Retro Warriors 496 - Richard Garriott

Let's do the 100% winners at put 496. As always, I'm your host, Justin Baker, and as always, I'm joined by Bible human Chris Saturn. Justin, was there ever a point where you just decide the numbers too big and you're just gonna stop reading it? No, as a recent fan of cookie clicker, I've decided no numbers too big for me.

I want every number to be as big and ridiculous. I want numbers so big they have letters in them. That's where I want numbers to be. That's the ideal state for me.

Yeah, I want that E. And I gotta E, get the fuck out of here. Yeah, that's when Bellotra gets realized. It's when the E goes up.

I want those real insane, I want those numbers that I don't even know what they mean. I know that's the real imaginary. I know that solves too a number, but I don't know how to get there. Don't really have any housekeeping, so I'll just jump right into my week, which has been more games.

I've been trying to, I've played it before, and I just didn't quite get it, but I want to get it and it's into the Gungeon. I know I'll pick that up. Pablo loves the game. And what I want it to be is just a twin stick shooter, but it adds in this element of reloading.

So your weapon will run out of ammo and you have to let go of the fire button and push it again or push the reload button or reload your gun. And that cycle of having to reload, I just literally don't do it. I'll be like in a boss fight, dodging bullets and holding the fire button and realize that for 30 seconds I've not been shooting anything because I ran out of ammo and I've just been holding down the fire button. So I'm struggling with an imaginary, it's such a cute game, it's a fun game, it's got cool stuff in it.

I like it and I'm trying to make my brain accept it. And I want to, but I can't. I don't have a hard time with it, but I keep like, I'll do a run and then I'll be like, all right, that went badly and I'll come back to it. And it's also got dodge rolling.

So dodge rolling on top of, it's like it's too many buttons for the level of game it wants to be, if that makes sense. That's fair. And so I just, I struggle with it. I had the same struggle with like certain weapons and Hades where like you had to do specific like attacks and stuff.

Like I couldn't use those because I needed to just all I can do is attack and dodge and there's only two things my brain can do. And fair enough sometimes even in something as simple as vampires, I was like, I don't want to point this weapon. Yeah, yeah, I won't pick weapons after point. I need my brain needs to do as few things as possible to pay as close of attention to not dying as I can.

Yeah. I also picked up for like a dollar and have been playing down well, which is yet another rogue light in a way kind of. Really fun game. Really fun, cute like 30 megabyte game.

Yeah, I played a lot on my PS4 almost 10 years ago now. Yeah, it's a well falling simulator. Or you fall into a well and that's basically the game. And it's fun.

And it's many years old at this point. I just never played it. And it's a good time. I just think I remember when I was a little bit with puddlers when I was playing that one on PS4 and I was back in 2017.

Yeah, it's been a minute. I've also been recently as part of, not really research for this episode, but you know inspired by this episode. I was playing Ultima 1 and Ultima Underworld. Which we talked about in Ultima Underworld on our Warren Specter episode.

We did indeed. And spoiler for people who didn't read the title this episode, we can talk about it again this episode. But I finally sat down and like printed out the quick reference sheet for Ultima Underworld and really tried to like get into it. And for a 1992, I'm shocked at how modern that game feels.

It takes in getting used to because like it doesn't do WASD movement. It does WAXD movement. Oh yeah. Yeah, I would absolutely see that.

Which is kind of weird, but it's a lot nicer than arrow keys. And just kind of playing through it. Like I'm still, I think I'd rather have arrow keys. Ah, nope.

No, I can't do arrow keys or too far to the right. And I can't, then my hands too close to my mouse and I don't like that. And then I got to move my whole keyboard and then I got to do other key commands. And then they're far away from the arrow keys and then I get mad.

You get very specific with your control setups. I don't want to be reaching across the whole fucking keyboard. I want everything right there in that little left hand zone. What's funny to me is, is you have an issue when the buttons on your controller aren't the correct letters.

But you don't have an issue when the keys on your keyboard don't have arrows on them. No, that doesn't bother me at all. Yeah, that's weird to me. Because I know W is forward.

Now, if the game said W is forward, but up was forward, I would be upset. I'd be like, it's wrong. I ran into this issue with my daughter the other day because she plays Switch. And all my controllers for my PC and living room are Xbox layout.

Yes. And we were playing Cult of the Lam together and she was struggling because it was Xbox button layout. And so I reached over and I hit the profile button because I have a Nintendo profile saved on that 8-bit-doh controller. And I got right now, what you expect.

But then she kept, I'd tell her, I'd be like, okay, press A. And she looked down and then press A. So she was doing this mixture of looking and pressing and then muscle memory pressing. And it was fucking, I was like, I don't really know how to fix this other than get you a controller with the correct legend on it.

And it's exactly the same thing that I would struggle with, which is like, I need the legend to match with the button, say that they are. Don't most the 8-bit-doh controllers have Nintendo legends on them? The one she was using originally did, but I swapped it because I had two of the ultimate controllers. And one was the ultimate Bluetooth.

And one was the other ultimate that was Nintendo layout. And I made them Xbox because when I played PC, I preferred the Xbox layout. Because you have to have the match. Because yeah, they got to match, set her.

If they don't match, then I'm just throwing in the trash. But yeah, it's funny because she was sitting there struggling with it. And I was like, do you want me to switch the buttons? Yeah, A should be over here.

And I was like, all right, I did that. But then she kept pressing it wrong. Because then she liked that bit of doubt, made her look to check. And I kept having to be like, you can't look, or it's wrong.

And then she eventually got upset and was like crying. She's like, I can't get the buttons right. I was like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that gaming sucks. I agree that it sucks in this way.

I don't know. You know what they need to do? Because the 8-bit dough arcade stick has lights under it. It's true.

So when you switch, it will change the legend on the buttons. Why don't they make a controller like that? That would be awesome. Because then each button would have to be an LCD panel.

And it would cost a shitload of money. Well, no, you just do the etch out LED like they did on the arcade stick and just put it next to the button. There's a lot of room there. Right, but there's room for 8 LEDs of a controller.

They can fit it. Look, man, these put fans in controllers. I wish they still did. But they used to too.

This is why you don't want to use a touchscreen on your laptop. Because you're the kind of person that needs fans in your controller. I got the sweaty hands. I don't.

It's genetic. I got it. My daddy was sweaty handed. Now I'm sweaty.

I don't actually know if my dad has a sweaty hand. Is that what you've been playing this week? I was bouncing between a few things because I was working a lot. And when I was at work, for some reason, the signal for my self-provider was really sucking at my office this last couple of weeks.

And so I couldn't do much online. I couldn't be on Discord as much as I wanted to. I could browse the internet like an idiot. And so I was playing things that I had offline that I had installed on my laptop.

And so one of them was Unsiv, which is an open source 3. It's like a CIV 5 clone. I can't remember if I mentioned that or FreeCiv on our, we did our play this, not that episode. I think we mentioned them both.

And because FreeCiv is the CIV 2 equivalent, Unsiv is the CIV 5 equivalent. Yeah. And I was playing that a little bit. And immediately, the Aztecs felt they need to go to war with me every time our piece treated ended.

And I was just getting decimated. And that was making me upset. Because in regular CIV, I can set the difficulty to where all the computers will basically never declare war. And that way, I can play the way I want to play, which is with no combat.

And Unsiv was not. Zero consequence civilization. Yeah. You know, that's just real peaceful civilization.

I want us to compete technologically. Not compete physically. Right. And that was not working.

So I switched over to UFO 50. And I'm not getting into the meta as much as I want to yet, which is where I'm excited to get to. Because there's a lot of hidden stuff in there. If you start digging into it, and it starts to tell the story about the company.

And apparently, there's kind of a dark narrative in there. And I want to get to that part. But I haven't gotten that yet. That's kind of where I am on it where it's like, I want to get to that.

But also, I have to sit through a lot of Nintendo NES hard games to get there. And like, so I'm bouncing around the games a little bit. And some of them are less OK. So I'm getting there.

But I did pick up Biogun. And that was one that I'd been looking at. It was one that was recommended to me at the same time as Mini Shoot Adventures, which we talked about last week. And Biogun is a search action where you play as a robot virus detection thing inside of a dog who is sick with a virus.

I'm looking at this. This looks ridiculous. Yeah. And it's mostly dog puns.

Yeah. Mostly dog puns. It's cute. It's a little search action game.

And at first, I thought it was just needlessly difficult. And it's because I didn't read. Because the game tells you you can press a button to heal. And I thought that it, because it just showed like the little die critic for the right button.

But I thought it was saying right on the D-pad. Because it didn't just say B button or A button or whatever. It showed the little diagram. And I thought that diagram was showing my D-pad.

So I kept trying to hit right on my D-pad, which brought up a menu, which I assumed would have healing items in it. And I just didn't have them. And so I thought that I couldn't heal because I wasn't finding healing items. And I was getting my ass kicked in.

And it wants me to hold the right button to heal. And I didn't read hold. I read press. And that didn't work.

And I was frustrated. And once I realized that I could have healed this whole time, the game was much easier. It got a little easier. Yeah.

And it's still not super easy. It's still challenging combat and everything. Mixed with a lot of dog puns. And I'm going to tell you upfront, the puns not great quality.

This is not the world. I'm not even have a writing team. No, this is not like a few games lately I played where the writing was charming enough. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's worth dealing with their bad puns to get to the charming writing.

No, it's less than that, which I don't want to shit on these people because it's an indie team. But I'm going to shit on your writing a little bit, man. It's not keeping my attention. But the gameplay itself is fine.

I'm enjoying that. So I do, if you were in the mood for that kind of search action game, I'm enjoying that. It's pretty good. Did you just post a picture of a My Arcade Retro Atari that has Jaguar controls?

It was just announced. And I didn't want to not cover it in our news. Oh, no. I mean, oh, it was announced today at 9A.

Yeah, we had a big one. So I would do that. It would have missed our news. So we'll get to that.

Anyway, also I had seen a YouTube video from a guy. I don't remember his name. I feel bad that I didn't write it down. But he was mentioning some software where you can turn a Raspberry Pi into a Vida dock.

So you can use a Vida as a hybrid like a switch where you can be in the middle playing it, plug it into the dock, and then immediately play it on your TV, and it continues to play, and then undock it and can play it. Oh, which is really neat. And it just requires a Raspberry Pi. And he had like a custom molded dock and all this shit.

I'm not going that far. I'm just using one of my many, many, many spare Raspberry playing around and installed software works great as long as your Vida is hacked. Just plugged in immediately outputs on the screen. You can use a PS3 controller, PS4 controller, PS5 controller, and just immediately play on there, which is nice.

And the thing that I am appreciating about it is on my Vida TV, which I already have, and can play my Vida games on my TV. It won't work with select games because the Vida TV isn't compatible with them. And you can use a whitelist software to cheat that, but some games still need the touch screen to play. And you just a back touch screen or whatever.

You just can't do anything about that. But with this solution, you can either use the Vida itself as the controller and keep playing that way, or pick it up for a moment and use its touch screen for the momentary interaction with touch screen and then go back using a regular controller and it'll play. And that's great. That means that I can finally play the world's worst Silent Hill game on my TV.

Because finally your dream come true. It's got Book of Memories of Still Such Garbage. If you haven't played it, it's what if Diablo meets Gauntlet Legends, but worse? And it occasionally wants to put some try hard horror in there.

Like it's Diablo meets Gauntlet Legends meets some random hell-raiser level horror, all mushed into a game that's a C minus. And this all sounds incredible. Why did you not tell me about this before? I have told you about this before.

That's exactly what you said about it. But now it's a mediocre, tastic game. Like it's not a bad game. It is way forward.

Way forward knows how to make a good game. They just didn't sound great. It'll be my first Silent Hill. I've told you about this many times.

I keep forgetting games. Yeah, it is exclusive. The problem is even if you use the whitelist to play it on a Vida TV, as soon as you get to character creation, which you have to create your own character, which is also a thing I don't like, it immediately asks you to put in your name and it requires the touch screen for that. It arbitrarily requires a touch screen for for entering your name and won't just bring up a keyboard.

You can't even select the field where it asks you to enter name. You have to touch that field and then the keyboard. It's like a DS, Castlevania games that meet you, write your name. Yep.

And then never you. Well, I guess I think you know, they did use the touch. But the first one used to have that. The other one did.

So yeah, there is little things like that in certain games that the Vida TV just won't work in this does. And that's great. And all it needs is a Raspberry Pi to do it granted. If you try to output greater than 720p, my Raspberry Pi 3B suddenly tanks the frame rate.

Oh no, which is fine because the system itself didn't even output 720p originally. It was natively much less than that. And Vida TV only supports 720p, so it's not like it's worse than that. But you are limited in your resolution unless you are either on a Raspberry Pi 5 or if you want to tank the frame rate.

Yeah, but it is still an option. And also I finally said I started a Linux cube, which I didn't know Linda got cued. She did. So if you're not familiar with this, this was originally a PC engine game that got a port on PlayStation and Saturn.

And it is a animal game collecting JRPG that is themed after the ultra violent ultra sexual early 90s anime movies. So 90s anime sexy Pokemon kind of, but you all right, but you don't get to battle the animals. When you're collecting them, you're just collecting them to put them on an arc. You aren't.

Oh, your party members are your character, Ken and Linda, who he has been designated to go on the arc with, meaning they are intended to repopulate humanity, whether they wanted or not. I think you need more than two people to repopulate. I don't know if you've read the story of the arc. You just need to.

But that's not genetic diversity. Well, it isn't about science, sir. It's about an arc. And and the only other party members you can get beyond, beyond Ken and Linda are dogs that you buy at the dog store.

And if you want to rank them up because they can't get like weapons or armor, anything, dogs, yeah, you have to take them to a veterinarian who's the same veterinarian who will revive them if they die in combat. And the veterinarian will offer to train them for a not cheap amount of money. And when you do, the screen just fades to black and you hear this dog getting tortured. And sometimes it fails.

So you had to hear a dog getting tortured and be like, if I didn't rank up at all, I'm like, what the fuck was the point of this horrible thing? I just did. Sounds a little dark. Very dark.

But then it goes back and forth between this ultra violent ultra dark and slapstick wacky early 90s anime. That's bizarre. It's really bizarre. And I'm trying to decide if I hate it or not.

Because it's also really terrible or genius. Right. I can't decide it's somewhere in there. It's not been re-released even in Japan since the late 90s because of its tone.

So I don't know. I'll have feel about it, but I'm giving it a shot. Yeah. Let's do the news.

First up, infidelity has made right by Tecmo's mistakes with a direct port of the three NES Ninja Gaiden games to one SNES cart with MSU one arranged soundtracks. Finally, a Ninja Gaiden trilogy on Super Nintendo that doesn't blow ass. This is the same guy who's done those other NES Super NES ports. Yeah.

And most of them he's done have just been one game to one game, but he decided to do the full trilogy just to prove to Tecmo that it could have been done without sucking. I think they knew they just chose not to. Right. And it's just literally any graphics on your Super NES.

You're not getting any better graphic fidelity, but it doesn't have the flicker of the NES game because it can handle more sprites on the screen. So there's a minor upgrade and better soundtracks. A 90 gigabyte leak at Bungie reveals a ton of early development info from the first Halo. I think some of the other early Halo's do, but definitely the first one.

Some of the dev work going back to 1998, which is a news release for people that don't know it was in development for a while and was originally a Mac. I think exclusive exclusive exclusive exclusive because they made what was the game's name before? Marathon marathon, which were also Mac games. During a presentation about preservation, a representative from Sega admits that the company doesn't actually know how many games it owns, but it reveals that they purchased the rights to Warps game library at some point.

Is this why they said they're not a retro company? Is this like when your neighbors like him and can I borrow that air compressor? You said you had you like, I don't remember where that is. I don't want to dig it out.

You're like, Oh, I don't have an air compressor. And he's like, Nah, I definitely remember you having one. Yeah. No, I don't hurt anyone else trying to sleep that night.

I don't have. No, I'm not an air compressor company. I don't know. And in this talk there, like what's important is preserving your history.

And here is they go. We don't even know how many games we own. In the whole point of the presentation was like, or the presentation was they're talking about how they're trying to become better at preservation. I tried to go back and do the research and make sure that everything developed now is being preserved correctly.

And the guy who was that was the shit that could be preserving. Yeah. And the guy who was presenting it was like when I started this project, I went back through the records, we don't even have records of all the games that we own. We are documentation was that bad and we're going to try to make it better.

But yeah, so like really at a high level, and that it's a net positive, it's a little ridiculous to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. It's still made for great clickbait headlines, but at least they're trying to do better.

A fake lawyer claiming to represent Nintendo has been issuing take down requests to YouTube videos because now you can just pretend to be a corporation and YouTube will do whatever you want. Right. Isn't that nice of you to do just anything that anyone who claims to be a lawyer says? And I know that it's a joke that people have been making the joke for a few years now, but I really think nobody works at YouTube.

Yeah. I think it just runs. Yeah. There's just some executives in charge of it.

And that's it. Did you read the in-depth on this? No, this is just a mess. And the guy claiming to be the lawyer kept doubling and tripling down over and over and over again, until other lawyers were involved and until Nintendo themselves were like, no, that is not the kind of form letter that we send.

They wouldn't admit that the video wasn't one they want to take down. They're just like, no, that is not technically the kind of letter that we would send. Yeah. So it's a mess.

The Majora's Mask Decompilation Project has learned that the game had native support for the N64 microphone adapter at one point in development. Yeah. Apparently you could shout commands at Majora's Mask at one point. I didn't like Majora's Mask.

So my immediate thought was just me being like, stop sucking. Be more fun. That would be the commands I would shout out at Majora's Mask. I don't remember what the commands were.

I think it was like a mini game specific or specific outfit, specific command or something. But or maybe some of the music. Sort slash. Maybe you've been when you were playing a music instrument in the game or something.

Oh, yeah. Now they make you sing. That would be horrible. The RetroTINK 4CE has been announced.

4K, what I say, just four. Yeah. 4K CE has been announced. Includes most of the same features as the full RetroTINK 4K for a reduced price, reduced price of $475.

Now hold on. The regular RetroTINK 4K is like $800. This is like about a third of the price off. So it is a big discount.

And the RetroTINK 4K is allegedly a fucking fantastic scaler. Yeah, everything I've heard about it is phenomenal. But that's still just a load of money. That's the price of a PS5, Justin.

Like Mike Che deserves every dollar he gets for the work he's put into these devices. I really want to be able to afford one. I have one of the other RetroTINK 2X and it's great. I've been using it a long time.

But when I did, it would work great. No. A fan made alpha build of GTA 3 has been released for the Dreamcast. The game is fully playable and includes all music and assets of the original proving that we didn't need the PS2 after all.

And you know, the game was originally in development for Dreamcast before it moved to PS2. Yeah. And I canceled it because Dreamcast died. Yeah, you don't say.

But they, what I find interesting about it is that Dreamcast has fewer buttons on the controller than on PS2. So they had to rearrange the controls a little bit to make it work. There's no second stick for the camera. Oh, there's also no second triggers.

Yeah, true. So they rearrange the buttons a little bit. But they also made it support a fan made adapter that lets you plug PS2 controllers into a Dreamcast. Oh, that's wild, right?

So it's a... At that point, just playing on PS2, but still wild that they got a wild thing. They got a working, right? But this is neat.

They said that they recommend that you run it off of an optical drive emulator with an SSD just because the amount of load in that GTA 3 does as far as when you're in the open world pulling in assets from other areas and slow the game down a bit. Somebody did test it on a just a CDR, not even a GDR, just a CDR, just to see if it worked. And they said the frame rate dips a little bit, but it is fully playable. I like to imagine there's like one Dreamcast die hard that was there in that moment.

It was like, I'll never play PS2 games ever. Because he's so mad. And finally, he gets to play GTA 3 after all these years. It's finally on Dreamcast.

24 years later. An anonymous dev from Next Level Games says that Nintendo may not ever revisit Punch Out due to an unexpected level of pushback about the character stereotypes in the Wii game, which is fair. It's pretty fair, yeah. It's pretty.

It's a thing. Yeah. It's kind of one of those like, oh, yeah, that was the thing. I wouldn't have forgot.

And then you forget how bad some of them are. Yeah. And you're like, oh, yeah, they are pretty little. We're bad enough that they were already censored by the NES port.

Yeah. So it's just the specifically vodka drunk inski had been censored by then. Yeah, to soda pop inski. And so he'd pizza pasta.

Yeah. So yeah, yeah, I don't know that anyone's like clamoring for those to come back. Fair enough to punch out. But I mean, the game, yeah, but I think you could do the game and just have regular.

You just have regular caricatures without them being stereotypical caricatures. That's what you can do. Totally. I don't know the Nintendo knows how to do it.

I mean, their main mascot is a stereotype of an Italian person. Yeah, it's not a fault. But if they could figure out how to do it, then. Oh, geez.

A part of the original shimyu to PS2 and Xbox was in development at Sega before being canceled. I guess they forgot that they had that too. Fuck it, idiots. Well, they're not a retro company, Justin.

They're not a retro company. You can't expect them. Which brings us to a totally the thing you posted in the chat. Oh, yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. You posted something you did not forget about it. And then you forgot about it.

The news posted this Atari just dropped a teaser video of a handheld, my arcade branded Atari device that has a joystick, a deep hat, a track ball, full face buttons and a full keypad. Yeah. I've not found anything on anything. I'm sure they have a press release out.

I haven't found the news article yet, but obviously it's an emulation device. Yeah. So you open up playability for Jaguar and 5,200 games. So now you can play all of your Atari games on one device.

And you want to play Pong because apparently it doesn't have a dial on there. So what are you going to do? Maybe that joystick is also a dial. That sounds awful.

It looks like a weird one. It's possible. It's got USB-C on it. It looks like it supports other controllers and maybe video out again.

I've been read the press release and they stick that was also a dialy. You could play proper Atari Warriors, Justin. They hashtag it. Atari CES 25 and Game Station Go, which is the dumbest, most generic ass fucking game ever.

Game Station Go. If it was a 94, I thought PlayStation was the dumbest, most generic sounding game ever. It is. So that brings us to our topic.

Which is Richard Garriott, AKA Lord British. I misspelled Gary right there. I fixed it. Nobody knows.

Don't tell anyone. I misspelled it there. That was me. Oh, is it you?

For stops us. I have hello. What are you British? Which will make more sense later.

And I do need to give a note on scope. I've played very, very little of the Ultimate Series given how many games there are. I've played some of them. I've played some Ultima 4, some ports of Ultima 4, Ultima 1, a Colobeth, Ultima 2, Ultima 2, the completion.

I started a character in UO. I couldn't turn it off. But outside of dabbling here and there, I'm largely unfamiliar with the games. I just find Gary at fascinating as a person.

He has a fascinating character. Also lots of the info here came from the Ultima Codex, which doesn't do a very good job of citing sources if it cites them at all. And Gary has also changed some of these stories as time has gone on. So please excuse anything that may be apocryphal.

I leaned toward Ultima Codex being correct because they seemed to have what seemed like some insider knowledge on a lot of this. Information that if not true was fully fabricated, which seems unlikely, but also without citations I can't say it's impossible. Biographical info on Lord British. The Private Astronaut.

Richard Gary was born July 4, 1961 in Cambridge, England. His father was Owen Garriott, who was an early scientist astronaut that flew several missions of note. His mother Helen Mary Garriott was an artist specializing in ceramics and painting. There's an older brother named Robert Garriott, who worked with Richard at Origin, which we'll get into later.

His father worked at NASA. He was a professor. He worked at NASA. He was a private astronaut.

Yeah, but he was specifically called a scientist astronaut, I'm guessing being different from most astronauts, usually, previously being pilots. He was indeed a scientist. And there's a list of notable missions that he went on. I didn't include because it's anything about him.

And despite being born in England and having dual citizenship because of it, he was raised in NASA Bay, Texas. He was outside of Houston, which is near NASA. And he can't trust people from Texas. No, he's a fucking idiot.

His father was in England studying at University of Cambridge when he was born. That's why they were in England. I probably specify that we are in Texas. But we're also sounds like I'm being an asshole.

His early life. Gary grew up outside of Houston with an astronaut for a father, so he was often around astronauts and families. This led to quote an early interest in space flight, which we would see manifest in both his games and personal life. And we have to start with a nickname British and Lord British.

So reports on the nickname British and subsequently Lord British popped up and they kind of vary depending on when you ask Richard Gary about the nickname. The common threat amongst them is that he grew up in Texas without a Texas accent. Is based, that's the, I think the nugget of truth that we can definitively say. And that led to kids calling him British because he lacked their particular pet wall.

Now, there is more detail. Sounds like something kids would do though. Totally. Yeah.

The more detailed version which he regaled us with in issue 26 of computer gaming world was, quote, when I first learned fantasy games, I was at Oklahoma University for high school summer studies. When I first arrived at the dorm, other students would come into my room and say, hi. Of course, I would say hello back. And they would blurt out what?

Hello? No one from around here says hello. You must be from Britain or something. We'll call you British.

Well, everyone that summer was similarly dubbed with a nickname and I began to call all of my fantasy characters, Lord British. That's I don't believe that. Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah.

What? Here's the thing. I can believe that that is a paraphrased version of a story. I can believe that.

Yeah. It's just like I've grown up in Texas. People say hello. Yeah.

And if someone, if someone's hello to me in Texas, I would go, what are you from Britain? Also in Texas, we don't call it Britain. We call it, we would call it England. Yeah.

We would say, what are you English? And they might call him English. Yeah. In fact, I know a guy that we called English for years, he granted he was from England, but that was just his nickname.

That was his name. Maybe the fucking Dorks down in Houston would do that shit. Granted, he said this was Oklahoma. True.

Maybe the fucking Dorks up in Oklahoma. That's an Oklahoma thing. We're closer to Oklahoma than Houston. Yeah, but we're in Dallas.

Dallas is different than either most of Texas or Oklahoma. So regardless, I personally, from everything I've read, I personally think he probably shared the dual citizenship and being born in Britain thing with people and then they tacked it on with you lack the southern draw that we expect. This would have been what in the early 80s, late 70s, this happened. And we still had home telephones then and we absolutely always said hello when we pick them up.

Nobody even in Texas was picking up saying, Hey, y'all, that's not how you answer a telephone. So that aside, this story has been perpetuated to death. It's right up there in my mind with sonic shoes or red because of the love he has for the fans or whatever. I personally think he would volunteer the information that he was born in not England, Britain because it sounds fancier.

I do like that Gary, it's Wikipedia page has a citizenship as American slash British, but the little not next to British that's better source needed. Yeah. I feel like that really is a sum up of his background in general. His mother would teach him a new artistic skill every summer.

And so which was, you know, when he talked about a lot of the different artistic skills he learned over the summer, his brother, which is really cool. And in another story, he tells about that. And if you've ever seen Richard Garrett, you've seen it. He wears this big silver snake necklace.

It's not discreet. It's a very big snake. Yes. And he has claimed that he made it when his mother was teaching him jewelry making one summer, which but a fun childhood memory.

But he also claims that making clasps was too difficult. So it is permanently attached to his neck, which is not true. That's not true. Gary, it still wears it.

Yeah. And here's the thing. He's an adult man who's gone into space. You don't get to wear a giant fucking like he's gone on planes.

You got to go for a metal detector. Like you know what I mean? Like there's just no way like there's pictures of him on spacecraft and you can tell he's not wearing it there. Yeah.

And so I can't tell if this is him being hyperbolic and because here's the thing about Richard Gary, he's very, you know, he's one of those larger than life. He's a character. Yeah. And he understands more so than even people like Peter Mullen you know that he is playing the role of Lord British.

Yes. As much as he is being Richard Gary. Yeah. Right.

So straight up first thing to recognize about this man and why he's a character named after his namesake in his games that is also a character that he helps portray. Yeah. At Clear Creek High School in 1975, he claims to have had his first real experience with computers working with the school's teletype machines. They were connected to a PDP 11 system.

This is pretty common for computer systems in the mid 70s at schools. A lot of schools would get these and they would just kind of be tucked away in a basement. Unlike a lot of other schools, he was just sort of given unfettered access to the machines and ultimately convinced the school to let him make his own self-guided computer course centered around them, which was apparently a thing this school did where the older students could kind of make their own curriculum and coursework. Nice.

He claimed that no teachers knew how to use the machine. So he was completely left unsupervised with them. I believe that. And he also claims that it counted as his foreign language credit, which sounds like some shit he said as a joke and magazines picked up.

I again, what? Yeah, that doesn't sound legit. I had to have a foreign language credit in the state of Texas and I took three programming classes. I was just like, great.

This was 20 years before us. True. True. In the mid to late 70s, his sister and I gave him a copy of Lord of the Rings and he began playing Dungeons and Dragons, which was kind of in Vogue and Nerd Culture in the late 70s.

His interests in fantasy, fantasy, gaming and computers all kind of quickly collided. So he started making teletype computer games pretty quickly by late high school and some of his early prototypes were called D&D, like D&D, not Dungeons and Dragons, just like D&D. And he would iterate on them. So there was like D&D1, D&D2, D&D3.

And then he was making on these PDP11 teletype terminals. And that's kind of how he started cutting his teeth, you know, on his teeth wet. Getting his teeth wet, doing programming and interested in fantasy and writing games and doing all that kind of together. And after he saw an ad for an Apple II, he made a deal with his father that if he could make a working role playing game, then his father would split the cost of an Apple II with him.

And so the game that he made for his school type system was called D&D number one. And this would eventually be iterated upon with more D&D numbers all the way up to D&D number 28. Because throughout his entire life, he had a problem with sequelitis. Yeah, he had already made 28 sequels.

So Ultima 9 didn't seem that weird to him when it happened. No, that's relatively normal. So D&D 28, also known as Ultima 0, also known as a Calibeth, is kind of also the start to his professional life in gaming. It originally started on those style type machines.

It lived on punch tapes until he later ported it to his Apple II where the game also gained its wireframe 3D dungeon graphics. And his boss at computer land pushed him to sell the game, which was then at the time named D&D28B, because presumably after making D&D28, he iterated on that to A&B. And so he had commercial versions produced, they were sold in Ziploc baggies, and initial sales were around 12, not 1000, just regular 12. Nice.

I've seen some people try to site up to two dozen, but 12 is also up to two dozen and 12 is the number that I've seen. I've seen almost 12. And somehow one of these dozen made its way to California Pacific Computer Company, who was a pretty big in the terms of PC video game publishers of the time of the early 80s, which is, you know, temper expectations. They were notable in that space.

They were something that dozens by then. They somehow heard about it and they struck a deal with Gary to publish the game, giving him $5 of each sale. So a call of F made its second commercial debut in 1980 with a four page manual, and along with a second release in 81 sold around 30,000 copies, which is a lot more than 12. Is it?

It is. A call of F also featured the NPC Lord British, which would go into become a mainstay character for the Ultima series, which eventually leads us into Ultima 1. This is in 1981. So while Gary was attending the University of Texas at Austin, he began working on Ultima with Ken Arnold.

Gary handled most of the basic programming, and Ken Arnold did the sound and graphics and stuff. The graphic portion of the game is very much just, or the dungeon portion of the game is very much just, this is a call of F. And then we've added an overworld and some quests to it. And it was originally intended to be named Ultimatum, but that trademark already belonged to an existing board game, which I now desperately want to find and play.

And he once again went with California Pacific Computer Company, who published a game on five and quarter floppies with a 12 page manual, but then they pretty quickly declared bankruptcy, pretty soon after it. And this caused him to enter into a publishing deal with Sierra Online, which was recently rebranded from Online, which is the previous name, which makes no sense now. But in the early 80s, they would shortly thereafter rename themselves again to just Sierra. They just had to keep pushing that online out of the name.

They didn't want it. It was online with a hyphen, too. Real 80s shit. Okay.

This is straight up. I love the online logo from before they went to Sierra. It looked like magnetic tape. Ultima was celebrated by the few publications covering PC gaming in 1980.

It sold well with a $39.95 price tag. The game also featured extensive space travel, which I did want to mention for people that haven't played any Ultima games, like space travel is already featuring his games in 1981. In the fantasy realm in the 70s, specifically in the D&D space and the adjacent pulp fantasy space, mixing sci-fi and fantasy was not that weird of a thing. Some of the most early celebrated advanced Dungeons and Dragons modules straight up have like aliens and ray guns and crash spaceships in them.

But the mixing of sci-fi and fantasy is something that retroactively Ultima has kind of remembered for people that are discovering it for the first time playing these early games. They're like, oh, you get a spaceship and go into space. That's weird. But a lot of it just grew out of pulp fantasy, which already kind of mixed these things together a lot of the time.

I mentioned that the initial retail price, that $39.95 adjusted for inflation was $140 today. That's toasty. Yeah. A year later, this led us straight into Ultima 2.

In 1982, Sierra Online was set to publish again and it was noted that they were chosen because Gary demanded a cloth map be included with the game. And they were one of the only publishers willing to do that. Everyone else was like, what the fuck's wrong with you? This was also his first game that came out of the gate on multiple systems, which widened the series's potential appeal.

And it sold and reviewed very well. The game continued its upper trajectory. Ultima 2 in the community is kind of remembered as like the one you need to skip because it sucks now. But a part of that is availability of the versions that we have now or like I think it's hard to get anything but the EGA graphics version of it and stuff.

But it ends up being obtuse and grindy by today's standards. But it reviewed well. People were like, this is a great building upon Ultima 1, which was a great building upon a call of F. So these are a call of F was all dungeon, Ultima 1 added an overworld, added some complexity to it.

And this led into the Ultima 3 and subsequently the origin systems era in 1983. So Ultima 3 exited this release in 1983 and finished what would be considered the age of darkness trilogy for Ultima, which is what they called it. It wasn't just called that because it was the Dark Ages. They just, that was the name of the trilogy.

And for Ultima 3, he upped the graphics and added in music for supported hardware and decided to start his own company to handle publishing the game, which was origin systems, which was a joint enterprise between Richard, his brother Robert and his father, Owen, and a guy named Chuck. And they ran it out of his garage. Chuck, they ran it out of his garage to begin with. And initially, Gary wanted his own publishing company to do issues having with royalties on previous games.

He wasn't getting paid the royalties appropriately or on time. There's some issue. They ran it out of their garage in Houston. And Origin itself took on publishing of many non-ultimate games pretty much immediately.

And some of them I was reading was like, they were unaffected by the crash of 83. And I was like, yeah, well, they were a PC game company. And it was a console crash. But also, to be fair, they did take on a lot of publishing from other people and seem to be keen to grow and work with others pretty fast, which probably helped them with a little bit of resiliency in that era.

There was a whole list of these, but there are some notable Origin employees over the years. These aren't right off the bat, but these are over the years that John Romero worked as a programmer. Warren Specter famously worked at Origin Systems. Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander guy, Wing Commander was Origin Systems published.

Tom Chilton, who was later a lead designer at Blizzard, worked at Origin. There's a company that has never done anything wrong as we established an art Blizzard episode. Right. You just go listen to that and know how Blizzard never did anything.

Never think about anything after that. Like the previous games, Ultima III sold really well, reviewed really well, continued to push the envelope for computer role-playing games in general. Remember, this is 1983, you know, having a game that's anything other than a dungeon crawl is bizarre. And this is before the NES in America.

You know, this is this is this is right around the time early in Japan. Yeah. So like the Famicom is just coming out, the entire console market is crashing and Origin Systems is pushing the envelope for what a computer role-playing game is and can be. And so this first trilogy was it's cited by a lot of people as extremely influential and inspirational.

I did see a thing that was like, it's one of the most influential games of all time. Ultima I and II are and helped inspire Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. And I think that's a pock-riffle. I think Wizardry was probably more influential in that particular space.

That's not to say Ultima had no impact. So I actually was doing some research on that at one point. And it looks like both Wizardry and Ultima hit Japan right around 85-86. Okay.

Okay. So it came a little later then. So that would that would track in. Yeah.

They didn't really reach Japanese shores in Japanese anyway until that 85-86. Now there were some Western copies that had been bootlegged in Japan, but they weren't as widely accessible just because they were exclusively in English. I will say these early Ultimas, they feel very Dragon Quest. They're definitely simpler games.

But just moving around on the tile-based overworld movement, it feels real Dragon Quest. You can feel it. So I don't know how much Wizardry gets cited a lot. And then the other game that we talked about as way back in our JRPG episodes, but the other game that influenced a lot of those early JRPGs was Highdlight, which came out of Japan before Wizardry or Ultima did in Japan.

And a lot of Japanese sources say that the reason Ultima and also Wizardry got translated in Japanese was because of the success of Highdlight. And I'm sure Ultima influenced some people. It seems to mention less in the Japanese role-playing game space as far as like intensely influential major influences on these early games. Wizardry seems to be the number one, like, oh yeah, that was it.

The one that I ever hear mentioning Ultima specifically is Sakaguchi, the final-mancy creator. He was always a fan of Ultima. I could see that. He explicitly said that he had a Western Apple II that he played on.

Weirdly enough, Ultima Codex really named drops Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the South Park guys for it being there. Ultima 1 and 2 being a big influence for their South Park role-playing games. I'm like, yeah, those South Park games aren't really anything to do with Ultima. They're much more based on later.

I guess what happens is they were in an interview and they were like, yeah, we grew up playing Ultima 1 and 2. Those were our favorite games. They were really influential in our lives. Anyway, we also made these games.

They were like direct line drawn checkbox. I'm going to quickly skim through about five years here. Ultima 4, 5, and 6. The second trilogy known as the Agent and Light Metrall G spanned in 1985 and 1990.