He also demanded that the two villains who went on a murder spree across Britannia in that game be named Elizabeth and Abraham. Among his relatively few detail-oriented contributions to Ultima VII were a set of infernal inter-dimensional generators whose shapes together formed the EA logo. Time really did seem to make Garriott more rather than less bitter. Ultima V‘s parser treated the phrase “Electronic Arts” like a curse word Ultima VI included a gang of evil pirates named after some of the more prominent members of EA’s executive staff. Garriott built a mausoleum for “Pirt Snikwah” - the name of Trip Hawkins, EA’s founder and chief executive, spelled backward - at his Austin mansion of Britannia Manor. From 1987 on, EA was Public Enemy #1 at Origin, a status which Garriott marked in ways that only seemed to grow pettier as time went on. Origin quickly signed a new distribution contract with Brøderbund, which lasted until 1989, by which point they had become big enough in their own right to take over their own distribution.īut Richard Garriott wasn’t one to forgive even a small personal slight easily, much less a full-blown threat to destroy his company. At last, EA agreed to allow Origin to go their own way, albeit probably only after the smaller company paid them a modest settlement for breaking the contract. Origin, however, found themselves a protector: Brøderbund Software, whose size and clout at the time were comparable to that of EA. EA at first seemed prepared to crush Origin utterly in retribution by pulling at the legal seams in the two companies’ contract. Eighteen months later, when EA released an otherwise unmemorable CRPG called Deathlord whose interface hewed a little too closely to that of an Ultima, a livid Richard Garriott attempted to pull Origin out of the agreement early. For Origin and EA, you see, had a history.īack in August of 1985, just prior to the release of Ultima IV, the much smaller Origin had signed a contract to piggyback on EA’s distribution network as an affiliated label. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at George Bush’s White House for a fireside chat. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.
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