Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott embarks on new adventure: Social games
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Richard Garriott, otherwise known as Lord British, on Wednesday announced the third act of his game development career -- social gaming.
Garriott, who started by selling his games in Ziploc bags in the 1980, created a massive following with his Ultima title for personal computers. From 1980 to 1994, his company rolled out more than a dozen Ultima games, including a title that launched his second act.
That game, Ultima Online, catapulted Garriott into the frontiers of online gaming when it came out in 1997. It was one of the first online multi-player games that let thousands of subscribers play online simultaneously. (Garriott himself often played online in the game as a character named Lord British, a nickname he earned in high school.) And it paved the way for subsequent online games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft.
After this phase, Garriott took a two-year intermission and spent a small fortune becoming the world’s first second-generation astronaut (his father, Owen Garriott, was a scientist who flew on a Space Shuttle mission).
For his third act, Garriott is diving back online. This time, he’s not creating vast, intricate digital worlds he’s known for. Instead, the 48-year-old developer wants to create simple, easily accessible social games that can be played on social networks such as Facebook and on mobile devices such as iPhones.
His new company, called Portalarium, is scheduled to crank out 2 to 4 social games a year, starting with a game on Facebook called Sweet @$! Poker (no, that wasn’t a typo). Garriott proposes to bring three new features to set himself apart from the rest: better graphics, faster loading and response times and the ability to see what your friends are doing in Portalarium’s other games in real-time.
To get an idea of what Garriott means, click on the video above and watch our video interview.
-- Alex Pham
Video Credit: Alex Pham / Los Angeles Times