Richard Garriott Interview

Even though there’s no real mention of Ultima or anything truly RPG-related, I thought some of you might be interested in a new interview with Richard Garriott over at Joystiq.  In it, Mr. British answers questions about his recent space adventure, the lawsuit he filed against NCsoft, and his new Portalarium social media service.

Tell us about your new company in your own words.

Portalarium has been described as fundamentally going to play in the area of social media networks, but what I think is important to describe about us is why we believe that’s the right place to play and why we believe we can do something important in that area.

You don’t think it’s over saturated?

Not at all. Although, by the way, it is maturing very quickly. I look at PC games or early gaming and it took 10 to 20 years to mature. Online gaming, which has been the biggest for the last 10 years, took five to 10 years to mature. This one is going to just take a few years. I believe I’m now in the middle of what I’d call my third “once in a lifetime opportunity.” First one was being at the emergence of games and getting to ride the growth of the industry. The second one came with Ultima Online. It took us years to convince anyone to let us do Ultima Online … for the last 10 years, non online gaming has been financially insignificant compared to online gaming. I believe the next wave, which we are well into, is the rise of social media gaming and if you look at the money flow already. The money flow is already significantly swinging in that direction.