Richard Garriott Interviews @ Eurogamer

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Richard Garriott (yes, again) has spoken with Eurogamer about his failures with Ultima 8 and Tabula Rasa. For the record, I don't intend to cover his latest social MMO thing but the inclusion of Ultima 8 was worth a post:

"In the case of Ultima 8, that was the first game I did as part of Electronic Arts," Garriott said, "and Electronic Arts, their whole success formula is based upon yearly releases of sports franchises just before the beginning of the sports season. Since their whole success and sales and marketing comes from accurately timed seasonal launches, the pressure was very heavy to accurately time a seasonal launch for Ultima 8.

"We shipped Ultima 8 more or less on time, but the only way we got there was by really cutting out huge swathes of the game all the way to the point where the cloth map was completely unrelated to the map of the real game because we threw out so many bits and pieces of it. So Ultima 8 was, frankly, unfinished - I mean dramatically unfinished. And in hindsight I look at it and go, if we'd really just finished it properly - even the movement, the jumping that was in the game - had we done it less hacked and more accurately, we would have had a Diablo-style success a year or so before Diablo.

"Too bad, spilt milk," he rued, "I get the blame - I get the appropriate blame, I'm the top of the food chain. It was my decisions. But that's my excuse or rationalisation." ​

For those who want to catch up on his Portalarium stuff, Eurogamer has some comments about that from a few days back. The headline suggests he could team up with EA and the Ultima property again but, frankly, it sounded like an attempt to sway EA rather than a reality to me.