Richard Garriott Interview

The latest interview with Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott comes to us via Motherboard, and while most of it touches on his Man on the Moon documentary and his passion for space, there’s also time for some gaming-related questions, including a brief insight into the man’s hopes for his “Ultimate RPG” and his opinions on Minecraft and Skyrim. Here’s a snip:

You coined the term Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, MMORPG.
What are your thoughts about massive multiplayer online games today?

I think we’re now in the third grand era of gaming. I was one of the major participants in the first grand era, so called solo player games. You know for 20 years all games were solo player games. Then I helped create the second grand era, of massively multiplayer games, you know with Ultima Online being arguably the first among many. And MMO’s are ten times bigger then solo player games, so it’s been a major success in the trend of gaming.

Now we are entering the third grand era, which I’ll call mobile and social games. And what is interesting about this era as opposed to previous eras is that where you had to pay fifty dollars to subscribe to a game every month, mobile and social games are games that you play for free or a low entry fee. Only when you find that the game is worth your time do you pay for it. And as opposed to it being multiplayer, now it’s about asynchronous multiplayer. In social media games, you’re playing with your real friends, with whom you don’t have the ability or time to devote to play with them at the same time.

What have you been doing on the gaming front since your departure from NCSoft in 2008?

We’re working on a variety of names already. Either Akalabeth or Lord British’s Ultimate Role Playing Game, just to do a tie back to the past. I have a game in production now that will set the stage for a ten-times-larger audience, aiming to do what we did before with MMORPGs, bringing ten times more people into role playing games.