And those three things obviously melded in my mind deeply, and I immediately began to manifest these fantasy games. “When I was in high school, within one year, my sister-in-law gave me Lord of the Rings, the game Dungeons & Dragons was published, and the personal computer was invented, the Apple II computer. Richard Garriott on being disowned by a fundamentalist relative: I felt compelled to reach out to you, because I have to tell you that my daughter has had a problem with lying and stealing … But then I noticed how your game brought those behaviors full circle, and my daughter was forced to face the ramifications of that behavior, and she learned to re-evaluate her own behavior, not only in the game, but in the real world.’ And so she was extremely thankful and happy that she had bought Ultima IV for her child, because she felt that it really did have that sincere, positive impact on her child’s life.” And I received a letter shortly thereafter from the mother of a young girl … She wrote me a letter that basically said, ‘Hey, Mr. 1 bestselling Ultima, and I think really put the series on the map. But when that game came out, it was actually my first No. They thought that trying to make a ‘preachy’ type of game, as they would say, might actually hurt its possibility of success. “When I was building that game, my team and my family were fairly skeptical. Richard Garriott on using Ultima IV to teach ethics: Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks James Sutter and Wendy Wagner join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss Dungeons & Dragons tie-in novels. Listen to our complete interview with Richard Garriott in Episode 105 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). “And so Lord British and the virtues which I personally espouse will continue into the new world.” “The one piece of continuity that we will bring back, that we do own, is Lord British,” says Garriott. Fortunately one trace of the beloved franchise remains, Garriott’s alter-ego Lord British. Fans will recognize this ancient world as the golden age of Ultima, and the Fall as Garriott’s disastrous partnership with EA. We’re told that this ancient world, in which Avatars walked the earth promoting the Virtues, was destroyed in an epic cataclysm called the Fall. “We got the project going to not only have him help us internally with the story for Shroud of the Avatar, but also to write a book of the backstory that we’ve been working on together, called Blade of the Avatar,” Garriott says in Episode 105 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.īlade of the Avatar tells the story of Aren Bennis, an army officer in service to the sinister Obsidian Empire, whose life changes forever when he stumbles across a magic sword, a relic of a forgotten age.

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