The Return of the Space Cowboy
Richard Garriott details his comeback to the industry and talks social media gaming
Richard Garriott has experienced mixed fortunes in the past couple of years - as lead designer on the disappointing Tabula Rasa title, his departure from publisher NCsoft was acrimonious and now the subject of a lawsuit, but last year he fulfilled a lifelong dream to go into space.
After a hiatus, he's now back in the videogames business with the launch of new company Portalarium, which publishes games on social network sites. At this year's DICE Summit we caught up with the man himself to find out more.
Well, yes, I can't comment specifically, but just for the record with Tabula Rasa and other games - I have about a 50-50 hit-miss ratio with the publication of all my games. And by the way I think 50-50 is mighty good - so although Tabula Rasa didn't find a sufficiently big audience for NCsoft to wish to continue it, I'm actually still very pleased with a lot of the innovations we brought to bear on the game, and I think there's a lot of ways in which it succeeded to at least the design vision we were attempting.
There are other areas in which, in hindsight, even I would be critical a wide swathe of things in Tabula Rasa, but that's no different to any others games I've done.
Well, there are also new players coming in and old players going away - and that's especially true in the giant, five-plus year MMO gaming space where literally a lot of people didn't exist in the last iteration - so I think it's quite forgiveable that people only see one iteration back.
But that's one of the reasons that, while you won't see me personally building a poker game - even though we're publishing that as our first title, the games you'll see me making will be more traditionally Lord British games.
The nice thing about social media networks is that by design they must begin casual and small - which means that unlike the big PC games, for which you have no idea if you're going to be successful or not until you're five years and $50 million into it...
For a social media game like poker, it's not done - it's in beta, but it's already running live and has thousands and thousands of players. So we're refining it while it's out in the public domain. That's normal - but you know if you're on-track much earlier, and the costs are much smaller, the time to market is much quicker, so the risks are mitigated and it's more compelling as a developer.
So far it's been good - so far it's what I'd call "factual" in the sense that most of the press I've seen has focused on the "Richard Garriott is back" angle, that he's doing some crazy new thing that they're not sure how to interpret yet.