Confessions of an RPG Developer

Atomic spoke with Richard Garriott, Chris Avellone, Joel Billings, Todd Howard and more on the struggles of working in the genre of the role-playing game.

Genre names tend to be short and sweet. ‘First-person shooter’ doesn’t leave too much to the imagination, ‘Turn-based strategy’ gets the point across, and you can almost smell the pearls of sweat dripping from the receding brows of furtive postal workers when you hear the words ‘Adult game’. But for a genre that holds court over so many passionately loved and respected games, ‘Role-playing game’ doesn’t mean much at all. Even Tetris casts you as a sort of invisible actor – the mysterious, god-like being who can spin falling shapes around at will. Realistically, if we are going to go all OED on the RPG, any game would conceivably feature a bit of ‘role-playing’.

Unsurprisingly, various games have laid claim to the title. From odd FPS hybrids like Ultima Underworld to colour-by-number games such as Pool of Radiance, the RPG has reigned over a variety of weird and wonderfuls. There are those, though, who think they can close the case: Richard Garriott (or ‘Lord British’ to the initiated), for instance. The 45-year-old creator of the legendary Ultima series and upcoming massively multiplayer online game, Tabula Rasa, is certainly the sort of fellow whose number you’d dial when such questions arise. After all, he helped shape the RPG into what it is today.

‘I think, fundamentally, a “role-playing game” is best defined by the first word,’ he says, ‘in that it’s a game where you play a role. This means that when you sign up and begin playing the game, and you choose or are given a role, your success or failure is dependent upon how well you play that specific role. For example, one of my favourite role-playing games – as I know them – is Thief, which was made by some of my friends here in town. In that game, you’re clearly playing the role of a thief; if you don’t play that role properly, you won’t succeed. What’s interesting is that I think most people who build role-playing games don’t adhere to that; for those, I actually use a term that means the same thing: “RPG”. Which of course really just means role-playing game, but I use that acronym to describe more of what I see in the industry. For example, most people who are building RPGs are building stats and inventory-based management games.’

‘These are where, in order to get through the game, you collect treasure and pump attribute points – you optimise your damage over time, and improve your defensive strengths to succeed at the challenges placed before you. And I think that’s actually considerably different to a true “role-playing game”. I think most people in this business don’t really split hairs like that, but there are actually very few games that could be called “role-playing games”, that focus very much on how well you play that role, or how much they encourage you to live through that role. It’s more about attribute management.’

Birth of the RPG
Reflecting on Garriott’s thoughts about the genre, one has to wonder: If even the arguably most important force in the evolution of CRPGs can’t quite draw a perfect circle around what it is to be a role-playing game, what hope is there for anyone else? In order to explain the different philosophies about RPGs, it might be an idea to return to the source: Dungeons & Dragons. D&D, as it’s more commonly known, is a tabletop role-playing franchise first published by TSR in 1974. The premise was that you’d roll (create) a hero using a statistics sheet, and go out into either pre-written campaigns – offline versions of CRPGs, in other words – or ones developed by your friends on-the-fly. Due to the amount of control players had over the game, it was hugely dynamic and provided a sense of freeform adventure that computer games have yet to replicate. This is the side of D&D that inspired Garriott to create Akalabeth in 1979.

Garriott fondly remembers the beginnings of his empire: ‘When I was writing Akalabeth back in high school in the late ‘70s, there were very few computer stores, and there were very few national distributors. And the state-of-the-art for game packaging at the time was a Ziploc bag, Xerox coversheet and hand-copied discs. I was working in the summer after my senior year in high school at a computer store, and it was actually the owner of the Computerland store where I worked who said, “Look, Richard, the game you’ve made here after school in the evenings at the store is considerably better than the games we’ve got on the wall here; you should sell this.’’

Richard Garriott demanded that the Avatar follow a strict moral code, as well as be a hero.

So, the future Lord British went off to gather the items he thought were needed to ship a successful game: Ziploc bags and Xerox coversheets. He spent $200 – a seriously big deal for a teenage Garriott – to buy them. ‘I hand-printed the discs,’ he remembers, ‘and sold them on the peg-board of the Computerland store. And I think within a week of selling them there, I got a call from one of the only existing Coast to Coast distributors. They said, “Hey, Richard, we’ve got a hold of one of your games; we’d really like to publish it nationally. What do you think?” So I signed a contract with California Pacific, they put it in a bigger Ziploc bag, raised the price from $19.95 to $34.95, and sold 30,000 copies. My royalties were $5 per unit, and if you do the math, that’s $150,000 for my after-school project. What took me six weeks of after-school time ended up making me double my Dad’s government salary as an astronaut. “Clearly,” I thought, “this is a good idea.” So I immediately began working on refining Akalabeth, because, you know, there’s no story in Akalabeth; it’s just walking through dungeons, fighting monsters and collecting treasure. And I knew if I created a game with public consumption in mind, I’d make something much better – that’s how the Ultima series began.’

Garriott more or less fumbled around for the first three Ultima installments, creating great, but undeniably eclectic and unfocused, games. It wasn’t until 1985’s Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar that he really started developing what he now calls ‘role-playing games’; before then, they were plain old RPGs. In Ultima IV, you would succeed based on your adherence to Garriott’s fictional moral code – the TLC system – and breaking those rules (a possibility thanks to Garriott’s pursuit of non-linearity) had dire consequences. Garriott took what he could from D&D – the open storytelling, the world, even a version of the alignment (good/evil) system – and forged an infinitely popular and influential RPG series.