#257 Richard Garriott (Video Games and Space Exploration)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6262804815ebc051

It was almost three o'clock in the morning when the sound of a glass door being smashed woke me up.
I was alone in my house.
A few seconds later
I heard someone walking on the broken glass.
The stranger
Had come back.
Hours earlier, my house had been filled with friends who'd come to watch huge fragments.
of the comet Shoemaker Levy Nine crashing into Jupiter.
The first time in history it was possible to watch an extraterrestrial collision in our solar system.
I'd built this house on the highest point in Austin just for nights like this.
And its centerpiece is a large telescope.
When my friends arrived early in the evening
I had opened the security gates in the front of the house and turned off the exterior lighting so it would not interfere with our observation.
The spectacle lasted only a few hours, and by ten o'clock my guests were gone.
When the doorbell rang just after midnight.
I didn't think too much about it.
Guessing that someone had just left something behind.
I had forgotten
To close the front gate.
I went to a window.
Standing at the front door.
shifting nervously from side to side, with his hands jammed into the pockets.
Was a stranger.
He was wearing a baseball hat.
The hat was pulled down over his eyes.
I didn't answer the door.
Instead, I stood there watching him.
To see what he was going to do.
I stood at the window for about a half an hour.
Occasionally he would walk around the side of the house and
And I move from window to window to follow him.
He didn't leave.
I couldn't figure out what he was doing.
Then it occurred to me.
That he was waiting for me to get home.
I began wondering how I could encourage him to leave
Without letting him know
That I was home.
The front gate could be opened remotely.
So I closed it.
And as I'd hope.
He looked around.
Surprised.
Watching the gate slowly shut.
He must have realized that he was on the wrong side of the perimeter because he hopped over the fence and disappeared into the darkness.
I watched for several more minutes to see if he'd come back.
Weird, I thought.
But when he didn't return after thirty more minutes, I went back to bed.
Three hours later.
Само грол и ларж рок.
Through my rear glass doors.
It was the stranger.
I realized that he must have been standing in the darkness for hours, just watching my house and waiting.
I rushed to the window and looked down to see him cautiously entering my house.
If this was simply a robbery
He probably waited and watched until he was certain that no one was home.
So if I banged on the window above him, I thought
He would realize somebody was in the house and probably take off.
I started banging on the window.
And I was so agitated that my fist
Went right through the glass.
The window shattered.
The intruder stopped.
And looked up at me.
For a few seconds.
We stood like that.
Just glaring at each other.
Then I said to him in a clear and loud voice,
Get the fuck out of my house.
He stood perfectly still
For a few more seconds.
And then he walked into the house.
I called nine one one.
The dispatcher told me the officers would be there in fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes.
It would take the intruder only a few minutes to find his way to my bedroom.
My gun safe.
Had about a dozen weapons in it.
But I had those guns for the same reason I had crossbows, battle axes, bows and arrows.
Even a working canon.
They're all part of the pantheon of collectible history for me.
Knowing about them.
It's essential.
For creating games.
Until that moment
I had never even considered the possibility that I might actually have to use one of those guns.
To protect myself.
I picked up an Uzi.
I pulled back the slide and snapped the clip into place.
I could hear him moving around downstairs.
Talking to someone.
I hadn't seen another person.
I still had the police dispatcher on the phone.
He's talking to someone, I whispered.
Then I asked, what do I do in this situation?
The dispatcher answered matter of factly.

If you feel threatened inside your own home by an intruder,
You shoot him.
It was as if one of my stories was coming to life and
In my life.
A few seconds later I heard footsteps crunching on the broken glass directly below me.
Then the intruder started walking up the stairs.
He moves slowly.
And didn't look up at me for the first few steps.
Finally he paused.
And for the first time he saw the oozy.
Pointing at his head.
I warned him.
Stop right there.
Or I'll shoot.
He stopped.
We stood there.
Six feet apart.
Staring at each other.
I held the gun steady.
At that distance.
I would not miss
Then he turned and started walking back down the stairs.
I remember thinking I don't want to kill this person.
But it would be dangerous to let him walk away thinking I wouldn't fire my weapon.
That would be an invitation to return.
So I aim the gun just a few inches to the side.
And fired.
He didn't even flinch.
He just continued walking.
His back to me.
I lost sight of him.
But I could hear him walking around.
Once again talking to someone.
I stood there.
Frozen in place.
The police finally arrived.
They found him in a guest bedroom.
Sitting nearly naked on the edge of a bed.
Nothing about the entire incident seemed to affect him.
He was alone.
The officers began questioning him.
It immediately became clear that he was very troubled.
His name was Daniel Dukes.
and he told them that he had seen a hologram over my house
Of me.
beckoning him there to receive the reward he'd earn
For completing his quest.
The police placed him under arrest. His parents told law enforcement that he had suffered from a mental disorder for a long time and that they had given up on him.
The police detained him as long as legally possible.
And then they released him.
The police arrested him several more times the following year and let me know every time
But eventually he seemed to have drifted away.
Several years later.
His obituary appeared in the newspaper.
Daniel Dukes had died at SeaWorld.
Initially, authorities believed that he had jumped into the killer whale tank.
And had been bitten.
But they found his camera and the undeveloped photographs told a different story.
He had been hiding in the bushes for several days before jumping into the tank taking photographs of women's back sights.
He had died.
From hypothermia.
He had not been bitten.
The fact that he was found on the back of the whale led the authorities to speculate that the whale had recognized him as an air breather and
and might have been trying to save him.
And that
Is how I learned to tell a story.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Explore Create, My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark.
And it was written by Richard Garriott.
So I found this book because I saw somebody post something like
Hey, more people should build unique and bizarre and like creative homes. They all of our houses don't have to look the same. And then they link to a video.
about this guy, which is Richard Garriott, I I've found out
Um and this bizarr house
that he built in Austin, Texas. It's on the the
the highest point in Austin, Texas. It's got his own
Like high powered telescope and observatory. It's got dungeons, secret passageways, a collection of all these medieval weapons and science fiction memorabilia.
I've never seen anything like it. And in the first few minutes of the video
He gives an overview of his career.
And starting in the seventies, he was one of the first successful
Computer game designers.
And so some of my favorite books that I've read for the podcast
or autobiographies or biographies on video game designers
Uh the one that comes to mind or the two that come to mind.
Is episode one ninety five.
uh Sid Meyer, who was also making games around the same time that Richard Garrett was, and then episode number twenty one, Masters of Doom.
Which is actually the generation a few years after
Sid and Richard. And so as I was watching the video, I was like, Okay, this guy thinks very differently than the average person. Let me go see if I can find a biography on him.
I found this autobiography and it turns out people like Ernest Klein
Uh which wrote Ready Player One.
uh Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak have actually read this book and they're all they've all blurbed about it in the book. And so I want to jump right into the introduction and as we'll see, he has a mindset that's very that we that you and I have d have talked about over and over again on this podcast, that the idea that the world is very malleable and that you can actually change the world around you.
And so he starts off, explore and create. Why is the name why is the book called that? So creation, you think of all the things that he made.
Most of the highlights I'm gonna focus on is how he built like he was at the very beginning of an industry, how he built his company. Half the book is about his exploration, the fact that he went to space, the fact that he's been
uh to the bottom of the ocean, he explored the Titanic.
He explored the Amazon River in South America.
He's gone hunting for meteorites in Antarctica.
And so what was interesting is he starts the book saying these are all it's the same exact that impulse. Like in the video, he says, Listen, the homes I build
They're very much manifestations of the same creative drive that goes into the games I produce.
And it's obvious when you read the book that oh the same creative drive that he has to explore the world around him and have uh ex and have all these uh unusual experiences, he applied to building
uh the video game companies that he n that made him very wealthy.
So it says explore and create. These words are inextricable from each other.
They feed each other.
We are fortunate to live in such a remarkable era for exploration and creation.
I often reflect on my own luck.
I was lucky to be born at the dawn of personal computers.
I was lucky to be the son of a scientist and an explorer.
My father was a NASA astronaut.
I was lucky to learn early on that a deep understanding of the world around you
Makes you its master. That is the most important sentence to me on this entire page. I want to read it again. I was lucky to learn early on that a deep understanding of the world around you makes it makes you its master. There's two quotes that I think about all the time that jumped into my mind.
when I got to that sentence. And the first is by Mark Andreessen. He's like the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion.
The world will often reconfigure itself around you.
Much more quickly.
Then you think.
I think Richard would agree with that quote. He would also agree with this quote from Steve Jobs Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
And you can change it, you can influence it.
You can build your own things that other people can use.
And that is a mindset that Richard applied not only to build the building of his house, the building of his companies, the building of the games, the the virtual worlds.
In fact, one of the taglines of I think either his first or second company is We Create Worlds.
But also he did all these like extreme in uh like in person live interactive events.
And some of those are actually in the video. I'll link that video in the show notes in case you want to watch it. It's about twenty minutes long.
So let's go back to the book. I do buy into the adage that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past us all the time.
The key is that you must be paying attention to see them. You must be willing to take risks. You must expose yourself to the possibility of massive.
Failure.
Which he does.
He puts everything on the line, wait till we get to that point where his first game company almost fails. And it's it's directly uh traced back to a a decision he made.
And so not only do you have to be willing to take risks, but you have to believe and you must believe in what you're doing so much that you do it anyway.
This attitude has helped me create and build two world impacting industries, computer games and commercial space flight.
And then he continues this line of thought with some ideas that helped him build his career.
The first thing is he thinks about building games just as the same thing as creating art. Interactive stories are where creativity and exploration meet.
It is a new art form.
Once I've had the pleasure of helping shape what's fascinating, so this book I think came out in two thousand seventeen, he starts building
uh computer games in uh the end of the night like the late nineteen seventies.
He ends this book saying, Hey, we're still in the emphasis.
of creating virtual worlds.
of the gaming industry at large.
And one thing that he repeats over and over again in the book is something that helped him create his games is the fact that
He's just spent a lot of time learning broadly.
So this is the first time he mentions it. He mentions it over and over again.
I created some of the first virtual worlds.
I did it with little to go on.
Largely through trial and error.
Like any good artist in any other medium, I became a polymath.
I studied subjects from philosophy and religious history to architecture, languages, physics, and fashion.
And then he tells us what he believes. He believes that games are in fact
The single most important form of media.
Games have become much more than pleasant diversions. They have a huge opportunity to be the media form of the twenty first century.
And then he ends the introduction with
Even the way the book even the way this book is created is different.
You don't have to read it chronologically. I did of course.
But he even says.
You can read this book straight through, but if you prefer to jump around to follow your own passionate interests, I encourage you to do so.
I hope by exploring the pages that follow and taking on the challenges I offer within them,
thinking about what you would do in many of these same situations, you will feel as though you have embarked
on your own adventure.
And so Richard, like every person that we study
has like this deep base of historical knowledge. He's very curious about the achievements of people that live long
Uh before he did.
And he talks about like these people are my heroes. He's gonna mention somebody that has had a huge influence on my life as well. So he says, My heroes are people who took epic journeys into the unknown.
Often at substantial personal risk.
I am simply following
The path that they carved into history.
That is fantastic.
And so he's gonna mention Shackleton. I fancy I fancy myself an admirer
of men like Polar Explorer.
Ernest Shackleton.
So I read the most famous book on Shackleton.
Uh back on it was like almost two years ago, it was episode number one forty four. The book is called Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.
And I actually have another biography of Shackleton. Check this out. So
Very soon there'll be two books coming.
This guy named Ranouf, I think it's Ranouf Finus or something like that. Finanis. I don't know how to pronounce his name, but he's a explorer. He wrote this autobiography that has maybe the best title for an autobiography that I've ever heard.
And he titled it Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.
So in addition to being an explorer he also is like a prolific writer and he wrote a biography on Shackleton.
And so I have both those books, I'll eventually read them and then I'll of course make uh podcasts on them.
And so I've told you this before, but I see Shackleton's face like uh several times every day because every time I pick up my phone, he's my lock screen. And it's not like
You can get some um in fact the the
I've seen covers of books with like Shackleton with like, you know, clean shaven, looks, you know, like he's well rested. No no no. This is Shackleton mid expedition beard with
Ice and snow and encrusted in it looks like he's on the borderline of death.
And I wanted to put it on the lock screen of my phone because of his
Family motto.
By endurance we conquer. So every time I pick up my phone.
I glance, I see Shackleton, and I'm reminded I'm and I'm reminded.
Don't even think.
For a second.
that you're gonna give up. Quitting is not an option and you can just win.
By just endure he says by endurance we conquer.
And I like to repeat that to myself and really think about it. I mean if you really think about what he think.
That is an entire story.
Told in four words.
So anyway, Shackleton is hugely influential. He pops up in these books over and over again. So if you haven't read that book or haven't listened to that podcast, I highly recommend
I think your life would be better knowing
Shackleton in his story than than not knowing it. Let's go to where he's a teenager
He's gonna start his first he's gonna sell his first game when he's still a
Senior in high school.
And so the prehistory to him starting his own game is playing other games and before computer games, he was obsessed with tabletop games.
the most important tabletop game that he ever played.
was Dungeon and Dragons.
And he's gonna describe like the influence at D D
uh has on him building
uh his games, but really I think about like you can think about D and D as a metaphor for building a company. And this idea if we w if we want to continue this metaphor, this gonna uh continue over the next two pages.
And just a few paragraphs for you. Here's an example. D and D is a role playing game.
An interactive story that is negotiated between the narrator
The dungeon master and the participants are players. So remember, we're not we're not reading this to think of like what DD is or the idea of playing games. We're using this as a metaphor for what it's like to build a company. The dungeon master or founder or game master creates the elaborate fantasy and the people playing with him
or her take the roles of specific characters in that story.
interacting with the other players to solve problems and to move the adventure forward.
And so I got to that paragraph and I re reread that the last part of the last sentence again.
Interact interacting with the other players to solve problems.
and move the adventure forward. And that's exactly I think that's one of the best metaphors for building a company. Made me think of
The way that if you're go like so if I could bring back
one person, one great entrepreneur from history from the dead. And I can only choose one. And I can't s you know, obviously I think the obvious example
is Steve Jobs. So we're we're gonna say, hey, you can't pick Steve Jobs in that case. My number one pick is Edwin Land.
And you probably already picked up on that because I've done what, four podcasts of on'em. I've read five books on'em. I'm about to reread that book, insisting on the impossible, hopefully in the next few weeks to make another podcast on it.
But that's the way he talked about in multiple um cases where he's like you know, he he ran he built Polaroid, he ran Polaroid for
uh he his tenure at the at the head of his company was longer than almost any other
Founder Executive in American history.
It was like fifty years or I ca like he started when he was a
think what, eighteen, nineteen?
And it g got kicked out, unfortunately, when he was like what, seventy, something like that. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but it was an extremely decade after decade after decade of building the same company, which is really fascinating.
But he would always say he's like, This is like uh I feel like I'm leading my
Uh like I'm running the company like I'm leading students on this grand scientific experiment. But
Toward the end.
uh of the book uh a triumph of genius, which I covered all the way back on founders number one thirty four. He gives Edwin Lin gives us six acceptance speech.
And he uses that opportunity to encourage you to continue the sense of adventure and exploration.
That your descendants had.
And so I wanna read this. This is a this is only a few sentences, but this is land. This is a direct quote
from Edwin Lance.
Lan chose to pay tribute to the process of invention by analogy to the basic American sense
of adventure and exploration.
And now this is where what this is now land talking. We are becoming a country of scientists. And however much we become a country of scientists, we will always remain first of

Ов адвенчус трансконтинентал експрос.
Pushing our way from wherever it is comfortable.
Into some more inviting
Unknown
And dangerous region.
These regions today
Or not giografic.
They are not the gold mines of the West.
They are the gold mines of the intellect.
And when the great scientists and the innumerable scientists of today respond to that ancient American urge
For adventure.
then the form that adventure takes
is the form of invention
And obviously.
Inventions are usually built around companies, right? Or excuse me, companies are really usually built around inventions. He invented instant photography. That is what Polaroid was built around.
So let's go back to that. So it says uh respond to that ancient American urge for adventure. Then the form that adventure takes is the form of invention.
And when an invention is made by this new tribe of highly literate
Highly scientific people
New things open up.
And then land.
deep historical knowledge, like to think about the base of think about the things that were in that man's head.
And so to me, when I'm reading this last sentence here, he's drawing on everything, not only everything he experienced, but everything that he studied and he knows about human history, and he wraps it up for us here.
Always those scientific adventurers have the characteristic
No matter how much you know.
No matter how educated you are in science.
No matter how imaginative you are.
Of leading you to say
I'll be darned.
Who ever thought
Such a domain.
Existed.
And so what the hell does that have to do with what you and I are talking about?
Because where we are in this book, where we're in the story.
There is no such thing as a computer game.
Right, he he's only thinking I'm obsessed with D, I'm a teenage dungeon master.
And you're gonna see as the story continues.
It's like oh wow. Well okay, not only can I make my own game
Right.
And then he pro he progresses through trial and error and doing that. But then
Uh he's like Oh wait, I can sell?
This thing?
That I was doing for free, that I'm completely obsessed with, that I love so much.
And then by doing that, I can go on my own adventure. I can create my own company.
That is one of the best feelings.
In the world.
So I jumped ahead a little bit, but
I it's just fascinating how all these things like I just love the fact
how all these people in different domains are right in completely different experiences.
They just think
And they arrive, and they're like, Oh, this is truly possible to create something new.
Something that never existed. That is insane to me. So let me go back to the book because I'm getting way ahead of myself and we'll get there in time.
This was before the emergence of computer games. So he's talking about, hey, I'm a teenager, I'm an online or excuse me, I'm a uh a teenage dungeon master in D.
There's gonna be a slight digression here, which is why I started the podcast where I did, because a huge theme of the book is the importance of storytelling. Steve Jobs has told you and I over and over again that storytellers are the most powerful people in the world.
Richard tells us that listen, storytelling is extremely powerful, just like Steve Jobs said, but it also can be learned. You can learn how to do this. I learned that each game was only as good. So again, this this other paragraph here, too, let me tie back to what I started this on. This is really to me a metaphor.
Of building a company.
Well, let me just read it to you and then I'll I'll uh add something onto it. I learned that each game was only as good as the ability of the game master to craft a story and manage the negotiations into a compelling narrative. We all took turns being game master.
And it was quickly obvious that while some people were very good at it.
Most were not.
That is when I began to really understand.
The power of storytelling.
So let me tie what Richard's saying in this book.
There's uh with another book I saw uh an uh an excerpt from I haven't read it yet.
The guy that um worked with Steve and and helped lead uh the development of the iPod, Tony Fidel.
has this new book and I saw this quote from it and it was on
Something that's very unique.
Um, and again it's all gonna be tied to the fact that Steve Jobs knew the power of story and it's on the fact that
The story defines the product, and it's not the other way around.
So I just want to read a few paragraphs from this real quick. Steve was a master at this.
Before he told you what a product did, he always took time to explain why you needed it.
And he made it all look so natural, so easy.
I'd watch other CEOs give pitches before, and they hardly know what their supposedly revolutionary product was.
Sometimes they didn't even know how to hold it right.
But customers and the press would always be in awe of Steve's presentations.
It's a miracle, they would say.
He's so calm, so collected.
No prepared s speeches, slides with almost no words, he just knows what he's talking about, and it all hang together.
It never felt like a speech.
It felt like a conversation.
Like a story.
And so when I got to that part, I'm like, okay, that's th those are three short sentences. It never felt like a speech, it felt like a conversation.
Like a story.
And if you think about it, storytelling
Is as old as language.
So let's go back to this. And the reason is simple.
Steve didn't just read a script for the presentation.
He had been telling a version of that same story
Every single day.
for months and months during development.
To us.
To his employees, to his friends.
To his family.
He was constantly working on it.
Refining it.
Every time he'd get a puzzled look
Or request for clarification from his unwitting early audience.
He would sand it down.
Tweak it slightly.
until it was perfectly polished. And this is the punchline here, and the last I'll read from this.
It was the story of the product.
And it drove
What we built.
So let's go back to exactly what Richard's telling us in the book.
We all took turns being game master, and it was quickly obvious that while some people were very good at it.
Most were not. Is that not exactly what Tony Fidel just explained to you and I?
Most CEOs
Didn't know.
what they were talking about couldn't even hold their product correctly.
Steve not only knew it, but he used that story to drive product development. That's insane. That's an insane thought.
That's why I began to really that's when I began to really understand the power of storytelling.
And so Richard's like okay, I gotta I gotta like how do I get
Better at this.
Uh, I was far from the best storyteller at the D gatherings, and my first stories were not good at all.
Watching other game masters, I knew their narratives were better thought through than mine.
I became a better storyteller by observing the strengths and weaknesses of
Of other game masters.
And so the reason I'm giving this background is because what he says here on the next page playing D
Воз за сід.
That would eventually grow into my elaborate computer games. He is telling us what I'm learning from the this experience.
I will use later for creating games and then I use the creation of games to build the creation of my
business empire, my financial empire, the things that open up and unlock all these other opportunities. You know, he had to pay for a private space flight. I think it was like
twenty million dollars, fifteen million dollars, I can't remember exactly.
That doesn't happen without all the stuff that's happening now as a teenager.
Uh, go back to this. The most people the the more people enjoyed listening to my stories, the more I enjoyed telling them. Every storyteller is familiar with the pleasure that comes from sitting with your friends around a fire.
Pouring a few drinks,
And weaving a yarn.
This is one of my favorite sentences in the book.
This was man's first form of entertainment.
And when done well,
І стіль гіст.
Storytelling. Thing about storytelling is as old as language. Much of my life is about telling stories.
The real ones I've lived and those that I make up.
More than anything else that I am or have accomplished.
I am a storyteller.
Okay, so I want to go back in his life when he's younger, and this is when he first sees he sees his first video game. I'm always amazed.
How much the work that we can do can influence other.
The first video game that he ever played was Pong.
Pong was developed at Atari.
Atari was founded by Nolan Bush now.
Nolan Bush now winds up hiring
A nineteen year old Steve Jobs.
And mentoring it.
And if you ever want to read a book.
A really easy to read book that's written by a crazy character.
That'd be Nolan Bush now, obviously. I did it for uh founders number thirty six. It's finding the next Steve Jobs, how to find, keep, and nurture talent.
Uh Nolan's very unique.
Not only did he found think about it, he found an Atari.
And then he also found a Chuck E Cheese.
And that book starts with Nolan
You know, making his at the time his companies were making hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
And he meets up
He's throwing this huge party in Paris and like a twenty five year old or twenty six year old Steve Jobs uh shows up
And they wind up having the next day they wind up going for a long walk or uh through Paris and they're talking about company building. And so that that discussion that they're having.
uh influenced Nolan to write the book later on. So it's it's very interesting. It's very quick to read too. So the very first video game I played was Pong. I was eleven years old when my friends and I wired the game into the back of our TV and began playing.
It was magical.
This was the simplest computer game imaginable.
But being able to play a game
On the family TV was astonishing.
It was a wholly new form of entertainment. I had no concept whether the technology was simple or complex because it seemed so far beyond my own skills.
The idea that I might create my own games had never occurred to me.
I had never seen a computer of any kind.
And personal computers.
Did not even exist.
But I was intrigued.
And so Richard's entire life changed.
Everything begins. His entire life begins really
With his introduction to the first computer and the way he got access to the computer is wild. Just imagine this taking place today. It would never happen.
The only place that we knew with computers was NASA, and with my father being an astronaut, we had strong connections there.
So we solicited the support of one of the space
Agency's prime contractors.
Lockheed Martin.
They allowed us to use their computer room.
Which is a pretty good indication of how lightly regarded those rudimentary computers were.
Think about it, one of our nation's leading defense індустрій контрактор.
A k NASA partner.
Permitted a group of teenagers.
To play with its computers.
And so I have a ton of highlights on across these next few pages. Really the reason I'm bringing this to your attention because this is what the beginning of an industry feels like.
And since humans will never stop.
creating new industries, it's important to know like what they look like at the very beginning.
When calling it an industry would be ridiculous.
And so on one of these early computers, he sees there's this text based game, right? There's no graphics at this time.
It's called Adventure. So it says Adventure had no graphics, only text, and it forced you to make decisions.
So he gives an example. To the north, you see lights of a town.
To the south, you see a sign that says to the jungeon.
To the d dun to the dungeon.
Which way do you go?
That's all the game did.
Each location had a text blurb.
You're in front of the house.
You see a front door.
You also see a mailbox and a doormat.
What do you do?
By exploring the scene and collecting items, the player was drawn further into the adventure. So these are the exact sign kind of games.
Only with visuals.
Uh, that he's gonna wind up creating a few years later. There was absolutely nothing to look at, but I was mesmerized.
I could visualize everything in my mind.
And so what do you do? Your natural inclination is like I love this game. How do I get new ones? Remember, this is what the beginning of an industry feels feels like.
I found other text games by luck.
There was no place to buy them.
Mostly they were spread virally on the snow on the so called sneaker net.
Which meant that somebody copied a game from one computer on a disc
and loaded it onto another computer.
Copies of games were passed hand to hand.
So these games start travelling by word of mouth.
They start build the building up this like strong, passionate user base. And so computer stores are like, Hey, we should start sell selling them. And this is how they sold them.
Computer games began to hang games in plastic ziploc bags.
On a pegboard.
The creators of the games
Did not consider it a business.
When I began making my own games, there was no economic incentive.
It never occurred to me that this could be a career.
And this is when all the the time and effort he put into learning and uh Dungeon and Dragons and being a like learning storytelling real storytelling really comes in hands. I learned how to play Dungeon and Dragons and I began writing small pieces of software.
And suddenly it occurred to me that I could combine the two.
And so he's astonished, he's really enthusiastic.
He needs access to a computer more reliable than than going to Lockheed Martin. So his high school
There's a computer that pops up at his high school one day and he does something that's really, really smart. I discovered another computer at my high school. They seem to have just appeared one day.
But they beckoned to me.
I convinced the teaching staff to let me have access to them for one period each day. I would work on my project
Which was my games.
And they would monitor my progress and give me whatever grade they saw fit.
They agreed that we could use this quote unquote class in which I taught myself computer basic.
To fulfill my foreign language requirement.
And so then he goes into how he learned to do this. Before I before I leave this page though.
What what what popped into my mind is I'm reading about the very early like bare there's barely uh an industry here for computer games. They're selling maybe a few on a pegboard and a plastic bag, right?
It made me think of like
How crazy it was when I've read I don't know how many books on Henry Ford.
And so it's crazy is when you learn about the arc of Henry Ford's career in life.
In about a twenty year span, Henry Ford goes from working on an early
uh internal combustion engine in his kitchen.
Two
Winding up being
The the owning
w the most well may might have been at the time the most valuable
private company owned by one person when he buys out the Dodge brothers and the rest of his investors. I think this is if my memory serves me correct, it was around nineteen nineteen that he owned a hundred he wound up getting back a hundred percent and owning one hundred percent of the Ford Motor Company. And I think at that point,
uh in nineteen nineteen dollars.
Uh it w his net worth was like five hundred million dollars. The company was worth five hundred million dollars in nineteen nineteen dollars.
And the reason that's important to know is because you go back, you you know, go back in history twenty years
He's like like you're looking y imagine like you could
have like a bird's eye view, you're looking at a y young Henry Ford.
You know, I think he's in his thirties, maybe like thirty five, something like that.
And he's working on this.
This s smelly, leaky
P like primitive engine.
And like hey, that guy right there that we're looking at twenty years from now is gonna own maybe the most private
uh most valuable private company in the world.
It's hard not to be awstruck at how much can change.
in one lifetime. So he goes into okay, this is what's learning to program
Like imagine trying to learn how to pro make a computer program.
A game.
In the late
Nineteen seventies. This is what it was like. I learned through trial and error and mostly error.
At the time there was no computer industry. There was no standards.
A few magazines published programs people had written for specific computers they were using, and it'd be like a twenty line program that would add numbers or balance a checkbook.
So I knew I could program a computer to do complex equations. The more important question was to me was whether I could create entirely new worlds.
My real objective was crafting a role playing game.
I wrote twenty eight programs on that teletype.
I know there were exactly twenty eight programs because I named them D one.
D two
And so on until I reach my twenty eighth attempt.
Many of them were never finished.
I get halfway through a game and would have learned so much about the process that I would decide to start over.
This time utilizing my newly obtained skills to create an even better structure.
By the time I was making D twenty eight.
I was working at Computer Land.
So this is some of the stuff that that uh the computers like some of the s computers that were for sale.
In nineteen seventy nine, we sold the Commodore sixty four and the Apple two.
And the hand and he says the seemingly handmade computer called the Soul Twenty.
These machines sold as much as three for as much as three thousand dollars. They had considerably less computing power than a drugstore cell phone has today.
And in limited amount of available software and the limited amount of available software was terrible.
So he's working at a computer store, he's still making games.
And the fact that they have now he has access to Apple too, he's like, Oh, uh we up until this point, he was the only one playing his games. And now other people, neither the might have been his co workers and then his boss.
are gonna start playing playing as games. The real benefit of working at Computer Land was that I had access to an Apple II and I was able to write my games on it. This meant for the first time that other people could play my games.
They enjoyed them.
The owner of the store told me one day, Richard, the game that you've created that we're all playing is obviously a more compelling reason to have one of these machines than anything else that's out there.
We really need to be selling this on the store wall.
Selling.
Wow, that's an interesting idea.
The first game I made for Apple Two

Al Kabeth.
Alkalabeth.
I had borrowed the name from a token story.
Which is by four the longest.
Мост комплекс
And most difficult book I have ever read.
I was enraptured.
JRR Tolkien had changed my life in that video I referenced earlier. Not only does he have like first editions of a bunch of Tolkien's uh novels,
But he has like pre like pre editions, editions that were sent to the to his editor.
And so once he completes the game
He spent an in what he thought at the time was an insane amount of money.
Like making copies and saying, Hey, I'm gonna try to sell this thing.
The game was so personal and our expectations were so small that I included my home address and phone number and asked players to call me when they finished the game.
It cost my entire life savings.
Two hundred dollars.
To produce copies of it.
So we buy Ziploc bags to put the game in.
And his mom is the one that actually draws the cover art for the game.
And this is just an amazing paragraph. I love what he's about to say here. This was a state of the art operation then.
We hung them up in the store.
And in the first week sold about twelve copies at twenty bucks each.
I would estimate that at the time
There were probably fewer than a couple of dozen people anywhere in the world.
Creating computer games.
And now one of us
Could have imagined we were creating an industry.
That in less than three decades would become the largest
And most successful entertainment industry in history.
That a game.
Would gross more in a few weeks.
Ти на мост суці свові ін хістрі.
Had earned in
Decades.
That's an incredible thought, an incredible paragraph. Gets even crazier here. This is his first game. He's about to make a hundred and fifty grand.
As a
High school senior in the seventies.
Within weeks the game was being published within weeks of the game being published, I got a call from California Pacific Computer Company.
I knew who they were.
They had published games by Bill Budge, a gaming pioneer whom I had greatly admired.
They told me that they want to distribute the game n nationally.
We need you to come out to California right away.
I was flabbergasted. I was eighteen years old.
When I arrived
I was met at the airport.
Uh by a guy in a new DeLorean.
Rather than driving me to the Pacific
California Pacific office, we went directly to an apartment near the airport. Uh oh.
It belonged to a friend.
Of the California California Pacific owner.
In the living room.
There was a chest of drawers.
This so called friend opened up the top drawer.
And I was stunned.

With plastic wrapped
Bricks of cocaine.
Welcome to the video game industry.
And so that's something he talks about quite a bit in the book.
The fact that a lot of these people that owned these like very primitive game publishing, like some of the first game publishing companies in the world.
A lot of them were doing Coke.
Lot of'em were uh on all kinds of drugs.
Uh they were drinking.
And a lot of them just they they're like fly by not operate uh fly by night operations, they pop up.
they distribute games, make some money, that would go up their nose and then they disappear.
And so he's gonna have a bunch of bad experiences uh with with uh game publishers that is going to lead him to say, Hey, forget it, I'll just do this myself, but we're not there yet. So this is him making money doing something that he used to do for free.
California Pacific's version of the game was priced at thirty four dollars, of which I received five dollars.
They sold thirty thousand copies.
I had earned a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, more than twice my father's yearly salary as an astronaut.
How crazy is that statement?
He's eighteen selling games. He's making twice what a NASA astronaut makes. It was a phenomenal amount of money.
Enough to buy a house.
It was so much money that it didn't that it didn't even really sink in.
It all seemed like some kind of fantasy.
We all thought it was a fluke.
It was great that someone wanted to pay me.
For doing it.
What I was already doing.
So he starts working on his next game. This next game he doesn't know at this point in his life.
It's gonna he w I went updating the series called Ultima. I think he said for like twenty five or thirty years. It's going to make him
Wealthy.
And we see a really important point that pops up over and over again is the fact that you really need to hold on so that future c technology can unlock
More powerful capabilities.
So it I had a weird thought when I got to this point because he's like, Okay, well my g my game was really basic.
Now we're fast forwarding a few years.
uh the computer industry's growing it's uh like the the computers get more keep getting more and more capabilities, they have more and more storage.
And so therefore I can actually build more and more complex games.
I actually thought of uh Samsamur.
Or more specifically the book The Fish Ate the Whale, the one I just re read on for episode two fifty five.
'Cause if you think about that, before the steam ship
You could sell a banana, like the the the market for your bananas.
Was essentially your neighborhood.
And after this invention of a new technology, it unlocks.
Then you can sell a banana.
All over
North and South America.
You can combine the banana, this new technology of Steam ship, and then two or three very formidable founders like Andrew Preston and Minor Keith.
And the combination of those events wind up creating one of the world's first truly
Global corporations.
And I hear myself saying this and it sounds fake. It sounds like that that that can't possibly be true.
But it was.
And so we see the same a very similar thing here. He's like, Okay, now I can start building
way more complex games. I wanted to put more m more meat on my games bones. And advances in technology made it possible.
Ultima.
was going to be my first virtual world.
It took about nine months of concerted effort to create
And uh and the available memory
Increase from forty eight K
of RAM to sixty four K.
Why why is that important? That meant I could add a series of activities
And previously
you were incapable of doing so. And then so that again, I think that's a main
uh theme in the history of entrepreneurship hold on so future con tech technology can unlock
more powerful capabilities and more opportunities that you cannot do yet.
But we'll be able to do five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years in the future.
So eventually the company that signs him is gonna go under
uh because of all the drug use and they wind up uh essentially instead of reinvesting in the company, they're just taking all that money
But really what set Richard apart was everybody else
Um and I saw this in the Sid Meyer game as well.
The publishers are really they were not really interested in being creative.
Uh they really just wanted the the game creators to, hey
This thing that you made successful, just make another one. Like you don't like let's not innovate, let's just keep making sequels and let's just stick with what is working.
And Richard did not want to do that. He says my desire was to make the world of my games as real as possible.
Like Tolkien and C S Lewis.
To do that I wanted to design the player's experience
From his or her first encounter with the game.
The moment they looked
At the box.
Except there was no box. Remember, we're in the malleable early days of an industry.
They're selling them in Ziploc bags with like this little paper, black and white paper.
With some you know basic
Artwork.
and h the name of the game and who wrote it and and his home address and his phone number, right?
So he says in addition to putting the game in the box, I wanted to include a detailed map of the world, of this ver fantasy virtual world that he's making.
I wanted instruction manuals that did not give directions like insert the disc into drive one and press the A button.
But rather describe the magical history of the world.
I had this great dream.
Meanwhile the publishers just wanted to put it in a plastic bag
And hang it on a hook.
So he goes to a couple of different publishers and he's like, you know what, forget this, I'm gonna do it myself. By then I knew enough about the computer game industry to understand that it wasn't actually an industry.
It was an association of companies run by people who had no more experience than I did, and who popped up.
Publish a few games and then disappeared.
So my brother Robert and I decided to start our own company.
We named our company Origin Systems. He's eventually going to sell this company to Electronic Arts.
Uh Robert created the tagline by which the company became known.
We create
Worlds.
And the headquarters for Origin Systems.
is their parents house. So since the company was based in my parents' house, everything about it was informal.
One night, for example, we were sitting in our office, which was actually my mother's kitchen table, when a car stopped in front of the house and s and a strange man got out.
He appeared oddly disheveled with long hair and a long beard.
My name is doctor Kat.
I read your ad.
I'm here to work.
I'm a programmer.
That's great, we replied. We need a programmer right now.
He was Origin's first outside employee.
And he worked for us for fifty years.
So now he has to try to make the transition from I'm just making games to I'm building a company. So he's gotta learn how to build a company and that is
He does that the same way that
He learned how to program games through trial and error.
Far more quickly than anyone imagined, computer gaming became a huge business. And for me, there was a steep learning curve from creator and designer to businessman.
And so his brother has an MBA
And he's like, Listen, your your work habits suck.
And the reason that's important is because they said the leaders' habits become everyone's habits. So he's like can you c stick to like some kind of schedule?
And Richard being young.
And not realizing that, like he's like, Well, I don't know why I have to do that.
Uh it seems to be working out. So there's just gonna be a lot of conflict.
uh between brothers.
And it has to happen that way. I mean, I I don't know of a single co founder relationship that is that is smooth.
Like there's going to be arguments. Like you have a lot of
Now your time and your energy is invested in your business, your emotions are invested in your business, your finances are invested in your business, it's impossible to think there's gonna be no conflict. My brother was always hypercritical of me from being the person to uh being the last person to arrive at the office and often the first to leave. If you asked him to describe my work habits for the first five or ten years that we work together, he would say something like
Richard would roll into the office around noon
or or sometime between noon and two in the afternoon. He'd play around in his office with his rubber band gun and code and then do coding experiments in his mind that had little to do with actually making a game.
Uh, Richard we might create some code or something else for a few hours.
Then come dark, he'd leave, and we wouldn't see him again until the next day.
And so Richard says in my defense I was living an unstructured life
That that was working very well for me. This was my most productive time creatively and economically, so I didn't understand why he needed to change. He is going to eventually change and like have some s some semblance of a schedule. I felt like I was clearly doing enough to create the next best selling game because money was rolling in.
I might have been sitting in my office discussing philosophy with other developers or reading a book about ancient languages, but I believe those little experiments were essential to my creative process.
And so there's a lot of tension, but that tension actually is is beneficial for the company. Robert and I are very different people.
But there's simply no way that Origin would have gone forward without both our unique contributions. We argued often
And we argued passionately.
Both of us were incredibly confident in our beliefs about the right way to proceed to build our company.
And they wind up getting into a physical fight.
Over a pencil.
says neither one of us remembers the s the specific issue that led to this fight, but somehow it came down to the ownership of a number t number two pencil. I started to leave Robert's office with the pencil.
He told me to leave it there because it was his office and therefore his pencil.
I insisted on taking this sound so immature, looking back.
But again, I think it's just it's obviously there is tension building up, you need some kind of release, and the pencil's just the way like the valve that they're gonna use here.
I insisted on taking it with me because I felt it was my pencil. We started shouting at each other, and the argument quickly escalated into a shoving match.
All of our frustration suddenly burst. And the next thing I knew, we were literally wrestling in the office.
And the benefit is this, he says we never had a serious fight again. So the it had to happen. And then they buried the hatchet. This is where Richard almost destroys the entire company and like
Think about a fast in the early days of a fast changing industry, one decision can uh uh one bad decision, one catastrophic condition
Uh decision.
can tank the entire company.
Uh, so at the time they're just making games for Apple because Apple too is dominating. But
And he's like, Oh, a if Apple do if Apple the Apple two's dominating now
It's obviously gonna keep dominating and didn't realize how fast IBM is gonna take market share. Apple had always been our lead market for sales.
So we wrote codes for the Apple.
I saw no reason to change strategies for the latest platform that had been introduced, which is the IBM PC.
As far as I was concerned, there was no comparison between the Apple two and the IBM C P C.
I concluded that the IBM PC would never pose a threat to Apple's dominance of the market.
I was supremely confident.
It would never compete with Apple.
So we continue developing our products for the Apple two, knowing that we could translate them later on to the P C P C and this is his main
like the lesson that he took away from this almost destroying his company.
It would have been almost impossible for me to be more wrong.
That was one of my first big lessons.
And it is this.
What I think is not necessarily right.
And perhaps
Not what everyone else thinks. So he's saying Apple's gonna dominate.
Everyone else says nope, I'm between I'm gonna choose between Apple and I B and the IB and P C. I'm choosing IBM P C.
In less than six months, the IBM PC became a the dominant machine in the market.
Everything else, including the Apple Two.
was suddenly irrelevant.
So due to my mistake.
Our company was caught developing products for a market.
That was rapidly disappearing.
This means we would have to start from scratch without any employees who knew how to program on the IBM PC.
We would have to retrain our existing staff or hire new people.
And so we also see, okay, what do we do here?
And he's gonna make the decision. He's like, I'm not gonna close down the company, I'm going all in.
When you make a mistake like this, you can either take your loss or double down.
Robert and I discussed closing the company and walking away with the several million dollars that we had in our personal bank accounts.
The alternative was to reinvest everything the company had.
Everything the company was projected to earn.
And everything that Robert and I could borrow personally.
The logical decision
was to close the company.
Robert and I
Decided to go all in.
And co sign
million dollar loans.
If we failed.
Not only would I lose the house, my house.
But my brother and I would lose the company.
and be millions of dollars in debt.
But we bet on our capabilities.
The race was on to get my next ultimate game out.
with the acceptable quality
Before we ran out of cash.
Okay, so I'm gonna pause before I continue the story. Think about what's happening here.
He made a catastrophic decision.
He had previous up until this point.
Had a company, everything was going well, his games are successful, he's building out the ultimate series. Him and his brother both are making millions and millions of dollars doing something they love.
And now suddenly he finds in a position where he's staring at the bankruptcy of not only personal bankruptcy, but the d the destruction of his company.
And everything rests on can we get this game out?
Uh on time and in the highest possible quality.
If we do so, we have a successful company. If we don't, we have utter
Failure.
And so the note I left myself on this page when I got to this point.
It says Dune.
Вот із і на бокс.
And so that is from this movie that just came out Dune. I've seen it three times.
Visually the movie is absolutely spectacular.
I actually had to watch it again because uh I haven't read the books yet.
And my friend that has, I had to ask, like, hey, can you fill in what is going on here?
But there's a scene in the movie.
That is exactly what is taking place in this book.
So the main character of Dune is this young
Young man, young boy.
And so I took notes on the movie.
'cause it made me think of what's happening in the book. So I wanna read that part from Dune first.
And I think they add great context to what
Robert.
and Richard are about to have to endure.
So one of the most powerful characters in this world is this little lady.
So it says uh the old lady these are my notes, the old lady makes the young boy put his hand in a box and then says
I hold at your neck.
A poison needle.
Instant
Yeah.
The test is simple.
Remove your hand from the box.
And you die.
The boy asks.
What's in the box?
Paint.
One of the best maxims you will find in the history of entrepreneurship comes from the founder of Four Seasons when he said.
Excellence is the capacity to take pain.
If Richard and Robert are going to get to the other side of what's happening in their lives right now,
They are going to have to endure pain.
The test is simple. Remove your hand from the box, meaning quit.
And you die.
Every month Robert and I would sit down and look at the numbers compared to our progress, and every month the situation looked more ominous.
In family lore
We refer to this
As the year of Richard's fetal position.
When we reviewed the financials, I found it so difficult to listen.
That I would sit in a chair in a corner.
In the fetal position.
With my legs curled up under me.
After all the success that we had enjoyed, it was extraordinarily difficult.
To deal with the possibility of failure.
Especially given that my mistake.
Had brought it on.
I barely slept.
And when I did sleep.
the nightmarish scenario of what I could have, should have done
played over and over in my mind.
Desperation
can be an extremely productive motivator.
We had only enough money to keep the doors open and
to the original ship date.
If this game
Wasn't published.
On time.
And with the highest possible quality
We were through.
We worked every

For months.
Ва та сам там
Resisting the urge to
To cut quality.
Just to get it.
Gone.
As a result.
This is our cleanest execution of a game.
Somehow.
We manage
To ship it.
On time.
I managed to unfied my self.
We had been saved.
He kept his hand in the box.
So the book goes into a lot of detail about how he makes like what all the preparation he does and all the learning he has to do to actually be able to create a world and to make it feel
Authentic and detail oriented.
And so if you find this podcast interesting, I obviously highly recommend
uh you pick up the book and read it to get all the detail. But there is just one thing I wanna pull out.
And it's when Richard's working on this problem of how to create a language from scratch. And I had a bizarre
Thought.
uh when I read this paragraph. I'm gonna read the paragraph to you first.
Then I'm gonna read the note I left myself. And I actually read the note.
So obviously, uh when I go through the book, I I make all the notes and highlights and then before the usually the night before I record I go back through
And I reread over all of them and and really like try to absorb and make sure I understand it before I sit down and talk to you.
And I got to this note, I'm like, Oh, this is my favorite note in the entire book. I didn't remember writing it.
And so again, I just when I'm reading I I just go on pure instinct. It's just like okay, this is interesting to me, let me highlight it and then what is the first thing that pops to mind? Like don't put too much thought into it. Just like what is your natural
Like what is the
Your first
Reaction.
And so hopefully this uh this makes sense to you.
So this is what Richard wrote.
I spent a lot of time working on this problem. So crafting languages, right? Crafting believable languages and scripts is essential to creating any realistic fantasy world.
Since language and writing
І за фаучів соціально.
Talk.
The greatest реаліті красков.
Once said
Та гісторіс
grew out of the languages. So this is what popped to my mind when I got to this section. You can think
Of the belief system of the founder.
As the language of the company.
That is why it is usually written down
And repeated.
Over and over again.
The belief system of the founder.
is the language of the company.
So now he fast forward into his career where he's realizing, hey, up until this point I've been really imitating.
And now it's time for me to actually create something unique. This is one of the most important things that I've learned from any book.
Uh I you know, what are we at? Two hundred sixty five, I think, something like that. The imitation precedes creation.
I wish like that's such a great maxim. I wish I could say I came up with it. It's not. It was written in Stephen King's autobiography, which I covered on Founders two ten.
Imitation precedes creation. There's so many people's like, I don't know where to start.
Doesn't matter. No one knows where to start.
Do what everybody else does. You imitate.
And then you'll imitate long enough and be like, Hey, well, I have an I my own idea. Then you'll start slowly mixing in your own insights into what you're imitating.
And then you'll keep going down this path, and eventually that is where your creation will come from, something unique. Imitation precedes creation.
Coming from somebody that sold three hundred and fifty million books. It's wild. Five years into a very successful career, I had an important decision to make. My other games had borrowed liberally from existing fantasy stories.
None of them were particularly original. Think about crazy this is, right?
Up until this point.
He's just taking things that he read.
uh games that he played, experiences he had beforehand, applying that to a new art form, new like medium, which in his case is the computer programs, right?
And even though nothing was original.
Right? Up until that point. Very f little original thought there.
He had still made millions and millions and millions of dollars.
There's a lesson there. My other games had borrowed liberally from existing fantasy stories. None of them were particularly original, other than the fact that they were being told in a computer game format.
All these stories had inspired me. So he's talking about
uh Narnia and Time Bannants and Lord of the Rings. I'm skipping over all that. All these stories had inspired me. But if I was ever going to compete with the writers I most respected, I knew I couldn't continue stealing from D D to Lord in the Rings.
Uh Narnia, Star Wars, and et cetera.
Games I realized had the potential to be much more than pleasant diversion.
Done well.
They could be as much an art form.
As books and movies.
And so up until this point, computer games are relatively simple, you know you have an objective.
But he's like, Well think about you're the the best novel you've ever read, or the best movie you've ever seen.
There's like moral choices.
made by the main characters. Like they have to go through and like there's some kind of trade off.
And they have to make like decision like what path
they're gonna take in life. He's like, why won't we do this for games?
And this is gonna lead to his most successful project ever. I thought how cool would it be to incorporate a player's own value system into a game.
If I could do that instead of a player just mindlessly going around killing monsters,
Players could would be forced to emotionally invest in the game.
Instead of pushing a button.
They'd have to sit and make a moral choice.
Now why am I bringing this up to you? Because he has this idea, he loves it.
Everybody around's like No
Do what's working.
Don't do something new.
And we saw this with Sid Meyer.
He was making I think uh
What was it flight simulator games? They were selling crazy making a ton of money, but he's like, Man, I wanna make like this big civilization game.
uh and this this this epic game
It winds up being called civilization. They're like there's no more and everybody around's like, No, you don't do that. Stick with the the the very profitable flight simulators.
There's no money in that path you're gonna take.
And that game civilization that s that said
Makes.
uh over the course of that series they sell like fifty three million copies.
So it says when I told my brother and our team I wanted to tell a story about the player's spiritual growth through their own actions, his response the response was pretty much unanimous. Are you nuts?
There's no profit in virtue.
That's a terrible idea.
When I pointed out that no one had done this before, it w I was reminded of the reason for that.
Because that's not what people were buying.
Throughout the development process, many people in the company continued to think I was nuts.
So he's gonna go ahead forward. Like he's the m main designer. He's like I'm I'm going to do this.
So we're going to
Even as he t so
Before the idea.
Or as he has an idea, don't do this, he's nuts.
He continues the idea, You're still nuts.
The ultima formula was proven improfable.
And many other people saw no reason to change it, and then he gets to his why. Like why is he taking this big risk? Why is he doing this?
It was my attempt to further develop an emerging art form.
And so he goes into way more detail in the book about all the fights they're having, the decisions he's making, but this part just made me laugh because his brother's like, No, I don't want to do this. His brother's handling the business aspect of the
of their company. He's obviously developing games and this part just made me laugh.
Uh they're they're fighting about all this. He goes, I had no choice but to stand firm. Forget it, I told my brother.
My reaction forced him to take the ultimate extreme position.
He told our parents.
So I just love this idea. Like I think they're what? They gotta be at this point mid to late twenties. I'm telling mom and dad.
That legitimately made made me laugh. But later on, like he was right to stick to his gun uh his guns.
And I just love this idea. It's like what Charlie Munger says, like you gotta follow your natural drift. It's a good idea. There's something inside of you that you may not even understand why you're drawn to that.
Or another way to think about that is like what Jeff Bezos says is like listen, we don't choose our passions, they choose us.
And there's some weird reason that you think you should be doing these things.
And so follow it.
Uh, so it says this is the game that they were fighting over when Quest of the Avatar was published in nineteen eighty five.
It was very successful with with sales surpassing all previous versions of Ultimas. It had also had a lasting impact on the gaming world.
Uh commonly appearing on lists of the ten most important video and computer games ever published.
And so I really like that chapter, because if you think about where the chapter started to where it ended up, it's like imitation precedes creation. Yes, I'm successful.
imitating and maybe being heavily influenced, maybe just taking in a story that's uh appears in a book.
and adapting it to a new format. And then eventually I like I'm learning all these other things that were on the way.
And I I'm understanding myself, he's getting older, you know, he's he's not a teenager anymore.
He's like, All right, I'm just gonna combine all these experiences and then create something new, something something something that no one's ever done before.
And he winds up creating one of the most valuable franchises ever.
And so then he's gonna build on that success and he's gonna create
He is widely so it says I have been credited somewhat inaccurately with inventing the term and category known as
There's a acronym here. I'm just gonna tell you what it uh versus what it means. Massively multiplayer online role playing games.
Because the next game the next thing they're gonna work on is this thing called Ultima Online.
Which was the first to become a major success. So this is like the world that we live in now, where you're playing the game, but you're also playing with millions and millions of people at the exact same time all over the world.
And so the reason I want to bring this to your attention
is because his point's like yeah, they they credit me for inventing the the cat the term in the category. I didn't invent it.
I just was the f it was the first I took an idea that I found in the history of my industry.
And then I added something new to it and
It winds up being the first massive success. And so because most people didn't take the time to study the history of the industry, they actually didn't know.
that I wasn't the first one to come up with this. And so what's the main like, why is that important? Because we've seen this over and over again. Like I can't think of one founder that you and I have studied that did not study the hell
out of the industry that they're in.
And they do that because you just never know when you can profit on that knowledge.
So it says, but in fact, long before the existence of the internet
People were linking computers to communicate with each other.
They got together through dial up services like the original American Online a decade before we produced a m ultima online.
We were already dreaming of producing a game that allowed many people to play
uh in the world at the same time and interact with each other.
We were not the only people with that dream.
Since the availability of computers
Some people were producing
Text based muds, and so mud, I never I don't remember hearing about this before.
They're called multi user dungeons.
So text games, right?
That are multiplayer text games.
These multiplayer games were quite simple. Players could chat, they could write to each other.
Anything that's on the screen would show on all the screens of all the players at the same time. But these games had user bases in the few hundreds or low thousands and were not competitive with mainstream games. So that is really his innovation. It's like well
You were doing this for text base, you already have this uh this capability. I'm creating entire new worlds. They're they're visual worlds, they have this elaborate storytelling.
Like, why not just apply that idea to what we're working on and make it so you're not just playing by yourself.
You're not just playing if you were happening to be networked with a person in the same room as you're just like, No, you can play all over the world.
These games never really appealed to me, nor did they inspire me beyond seeing the potential he's talking about text based mods. These games never really appealed to me, nor did they inspire me beyond seeing the potential they offer for something much more exciting.
We watched this segment of the gaming industry very carefully for at least a decade.
That's so important.
He was studying the history of his industry, collecting information
And it took a decade before he was able to capitalize and profit on that.
That's really cool. We meet we meet regularly with the companies making the best dial up games to discuss producing a multiplier Ultima.
But with the fee structure that existed at the time, we couldn't figure out how to make a business out of it. So again
This is this is like the the first time I got on the internet, uh when I was like a young kid.
I was probably like twelve, I was on an IBM PC and it was American Online and you would pay. Like you you know, you called the internet. I try to explain to my daughter about this. She's like, What are you talking about? I was like, You had to call the internet. And like no one could call your house phone when you're on it, so it'd bring I think busy at the time, make the funny noises and stuff.
But we were paid like you you had to pay by the minute.
It's insane. Like think about how how much your everybody's online now.
So it says the the why he couldn't do this
He says these games were expensive to play, they required a subscription to a dial up service, and the game itself generally would charge as much as a few dollars an hour to play.
the availability of the internet, which allowed people to be online for extended periods of time without being charged by the minute or hour, completely changed the economic structure. So wait a minute, I didn't even write this note, but that's the same example we just had.
Uh wait, just hold on. And you're and and
Future technology will unlock opportunities that you can't access yet. That's exactly what happened here. It's like, hey, I wanted to do this on massive online player uh multiplayer game.
couldn't do it when you're being charged a couple dollars an hour just to play the game and you have to buy the game. That doesn't make any sense, right?
But now
Technology keeps
Uh.
This new thing, the internet.
You can use it as much as you want.
Now this is possible. And this game he's gonna wind up having millions of subscribers on this game. So he says suddenly a million people could be online at the same time.
Not just a million, a hundred million people could be on at the same time. The potential was almost incalculable.
So we set out to create a game that would appeal not just to the few who played text based MUDs
But the millions of people who were playing
Any type of
of computer game.
Ultima online proved.
That a huge marker for multiplayer online games existed.
Okay, so I said at the very beginning, or he said at the very beginning, you don't have to read this book in order. It also doesn't go in order. So this is gonna be weird because
He just said uh this is where the idea came from, I'm gonna develop it, it's really successful. Then he goes back in time.
And suddenly you realize, Oh
He had sold his company.
He's gonna develop Ultima Online.
When after he sold his company.
To EA, to Electronic Arts.
And he has a terrible experience.
Selling to a larger company.
And understanding it is so important.
This is gonna go on for like sixty pages. The book is three hundred pages. This is a gigantic part of the book.
So let's go into what it was like after he sold his company.
And he's trying to develop this idea and he's just tenacious as hell.
Like that is really
A good way to think about Richard and uh just a great trait to have.
Uh the game was so different that i initially EA had no interest in developing it.
Solo games were selling meaning games you just played along, we're selling millions of copies.
While rudimentary
Uh muds we're selling a few thousand at most.
My team and I explained to EA
for whom we were then working.
That this new concept, massively multiplayer online gaming, was the wave of the future and then he needed to be prepared to ride it. It's amazing that he knew that back then, because w that's the reality we live in now, right?
No interest, they said. They pointed out that there was no data to support the belief that anyone would play an online game.
And then he describes the difference between having a small like entrepreneurial company. Now he's gotta get used to working with this like gigantic bureaucratic company. He doesn't really like that. EA had a very formal process that its developers had to go through before the company would even consider funding a game.
To make the case for funding, we had to be together a huge set of documents that demonstrated why it would be a success.
The sales department would then do an analysis based upon the sales of similar games in the past.
No, that's a obviously a big problem'cause there
Was no.
Like the only
Uh his past historical data is these text based MUDs right? Since no one had ever earned a penny selling the type of internet game we wanted to create, the sales projection was zero.
EA would not budge.
When I have an idea I believe in
I am tenacious.
Six months later we went back.
For the second time we were told no.
Six months now, I'm telling you all this because think about this is gonna be one of the most successful games they ever make. And think about like he had to fight just to get them to do this.
So six months later we went back. For the second time we were told no. Six months after that.
We went back again.
I literally would not take no for an answer. This time I went into the CEO's office and told him look
We spend five miles or more.
on any game that we develop.
Just give me a quarter million dollars to prove to you that this is viable.
He truly was not interested.
But I would not leave the office until he agreed.
Finally, he agreed to sign a note that had already written out that said basically I hereby grant Richard a budget of two hundred fifty grand for
Uh in pursuit of this multima thing that he wants to do.
ES gave EA gave it gave us minimal funding and no other support.
To make matters worse, EA wouldn't give us proper office space.
the building that we were in were being refurbished and every other team was given new space as it was completed.
My team was literally put out in the hallway.
We were working in the middle of a construction site.
So he actually gets it done with this very limited budget, like this prototype, and then check that
Th this is very unique this is a very unique marketing ploy that he used to launch Ultima Online.
For the two hundred fifty thousand dollars we managed to build a nice little prototype. When we put up
One of EA's we then put up one of EA's first websites to introduce the game.
Basically we introduced ourselves.
Hello, we're the ultimate team.
We spent two hundred fifty thousand dollars making a prototype for a new game and we need people.
A lot of people to help us test it.
We can't download it to you, we wrote, because it's too big.
We need to send you the game on a C D, which is gonna be expensive for us to manufacture in mail.
So if you want to volunteer to be a beta tester.
And help us develop this game, please send us five dollars.
This was a marketing strategy no one had tried before.
Asking people to pay for the privilege.
Of volunteering.
We didn't know what kind of response to expect.
the EA marketing team have projected lifetime sales of Ultima Online at about thirty thousand units.
Which they thought was wildly optimistic.
We put it on the internet and we held our breath.
Within a week or so
Fifty thousand people had signed up to pay five dollars for the disc.
Ultima Online instantly became
The most important thing happening in the EA world.
We got all the money and the development people we needed.
EA now decided we needed considerably more management oversight. This is also gonna be a mistake.
Having money made the situation much better. The managers made it much worse.
In the past, once we shipped a game, it was done.
Oh, so he's now talking about I've skipped ahead a little bit, sorry. He's talking about like the fact that there is no one's ever had an experience on working on a game that is never finished.
So it says in the past, once we'd shipped a game, it was done.
It was out.
It was time to focus on what's next.
This was completely different.
We were gonna be running a live service.
there was no one in our group with any level of ex level of experience
We didn't even think about this when we were working.
We were too busy just running around.
So there's a great line in Mark Andrewson's blog post, uh blog archive I did back on Founders Fifty when he's like, You know you have product market fit because the market will pull the product out of you. And when that happens, you it's just this huge rush and there's just
You don't have enough time or resources, you can't keep up with demand. It's very similar to what's happening here. We were wildly more successful than we ever imagined. We had designed servers that would allow for thousands of people to be connected connected simultaneously.
But we were completely unprepared for the game's success.
Suddenly
We had miljans of subscribers.
And our servers could not handle it.
Not only could he not predict the s the level of success that he was gonna have
He didn't predict what all what millions of people interacting with your product was gonna be like. And so this is where he actually
accidentally creates a real world.
economy.
From a virtual world.
And this is gonna be relevant to the day and age we live in because
This is happening what, uh twenty five years ago, maybe?
Uh
One thing's for sure, people are very, very willing to spend real money on all types.
of virtual items. And he sees that here.
No one anticipated that the game might enable students to work their way through college.
Or allow criminals and drug cartels to launder money.
Or lead to the creation of Chin gold farming businesses.
We had no idea we were creating a real money economy that would generate billions of dollars in revenue and would obscure the lines between virtual world and reality.
We just thought we were making a game.
And so he's uh I'll give you like a summary of what's happening here. Players could earn virtual gold in a variety of ways and use what they earned to purchase everything from virtual meals to a virtual house.
People began to cover it.
These virtual items like property and magic swords, but were not willing to put in the time to earn the virtual gold needed to buy them.
Instead of spending months playing the game to earn the virtual objects they wanted,
Players began making side deals.
Often through places like eBay.
Buying virtual assets for real US dollars. He did not expect us to happen. So those people who were willing or able to put in the time necessary to obtain these items discovered that they could sell them in the real world.
For real money.
I remember the first time I found an object.
From our game.
was being sold on eBay.
A rare and magical sword.
Was for sale for a hundred dollars, and we were flabbergasted.
The obvious question asks
Why would anyone pay real money?
For nothing.
Remember, these are these are conversations that are happening.
In present day.
Yeah, history doesn't repeat human nature does. That's why I'm reading this section to you. But for some people it actually makes a lot of economic sense. A player could spend two weeks in the game collecting treasure before they had enough gold to purchase a big sword.
Or they could pay someone to do it for them.
Then he also sees another analogy in the virtual world.
uh very similar to what takes place in the physical world.
Real estate starts to become incredibly valuable.
In the real world, you might be able to buy a small piece of land in a New Mexico hill country for a dollar.
But a piece of land that exact same size in New York City would sell for many millions of dollars.
The same thing is true in virtual worlds.
And so the value of property near the entrance to the cities.
Rapidly escalated.
Within months of the game going online, a piece of virtual property sold for more than ten thousand dollars.
So even though he's having a lot of success with his ultimate game series
He hates working at EA.
And we're gonna see him get kicked out of and fired.
From his own company.
Before I get there though, this is just a fantastic line.
And he says the art of business
Which I had to learn.
was how to stay in business long enough.
to give yourself the best chance to get a big hit.
So now he gets into why he sold his company and what the result was. So again, it's not in chronological order.
says the experience had come at a substantial personal cost.
Even while it made me a fortune.
Origin had long been among the top publishers in the industry.
But as the industry matured, it began consolidating.
The biggest players acquired many, many, many smaller companies and then became much, much, much bigger.
To survive we had to make a very tough decision.
Even today.
People ask me why in the world we did this.

is that in order to compete
We just had to get bigger.
We either had to gang up with several other small companies to become a single larger entity.
Or we had to sell origin to someone else.
Ultimately it became obvious that
That we were not going to be able to engineer a merger of small companies.
In that EA was the right fit for us.
So in nineteen eighty two we sold origin to EA.
for twenty five million dollars.
They immediately provided the resources we needed to double in size.
This was a huge strategic mistake.
We couldn't manage the type of rapid expansion and we wasted a lot of their money.
The first thing we did was to split our team in half.
Which meant that some teams
Had second tier leadership.

bring this to your attention'cause he's talking about like all the mistakes he made.
And it's very likely if you and I were put in the same position.
We are prone, like Rich is obviously very smart. These are smart driven entrepreneurs.
Very gifted at what they're doing.
And it's we seen time and time again in these books, like
They make the same they make insane mistakes.
Like smart people.
uh make mistakes all the time.
And so realizing, hey, if I was in that situation at that time, I might act the same way. And so the really benefit of downloading all these experiences into your brain is realizing it's gonna be very difficult.
If all these other smart driven people are making the mistake.
Like what hope do I have? Like
It's very likely that if I was exposed to the same decision, uh like choices
I do the same thing. That's why it's so difficult to avoid the mistakes.
But if you see this play out over and over again, like, hey, wait a minute, I need to really pause and make sure I'm not going down the same route that I've already seen.
multiple other smart and productive people.
Uh, you know, do and then regret later on.
And so part of this is like you you go from having one great team to now two
Okay teams.
The first thing we did was split our teams in half, which meant that some teams had second tier leadership.
We brought a brand new building that was twice as large as our existing space.
Then we doubled the size of our staff.
And then they're also working on a bunch of games at once.
Two years later we realized that about half of the games that we have in development were not gonna be successful.
And EA told us to abandon them.
For us, this was a new and very different way of doing business.
We had never canceled a single game.
But now
We were playing by EA's rules.
And so he goes into the fact that he just hated the way uh EA was building games and he no longer had control.
at EA there were large teams assigned to each project. So when a game was canceled, we had to fire people.
Once, when we announced that we had to cancel a game in development, the project manager laid down on the floor while another manager outlined his body in masking tape.
as if it were a crime scene. And this is the punchline, the most important sentence of this entire section.
We felt this was symbolic of the death.
of the entrepreneurial company
That we had built.
They also make'em rush and compromise quality.
We released games when we were done with them.
That was not the way EA did business.
Richard, they told me.
Your release of games is incredibly unreliable.
They wanted us to change a development process to meet their deadlines.
Ultima eight.
EA wanted on the shelves in time for the following Christmas.
And they told me, Richard.
You need to cut whatever needs to be cut to get this game done.
So I cut it.
I cut it.
And I cut it.
And I cut it.
And as a result
I ship the most incomplete.
Gum.
Buggy game.
That have ever shipped.
The creative joy

Had been replaced by the prosaic demands of running a business.
It was hard to believe how much it changed.
Only a few years earlier.
Our people would happily work all night.
And love every minute of it.
And now
We had become a sweatshop.
And say starting games.
You're not finishing a bunch, you're firing them, there's all these turnovers. You had like the small band
of this incredibly gifted team working together. Most of these people are are
Turned out.
Then you have all these different people in charge.
And so it says EA kept sending us second string replacement managers.
who would immediately start by undoing all the things that his predecessor also sent by EA, by the way.
Had tried to put in a place.
Replacing them with his own initiatives.
The manager would then would start out their own new projects and fire all the junior people who weren't on their team.
And then bring in other junior people.
People.
No none of them stayed in place long enough.
to see their new projects through.
So every year.
The entire culture changed.
And because he came up with control
He has no influence. He's trying to convince him, hey, we should go back to the way things were we were doing them before.
And EA said no.
None of my suggestions were accepted.
Then one afternoon.
A general manager of EA
Called me into his office and said
Richard.
We just don't need you anymore.
I left the office.
Drove to a grocery store parking lot.
And wept for several hours.
It was the end of my personal Camelot.
This was no game.
This is my life.
It had been painful for me to fire other people.
But as I had just learned, that was nothing compared to being fired.
I got blindsided.

And complex range of feelings.
I felt like a failure.
I was angry and depressed.
And confused.
It was a hurt.
That lasted a long time.
And frankly.
I don't think
I ever fully got over it.
And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Get the book. There's a lot more that goes on. He winds up founding two or three more
video game companies, you might as well go into space.
uh all kinds of exploration of Antarctica, the Amazon, the the bottom of the ocean. This book is uh was really, really wild.
And if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player.
You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.
That is two hundred and fifty seven books down, one thousand to go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.