When other platforms came out, I would make my own judgment as to whether I thought they’d eventually supersede or do less well than Apple’s. The first machine I was particularly enamored with was the Apple II, and so, most of the early Ultimas were developed on the Apple II. There are very important lessons that come out of the lows. Garriott: We talked about highs and lows. You almost went out of business before publishing Ultima V. GamesBeat: Your book had some details that we didn’t always know. Solving that problem - making universal languages that both create a sense of mystery and depth in the game world but don’t increase the difficulty for anyone to understand - has been one of my pet projects. Something that’s easy for an American becomes doubly difficult for anyone else. You first have to convert it from runic into English characters to get an English word, then translate that word into whatever your domestic language is. For example, runic is great if you speak English, but it’s terrible if you speak Japanese. But I kept that - to where I have research projects going on to this day about symbolic languages, phonetic languages, and other structures that try to improve how to present languages in a game context. I went back to the same source Tolkien did, the druidic runes, to create a slight variation of my own for Ultima. To me, that was a great revelation, to realize that this wasn’t just made up. It’s real words that are in fact quite easy to read because it’s made in this runic language that’s an easy letter for letter cipher into English. You may have had a moment like I did, when you saw the map with the strange writing on it, and then, you move on, and only after a chapter or two of the book, you realize that that writing isn’t just a scribble. Garriott: If you look at the cloth maps that the Ultimas are well known to have included as one of these anchor pieces you’d get in the box - I presume most of you have read The Hobbit. This is something you’ve done in your games as well. GamesBeat: In your book, Tolkien provided you with a very inspirational quotation, about how he felt as if he created languages for his world and then the stories came from that process. By researching deeply the worlds that we’re crafting, it creates meaning and context and depth within the stories we eventually layer on top of that. I read English translations of Kalevala, the Finnish oral histories that inspired a lot of his unfinished tales and the pieces built on top of that. The layers upon layers of reality crafting he had done for the world before he even unleashed his characters into the world - I was constantly impressed with that.Īfter reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, I went back and read all his unfinished work. What I mean when I say that - as soon as I started reading Tolkien, I personally came to the belief that his understanding of the world in which his characters were living was not just deep but astoundingly deep. In my best imagination of myself, I think of myself as a Tolkien-style game designer. Garriott: That’s definitely a foundation. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. GamesBeat: As far as inspiration goes, it seems like your main inspiration was J.R.R.
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