Eight Virtues in a Duffel Bag: The Richard Garriott Interview, Part II
In part II of our interview with Ultima series creator Richard Garriott we talk more about the “rooms full of killing children,” the dark nature of The Black Gate, creative ways to kill Lord British, fan mail, and the possibility of a new Ultima game from Garriott in the future. Read it after the break, and check out Part I if you haven’t already done so.
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Crispy Gamer: Tell us about the different kinds of rooms full of killing children.
Richard Garriott: There was one that was “Children of the Corn”-like, where there are children that come running out of the fields to get you. In another one there are “children of the shrooms” — in a giant nest of mushrooms behind a building, where there were children that spawn and attack you.
In one of the Ultimas there’s a dungeon area where there’s a giant monster in one cage, and children in another cage. When you go to use the lever that you have been led to believe will unlock the children’s cage so you can rescue them, instead [you] release the monster into the room of children — so inadvertently you actually cause the death of all the children in the room. Etc, etc.
And so there has always been — starting with Ultima IV — a room associated with the inadvertent challenge of reality [in each situation] setting you up to fail. In my mind, it’s different tests to find how you deal with it, but I always know what people are going to worry about. They are going to worry about the fact that they are responsible for what happens, and try to find a way to work around it and to solve it.
Crispy Gamer: This room is what actually inspired me to replay the game and kill everybody that could be killed. There are like three people you can’t kill, right?
Garriott: I don’t recall the exact number, but in most Ultimas there has been — sometimes by chance, and sometimes by design — approximately one person per town that could not be killed. But that wasn’t a hard and fast rule — that’s just the way it worked out.
Crispy Gamer: I believe you can kill everyone except Batlin, the Ferryman and the Time Lord. But, anyway, that room inspired me to go through the game and see what effect killing everyone in every town would have. If I killed everyone in one town — would anybody care? I noticed that nobody really cared [Editor's note: I'm not counting the aftermath of casting Armageddon]…
Garriott: Don’t forget that we have to think of all the things that all the players might try to do, and then decide if we can notice that and respond accordingly. What that means is that you’ve done something that no one on the design team imagined someone could do or would want to do, that we could trap and then therefore respond to intelligently.
There have been cases where we have tried to respond to things akin to that. One of the things that started Ultima IV on this journey down the path of Virtue was because I started getting “fan mail” for Ultima III. Most fan mail is one paragraph of “hey, I really enjoyed your game” and five pages of “here’s what you did wrong or here’s what I would have done differently.” And amongst those was always (for Ultimas I, II and III) something like “hey, I loved the game, played it to completion, and then I went around and just started killing everybody, including you — your character.” And I was just really struck by the fact that everybody really got so much joy out of killing everyone they could kill in the entire game - and especially if people were trying to kill me.
