According to Garriott, ”Even before Starr had come to Origin we had always talked about doing a multiplayer Ultima game. We looked at the old dial-up multiplayer games and MUDs and it didn’t seem to be a business that was useful at the scale we needed.
“It was really Starr who sat me down and said ‘look Richard, the Internet is coming, now is the time.’ Though it was often me arguing the case in front of Electronic Arts management it was really Starr’s belief that we could pull this off and his insistence that I keep fighting that good battle by which we finally got the game — begrudging shall we say — greenlit by EA. Ultima Online immediately became the fastest selling PC game in Origin and EA history and within two years had outsold all the previous Ultimas combined, several times over.”
Long will be helping Garriott with the studio’s major Kickstarter project, Shroud of the Avatar, a spiritual successor to Garriott’s famed Ultima series.
