiences and then create something new, something that no one has ever done before. And he winds up creating one of the most valuable franchises ever. And so then he's going to build on that success and he's going to create he is widely, so it says, I have been credited somewhat inaccurately with inventing the term and category known as there's an acronym him. I'm just going to tell you what it versus what it means, massively multiplayer online role-playing games because the next game, the next thing they're going to work on is this thing called Ultima Online, which is the first to become a major success. So this is like the world that we live in now, where you're playing the game, but you're also playing with millions and millions of people at the exact same time.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make like this big civilization game and this epic game, it winds up being called civilization. They're like, there's no money. And everybody around them is like, no, don't do that. Stick with the very profitable flight simulators. There's no money in that path you're going to take. And that game civilization that Sid makes over the course of that series, they saw like 53 million copies. So it says when I told my brother and our team, I wanted to tell a story about the player spiritual growth through their own actions. His response, the response was pretty much unanimous. Are you nuts? There's no profit in virtue. That's a terrible idea. When I pointed out that no one had done this before, I was reminded of the reason for that because that's not what people were buying throughout the development process. Many people in the company continue to think I was nuts. So he's going to go ahead forward. He's the main designer. He's like, I'm going to do this. So he going even as he, so before the idea or as he has idea, don't do this. He's nuts. He continues the idea. You're still nuts. The ultimate form.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As books and movies. And so up until this point, computer games are relatively simple. You know, you have an objective. But he's like, well, think about the best novel you've ever read or the best movie you've ever seen. There's like moral choices made by the main characters. They have to go through and there's some kind of trade-off and they have to make decision like what path they're going to take in life. He's like, why won't we do this for games? And this is going to lead to his most successful project ever. I thought, how cool to be to incorporate a player's own value system into a game? If I could do that instead of a player just mindlessly going around killing monsters, players could be forced to emotionally invest in the game. Instead of pushing a button, they'd have to sit and make a moral choice. Now, why am I bringing this up to you? Because he has this idea, he loves it. Everybody around him is like, no, no, no, no, do what's working. Don't do something new. And we saw this with Sid Meyer. He was making, I think, what was it, flight simulator games. They were selling it crazy, making a ton of money. But he's like, man, I want to.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly original. Think about crazy this, right? Up until this point, he's just taking things that he read, games that he played, experiences he had beforehand, applying that to a new art form, new medium, which in his case is the computer programs, right? And even though nothing was original, right? Up until that point, very little original thought there, he had still made millions and millions and millions of dollars. There's a lesson there. My other games had borrowed liberally from existing fantasy stories. None of them were particularly original. Other than the fact that they were being told in a computer game format. All these stories had inspired me. So he's talking about Narnia and time banners and Lord of the Rings. I'm skipping over all that. All these stories that inspired me. But if I was ever going to compete with the writers I most respected, I knew I couldn't continue stealing from D&D to Lord in the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars, and etc. Games I realized had the potential to be much more than pleasant diversion. Done well, they could be as much an art form.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now we fast forward into his career where he's realizing hey, up until this point, I've been really imitating, and now it's time for me to actually create something unique. This is one of the most important things that I've learned from any book, you know, what are we at 265, I think, something like that. The imitation precedes creation. I wish that's such a great maxim. I wish I could say I came up with it. It's not. It was written in Stephen King's autobiography, which I covered on Founders 210. Imitation precedes creation. Some people are like, I don't know where to start. Doesn't matter. No one knows where to start. Do what everybody else does. You imitate and then you'll imitate long enough and be like, hey, well, I have my own idea. Then you'll start slowly mixing in your own insights into what you're imitating. And then you'll keep going down this path. And eventually that is where your creation will come from, something unique. Imitation proceeds creation. Coming from somebody that sold 350 million books, that's wild. Five years into a very successful career, I had an important decision to make. My other games had borrowed liberally from existing fantasy stories. None of them were...”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent a lot of time working on this problem, so crafting languages, right? Crafting believable languages and scripts is essential to creating any realistic fantasy world. Since language and writing is the foundation of a society, Tolkien, the greatest reality crafter I have ever discovered, once said that his stories grew out of the languages he created. So this is what popped my mind when I got to this section. You can think of the belief system of the founder as the language of the company. That is why it is usually written down and repeated over and over again. The belief system of the founder is the language of the company.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If this game wasn't published on time and with the highest possible quality we were through, we worked every possible minute for months while at the same time resisting the urge to cut quality just to get it done. As a result, this was our cleanest execution of a game. Somehow we managed to ship it on time. I managed to unfetal myself. We had been saved. He kept his hand in the box.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every month Robert and I would sit down and look at the numbers compared to our progress, and every month the situation looked more ominous. In family lore, we refer to this as the year of Richard's fetal position. When we review the financials I found it so difficult to listen that I would sit in a chair in a corner in the fetal position with my legs curled up under me. After all the success that we had enjoyed, it was extraordinarily difficult to deal with the possibility of failure, especially given that my mistake had brought it on. I barely slept, and when I did sleep the nightmarish scenario of what I could have should have done played over and over in my mind. Desperation can be an extremely productive motivator. We had only enough money to keep the doors open till the original ship date.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision. He's like, I'm not going to close down the company. I'm going all in. When you make a mistake like this, you can either take your loss or double down. Robert and I discussed closing the company and walking away with the several million dollars that we had in our personal bank accounts. The alternative was to reinvest everything the company had, everything the company was projected to earn, and everything that Robert and I could borrow personally. The logical decision was to close the company. Robert and I decided to go all in and co-signed million dollar loans. If we failed, not only would I lose the house, my house, but my brother and I would lose the company and be millions of dollars in debt. But we bet on our capabilities. The race was on to get my next Ultima game out with the acceptable quality before we ran out of cash.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the Apple II, knowing that we could translate them later on to the PC, and this is his main lesson that he took away from this, almost destroying his company. It would have been almost impossible for me to be more wrong. That was one of my first big lessons. And it is this. What I think is not necessarily right and perhaps not what everyone else thinks. So he's saying Apple is going to dominate. Everyone else says, nope, I'm going to choose between Apple and the IBM PC. I'm choosing IBM PC. In less than six months, the IBM PC became a dominant machine in the market. Everything else, including the Apple II, was suddenly irrelevant. So due to my mistake, our company was caught developing products for a market that was rapidly disappearing. This means we would have to start from scratch without any employees who knew how to program on the IBM PC. We would have to retrain our existing staff or hire new people. And so we also say, okay, what do we do here? And he's going to make...”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I insisted on taking it with me because I felt it was my pencil. We started shouting at each other, and the argument quickly escalated into a shoving match. All of our frustration suddenly burst, and the next thing I knew, we were literally wrestling in the office.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Schedule. I felt like I was clearly doing enough to create the next best selling game because money was rolling in. I might have been sitting in my office discussing philosophy with other developers or reading a book about ancient languages, but I believe those little experiments were essential to my creative process. And so there's a lot of tension, but that tension actually is beneficial for the company. Robert and I are very different people, but there's simply no way that Origin would have gone forward without both our unique contributions. We argued often, and we argued passionately. Both of us were incredibly confident in our beliefs about the right way to proceed to build our company. And they wind up getting into a physical fight over a pencil. It says neither one of us remembers the specific issue that led to this fight, but somehow it came down to the ownership of a number two pencil. I started to leave Robert's office with the pencil. He told me to leave it there because it was his office and therefore his pencil. I insisted on taking this sound so immature, looking back. But again, I think it's just, it's obviously there is tension building up.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A relationship that is smooth, like there's going to be argument, like you have a lot of not your time and your energy is invested in your business, your emotions are invested in your business, your finances are invested in your business, it's impossible to think there's going to be no conflict. My brother was always hypercritical of me from being the person being the last person to arrive at the office and often the first to leave. If you ask him to describe my work habits for the first five or ten years, that we work together, he would say something like Richard would roll into the office around noon or sometime between noon and two in the afternoon. He'd play around in his office with his rubber band gun and code and then do coding experiments in his mind that had little to do with actually making game. Richard might create some code or something else for a few hours, then come dark, he'd leave and we wouldn't see him again until the next day. And so Richard says in my defense, I was living in unstructured life that was working very well for me. This was my most productive time creativity and economically, so I didn't understand why I needed to change. He is going to eventually change and like have some semblance of...”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a programmer. That's great, we replied. We need a programmer right now. He was Origin's first outside employee, and he worked for us for 15 years. So now he has to try to make the transition from I'm just making games to I'm building a company. So he's got to learn how to build a company. And that is, he does that the same way that he learned how to program games through trial and error. Far more quickly than anyone imagined, computer gaming became a huge business. And for me, there was a steep learning curve from creator and designer to businessman. And so his brother has an MBA and he's like, listen, your work habits suck. And the reason that's important is because they said the leaders habits become everyone's habits. So he's like, can you stick to like some kind of schedule? And Richard being young and not realizing that, like, he's like, well, I don't know why I have to do that. It seems to be working out. So there's just going to be a lot of conflict between brothers. And it has to happen that way. I mean, I don't know if a single co-founder.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hanging on a hook. So he goes to a couple of different publishers and he's like, you know what? Forget this. I'm going to do it myself. By then, I knew enough about the computer game industry to understand that it wasn't actually an industry. It was an association of companies run by people who had no more experience than I did and who popped up, published a few games and then disappeared. So my brother Robert and I decided to start our own company. We named our company Origin Systems. He's eventually going to sell this company to Electronic Arts. Robert created the tagline by which the company became known. We create worlds. And the headquarters for Origin Systems is their parents' house. So since the company was based in my parents' house, everything about it was informal. One night, for example, we were sitting in our office, which is actually my mother's kitchen table, when a car stopped in front of the house and a strange man got out. He appeared oddly disheveled with long hair and a long beard. My name is Dr. Kat. I read your ad. I'm here to work.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Richard did not want to do that. He says, My desire was to make the world of my games as real as possible, like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. To do that, I wanted to design the player's experience from his or her first encounter with the game. The moment they looked at the box, except there was no box. Remember, we're in the malleable early days of an industry. They're selling them in Ziploc bags with like this little paper, black and white paper with some, you know, basic artwork and the name of the game and who wrote it and his home address and his phone number, right? So he says in addition to pitting the game in the box, I wanted to include a detailed map of the world, of this fantasy virtual world that he's making. I wanted instruction manuals that did not give directions like insert the disc into drive one and press the A button, but rather describe the magical history of the world. I had this great dream. Meanwhile, the publishers just wanted to put it in a plastic bag and”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“K of RAM to 64K. Why is that important? That meant I could add a series of activities that were rich and diverse. And previously you were incapable of doing so. And so again, I think that's a main theme in the history of entrepreneurship. Hold on. So future technology can unlock more powerful capabilities and more opportunities that you cannot do yet, but will be able to do five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years in the future. So eventually the company that signs them is going to go under because of all the drug use. And they wind up essentially instead of reinvesting in the company, they're just taking all that money and doing drugs. So he's going to leave. But really what set Richard apart was everybody else. And I saw this in the Sid Meyer game as well, the publishers are really, they were not really interested in being creative. They really just wanted the game creators to, hey, this thing that you made successful, just make another one. Like, you don't like, let's not innovate. Let's just keep making sequels and let's just stick with what is working.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sink in. It all seemed like some kind of fantasy. We all thought it was a fluke. It was great that someone wanted to pay me for doing what I was already doing. So he starts working on his next game. This next game, he doesn't know at this point in his life. I wind up updating the series called Ultima. I think he said for like 25 or 30 years. It's going to make him wealthy. And we see a really important point that pops up over and over again is the fact that you really need to hold on so that future technology can unlock more powerful capabilities. So I had a weird thought when I got to this point because he's like, okay, well, my game was really basic. Now you're fast forwarding a few years. The computer industry's growing. The computers get more, keep getting more and more capabilities. They have more and more storage. And so therefore, I can actually build more and more complex games. I actually thought of Sam Zaurray or more specifically the book, The Fish That the Whale, the one I just reread on for episode 255.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Game publishing, like some of the first game publishing companies in the world, a lot of them were doing Coke. A lot of them were on all kinds of drugs. They were drinking, and a lot of them just, they're like fly-by-not operations. They'd pop up. They distribute games, make some money. That would go up their nose, and then they'd disappear. And so he's going to have a bunch of bad experiences with game publishers. That is going to lead him to say, hey, forget it. I'll just do this myself, but we're not there yet. So this is him making money doing something that he used to do for free. California Pacific's version of the game was priced at $34, of which I received $5. They sold 30,000 copies. I had earned $150,000, more than twice my father's yearly salary as an astronaut. How crazy is that statement? Selling games, he's making twice what an NASA astronaut makes. It was a phenomenal amount of money, enough to buy a house. It was so much money that it didn't even really.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weeks the game was being published within weeks of the game being published. I got a call from California Pacific Computer Company. I knew who they were. They had published games by Bill Budge, a gaming pioneer whom I had greatly admired. They told me that they wanted to distribute the game nationally. We need you to come out to California right away. I was flabbergasted. I was 18 years old. When I arrived, I was met at the airport by a guy in a new DeLorean. Rather than driving me to the Pacific, California Pacific office, we went directly to an apartment near the airport. Uh-oh. It belonged to a friend of the California Pacific owner. In the living room, there was a chest of drawers. This so-called friend opened up the top drawer, and I was stunned to see it was filled with plastic wrapped bricks of cocaine. Welcome to the video game industry. And so that's something you talked about quite a bit in the book. The fact that a lot of these people that owned these like very primitive.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually draws the cover art for the game. And this is just an amazing paragraph. I love what he's about to say here. This was a state-of-the-art operation then. We hung them up in the store and in the first week sold about 12 copies at 20 bucks each. I would estimate that at the time there were probably fewer than a couple of dozen people anywhere in the world creating computer games and not one of us could have imagined we were creating an industry that in less than three decades would become the largest and most successful entertainment industry in history that a game would gross more in a few weeks than the most successful movie in history had earned in decades that's an incredible thought an incredible paragraph gets even crazier here this is his first game he's about to make 150 grand as a high school senior in the 70s with”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first game I made for Apple II was named Alkabeth. I had borrowed the name from a Tolkien story, which is by far the longest, most complex, and most difficult book I have ever read. I was enraptured. JR Tolkien had changed my life in that video I referenced earlier. Not only does he have first editions of a bunch of Tolkien's novels, but he has pre-editions, editions that were sent to his editor. And so once he completes the game, he spends what he thought at the time was an insane amount of money, like making copies and saying, hey, I'm going to try to sell this thing. The game was so personal and our expectations were so small that I included my home address and phone number and asked players to call me when they finished the game. It cost my entire life savings, $200 to produce copies of it. So he buys Ziploc bags to put the game in, and his mom is the one.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the time I was making D&D 28, I was working at Computerland. So this is some of the stuff that computers, like some of the computers that were for sale in 1979, we sold the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. And he says the seemingly handmade computer called the Sol20. These machines sold as much as $3,000. They had considerably less computing power than a drugstore cell phone has today and a limited amount of available software and the limited amount of available software was terrible. So he's working at the computer store. He's still making games. And the fact that they have, now he has access to Apple II, he's like, oh, up until this point, he was the only one playing his games. And now other people being his coworkers and then his boss are going to start playing his games. The real benefit of working at computer land was that I had access to an Apple II and I was able to write my games on it. This meant for the first time that other people could play my games. They enjoyed them. The owner of the store told me one day, Richard.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this is what's learning to program. Like, imagine trying to learn how to make a computer program a game in the late 1970s. This is what it was like. I learned through trial and error and mostly error. At the time, there was no computer industry. There was no standards. A few magazines published programs people had written for specific computers they were using. And it'd be like a 20-line program that would add numbers or balance a checkbook. So I knew I could program a computer to do complex equations. The more important question to me was whether I could create entirely new worlds. My real objective was crafting a role-playing game. I wrote 28 programs on that teletype. I know there were exactly 28 programs because I named them D&D1, D&D 2, and so on until I reached my 28th attempt. Many of them were never finished. I'd get halfway through a game and would have learned so much about the process that I would decide to start over. This time utilizing my newly obtained skills to create an even better structure.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I convinced the teaching staff to let me have access to them for one period each day. I would work on my project, which was my games, and they would monitor my progress and give me whatever grade they saw fit. They agreed that we could use this quote-unquote class in which I taught myself computer basic to fulfill my foreign language requirement. And so then he goes into how he learned to do this before I leave this page, though. What popped into my mind is I'm reading about the very early, like there's barely an industry here for computer games. They're selling maybe a few on a pegboard and a plastic bag, right? It made me think of like how crazy it was when I've read, I don't know how many books on Henry Ford. And so what's crazy is when you learn about the arc of Henry Ford's career in life, in about a 20 year span, Henry Ford goes from working on an early internal combustion engine in his kitchen to winding up being the owning what might have been at the time, the most”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It occurred to me that I could combine the two. And so he's astonished, he's really enthusiastic, he needs access to a computer, though more reliable than going to Lockheed Martin. So his high school, there's a computer that pops up at his high school one day.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly they were spread virally on the so-called sneaker net, which meant that somebody copied a game from one computer on a disk and loaded it onto another computer. Copies of games were passed hand to hand. So these games start traveling by word of mouth. They start building up this strong, passionate user base. And so computer stores are like, hey, we should start selling them. And this is how they sold them. Computer games began to hang games in plastic Ziploc bags on a pegboard. The creators of the games did not consider it a business. When I began making my own games, there was no economic incentive. It never occurred to me that this could be a career. And this is where in all the time and effort he put into learning and Dungeon& Dragons and learning storytelling really comes enhanced. I learned how to play Dungeon& Dragons and I began writing small pieces of software.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so on one of these early computers, he sees there's this text based game, right? There's no graphics at this time. It's called Adventure. So it says Adventure had no graphics, only text. And it forced you to make decisions. So he gives an example. To the north, you see lights of a town. To the south, you see a sign that says to the dungeon, to the dungeon. Which way do you go? That's all the game did. Each location had a text blurb. You're in front of the house. You see a front door. You also see a mailbox and a doormat. What do you do? By exploring the scene and collecting items, the player was drawn further into the adventure. So these are the exact kind of games only with visuals that he's going to wind up creating a few years later. There was absolutely nothing to look at, but I was mesmerized. I could visualize everything in my mind. And so what do you do? Your natural inclinations, like, I love this game. How do I get new ones? Remember, this is what the beginning of an industry feels like. I found other text games by luck. There was no place to buy them.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the first computer, and the way he got access to the computer is wild. Just imagine this taking place today. It would never happen. The only place that we knew with computers was NASA. And with my father being an astronaut, we had strong connections there. So we solicited the support of one of the space agency's prime contractors, Lockheed Martin. They allowed us to use their computer room, which is a pretty good indication of how Lightly regarded those rudimentary computers were. Think about it, one of our nation's leading defense industry contractors, a key NASA partner, permitted a group of teenagers to play with its computers. And so I have a ton of highlights across these next few pages. Really the reason I'm bringing this to your attention because this is what the beginning of an industry feels like. And since humans will never stop creating new industries, it's important to know what they look like at the very beginning. When calling it an industry would be ridiculous.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walk through Paris, and they're talking about company building. And so that discussion that they're having influenced Nolan to write the book later on. So it's very interesting. It's very quick to read too. So the very first video game I played was Pong. I was 11 years old when my friends and I wired the game into the back of our TV and began playing. It was magical. This was the simplest computer game imaginable. But being able to play a game on the family TV was astonishing. It was a wholly new form of entertainment. I had no concept whether the technology was simple or complex because it seemed so far beyond my own skills. The idea that I might create my own games had never occurred to me. I had never seen a computer of any kind, and personal computers did not even exist, but I was intrigued. And so Richard's entire life changed. Everything begins. His entire life begins really with his introduction.”
2022-07-15 · Founders · #257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source