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Ultima IX

This article tells part of the story of the Ultima series.

Years ago, [Origin Systems] released Strike Commander, a high-concept flight sim that, while very entertaining from a purely theoretical point of view, was so resource-demanding that no one in the country actually owned a machine that could play it. Later, in Ultima VIII, the company decided to try to increase their sales numbers by adding action sequences straight out of a platform game to their ultra-deep RPG. The results managed to piss just about everyone off. With Ultima IX: Ascension, the company has made both mistakes again, but this time on a scale that is likely to make everyone finally forget about the company’s past mistakes and concentrate their efforts on making fun of this one.

— Trent C. Ward, writing for IGN

Appalling voice-acting. Clunky dialog-tree system. Over-simplistic, poorly implemented combat system. Disjointed story line… A huge slap in the face for all longtime Ultima fans… Insulting and contemptuous.

— Julian Schoffel, writing from the Department of “Other Than That, It Was Great” at Growling Dog Gaming

The late 1990s introduced a new phenomenon to the culture of gaming: the truly epic failure, the game that failed to live up to expectations so comprehensively that it became a sort of anti-heroic legend, destined to be better remembered than almost all of its vastly more playable competition. It’s not as if the bad game was a new species; people had been making bad games — far more of them than really good ones, if we’re being honest — for as long as they had been making games at all. But it took the industry’s meteoric expansion over the course of the 1990s, from a niche hobby for kids and nerds (and usually both) to a media ecosystem with realistic mainstream aspirations, to give rise to the combination of hype, hubris, excess, and ineptitude which could yield a Battlecruiser 3000AD or a Daikatana. Such games became cringe humor on a worldwide scale, whether they involved Derek Smart telling us his game was better than sex or John Romero saying he wanted to make us his bitch.

Another dubiously proud member of the 1990s rogue’s gallery of suckitude — just to use some period-correct diction, you understand — was Ultima IX: Ascension, the broken, slapdash, bed-shitting end to one of the most iconic franchises in all of gaming history. I’ve loved a handful of the older Ultimas and viewed some of the others with more of a jaundiced eye in the course of writing these histories, but there can be no denying that these games were seminal building blocks of the CRPG genre as we know it today. Surely the series deserved a better send-off than this.

As it is, though, Ultima IX has long since become a meme, a shorthand for ludic disaster. More people than have ever actually played it have watched Noah Antwiler’s rage-drenched two-hour takedown of the game from 2012, in a video which has itself become oddly iconic as one of the founding texts (videos?) of long-form YouTube game commentary. Meanwhile Richard Garriott, the motivating force behind Ultima from first to last, has done his level best to write the aforementioned last out of history entirely. Ultima IX is literally never mentioned at all in his autobiography.

But, much though I may be tempted to, I can’t similarly sweep under the rug the eminently unsatisfactory denouement to the Ultima series. I have to tell you how this unfortunate last gasp fits into the broader picture of the series’s life and times, and do what I can to explain to you how it turned out so darn awful.

Al Remmers, the man who unleashed Lord British and Ultima upon the world, is pictured here with his wife.

The great unsung hero of Ultima is a hard-disk salesman, software entrepreneur, and alleged drug addict named Al Remmers, who in 1980 agreed to distribute under the auspices of his company California Pacific a simple Apple II game called Akalabeth, written by a first-year student at the University of Texas named Richard Garriott. It was Remmers who suggested crediting the game to “Lord British,” a backhanded nickname Garriott had picked up from his Dungeons & Dragons buddies to commemorate his having been born in Britain (albeit to American parents), his lack of a Texas drawl, and, one suspects, a certain lordly manner he had begun to display even as an otherwise ordinary suburban teenager. Thus this name that had been coined in a spirit of mildly deprecating irony became the official nom de plume of Garriott, a young man whose personality evinced little appetite for self-deprecation or irony. A year after Akalabeth, when Garriott delivered to Remmers a second, more fully realized implementation of “Dungeons & Dragons on a computer” — also the first game into which he inserted himself/Lord British as the king of the realm of Britannia — Remmers came up with the name of Ultima as a catchier alternative to Garriott’s proposed Ultimatum. Having performed these enormous semiotic services for our young hero, Al Remmers then disappeared from the stage forever. By the time he did so, he had, according to Garriott, snorted all of his own and all of the young game developer’s money straight up his nose.

The Ultima series, however, was off to the races. After a brief, similarly unhappy dalliance with Sierra On-Line, Garriott started the company Origin Systems in 1983 to publish Ultima III. For the balance of the decade, Origin was every inch The House That Ultima Built. It did release other games — quite a number of them, in fact — and sometimes these games even did fairly well, but the anchor of the company’s identity and its balance sheets were the new Ultima iterations that appeared in 1985, 1988, and 1990, each one more technically and narratively ambitious than the last. Origin was Lord British; Origin was Ultima; Lord British was Ultima. Any and all were inconceivable without the others.

But that changed just a few months after Ultima VI, when Origin released a game called Wing Commander, designed by an enthusiastic kid named Chris Roberts who also had a British connection: he had come to Austin, Texas, by way of Manchester, England. Wing Commander wasn’t revolutionary in terms of its core gameplay; it was a “space sim” that sought to replicate the dogfighting seen in Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, part of a sub-genre that dated back to 1984’s Elite. What made it revolutionary was the stuff around the sim, a story that gave each mission you flew meaning and resonance. Gamers fell head over heels for Wing Commander, enough so to let it do the unthinkable: it outsold the latest Ultima. Just like that, Origin became the house of Wing Commander and Ultima — and in that order in the minds of many. Now Chris Roberts’s pudgy chipmunk smile was as much the face of the company as the familiar bearded mien of Lord British.

The next few years were the best in Origin’s history, in a business sense and arguably in a creative one as well, but the impressive growth in revenues was almost entirely down to the new Wing Commander franchise, which spawned a bewildering array of sequels, spin-offs, and add-ons that together constituted the most successful product line in computer gaming during the last few years before DOOM came along to upend everything. Ultima produced more mixed results. A rather delightful spinoff line called The Worlds of Ultima, moving the formula away from high fantasy and into pulp adventure of the Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells stripe, sold poorly and fizzled out after just two installments. The next mainline Ultima, 1992’s Ultima VII: The Black Gate, is widely regarded today as the series’s absolute peak, but it was accorded a surprisingly muted reception at the time; Charles Ardai wrote in Computer Gaming World how “weary gamers [are] sure that they have played enough Ultima to last them a lifetime,” how “computer gaming needs another visit to good old Britannia like the movies need another visit from Freddy Krueger.” That year the first-person-perspective, more action-oriented spinoff Ultima Underworld, the first project of the legendary Boston-based studio Looking Glass, actually sold better than the latest mainline entry in the series, another event that had seemed unthinkable until it came to pass.

Men with small egos don’t tend to dress themselves up as kings and unironically bless their fans during trade shows and conventions, as Richard Garriott had long made a habit of doing. It had to rankle him that the franchise invented by Chris Roberts, no shrinking violet himself, was by now generating the lion’s share of Origin’s profits. And yet there could be no denying that when Electronic Arts bought the company Garriott had founded on September 25, 1992, it was primarily Wing Commander that it wanted to get its hands on.

So, taking a hint from the success of not only Wing Commander but also Ultima Underworld, Garriott decided that the mainline games in his signature series as well had to become more streamlined and action-oriented. He decided to embrace, of all possible gameplay archetypes, the Prince of Persia-style platformer. The result was 1994’s Ultima VIII: Pagan, a game that seems like something less than a complete and total disaster today only by comparison with Ultima IX. Its action elements were executed far too ineptly to attract new players. And as for the Ultima old guard, they would have heaped scorn upon it even if it had been a good example of what it was trying to be; their favorite nickname for it was Super Ultima Bros. It stank up the joint so badly that Origin chose toward the end of the year not to even bother putting out an expansion pack that its development team had ready to go, right down to the box art.

The story of Ultima IX proper begins already at this fraught juncture, more than five years before that game’s eventual release. The team that had made Ultima VIII was split in two, with the majority going to work on Crusader: No Remorse, a rare 1990s Origin game that bore the name of neither Ultima nor Wing Commander. (It was a science-fiction exercise that wound up using the Ultima VIII engine to better effect, most critics and gamers would judge, than Ultima VIII itself had.) Just a few people were assigned to Ultima IX. An issue of Origin’s internal newsletter dating from February of 1995 describes them as “finishing [the] script stage, evaluating technology, and assembling a crack development team.” Origin programmer Mike McShaffry:

Right after the release [of Ultima VIII], Origin’s customer-service department compiled a list of customer complaints. It weighed about ten pounds! The Ultima IX core team went over this with a fine-toothed comb, and we decided along with Richard that we should get back to the original Ultima design formula. Ultima IX was going to be a game inspired by Ultimas IV and VII and nothing else. When I think of that game design I get chills; it was going to be awesome.

As McShaffry says, it was hoped that Ultima IX could rejuvenate the franchise by righting the wrongs of Ultima VIII. It would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, placing a a modernized gloss on what fans had loved about the games that came before: a deep world simulation, a whole party of adventurers to command, lots and lots of dialog in a richly realized setting. The isometric engine of Ultima VII was re-imagined as a 3D space, with a camera that the player could pan and zoom around the world. “For the first time ever, you could see what was on the south and east side of walls,” laughs McShaffry. “When you walked in a house, the roof would pop off and you could see inside.” Ultima IX was also to be the first entry in the series to be fully voice-acted. Origin hired one Bob White, an old friend with whom Richard Garriott had played Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager, to turn Garriott’s vague story ideas into a proper script for the voice actors to perform.

Garriott himself had been slowly sidling back from day-to-day involvement with Ultima development since roughly 1986, when he was cajoled into accepting that the demands of designing, writing, coding, and even drawing each game all by himself had become unsustainable. By the time that Ultima VII and VIII rolled around, he was content to provide a set of design goals and some high-level direction for the story only, while he busied himself with goings-on in the executive suite and playing Lord British for the fans. This trend would do little to reverse itself over the next five years, notwithstanding the occasional pledge from Garriott to “discard the mantle of authority within even my own group so I can stay at the designer level.” (Yes, he really talked like that.) This chronic reluctance on the part of Ultima IX’s most prominent booster to get his hands dirty would be a persistent issue for the project as the corporate politics surrounding it waxed and waned.

For now, the team did what they could with the high-level guidance he provided. Garriott had come to see Ultima IX as the culmination of a “trilogy of trilogies.” Long before it became clear to him that the game would probably mark the end of the series for purely business reasons, he intended it to mark the end of an Ultima era at the very least. He told Bob White that he wanted him to blow up Britannia at the conclusion of the game in much the same way that Douglas Adams had blown up every possible version of the Earth in his novel Mostly Harmless, and for the same reason: in order to ensure that he would have his work cut out for him if he decided to go back on his promise to himself and try to make yet another sequel set in Britannia. By September of 1996, White’s script was far enough along to record an initial round of voice-acting sessions, in the same Hollywood studio used by The Simpsons.

But just as momentum seemed to be coalescing around Ultima IX, two other events at Origin Systems conspired to derail it. The first was the release of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom in April of 1996. Widely trumpeted as the most expensive computer game yet made, the first with a budget that ran to eight digits, it marked the apex of Chris Roberts’s fixation on making “interactive movies,” starring Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame and a supporting cast of Hollywood regulars acting on a real Hollywood sound stage. But it resoundingly failed to live up to Origin’s sky-high commercial expectations for it; at three times the cost of Wing Commander III (which had also featured Hamill), it generated one-third as many sales. This failure threw all of Origin Systems into an existential tizzy. Roberts and few of his colleagues left after being informed that the current direction of the Wing Commander series was financially untenable, and everyone who remained behind wondered how they were going to keep the lights on now that both of Origin’s flagship franchises had fallen on hard times. The studio went through several rounds of layoffs, which deeply scarred the communal psyche of the survivors; Origin would never fully recover from the rupture, never regain its old confident swagger.

Partially in response to this crisis, another project that bore the name of Ultima saw its profile elevated. Ultima Online was to be the fruition of a dream of a persistent multiplayer fantasy world that Richard Garriott had been nursing since the 1980s. In 1995, when rapidly spreading Internet connectivity combined with the latest computer hardware were beginning to make the dream realistically conceivable, he had hired Raph and Kristen Koster, a pair of Alabama graduate students who were stars of the textual-MUD scene, to come to Austin and build a multiplayer Britannia. Ultima Online had at first been regarded more as a blue-sky research project than a serious effort to create a money-making game; it had seemed the longest of long shots, and was barely tolerated on that basis by the rest of Origin and EA’s management.

But the collapse of the industry’s “Siliwood” interactive-movie movement, as evinced by the failure of Wing Commander IV, had come in the midst of a major commercial downturn for single-player CRPGs like the traditional Ultimas as well. Both of Origin’s core competencies looked like they might not be applicable to the direction that gaming writ large was going. In this terrifying situation, Ultima Online began to look much more appealing. Online gaming was growing apace alongside the young World Wide Web, even as the appeal of Ultima Online’s new revenue model, whereby customers could be expected to pay once to buy the game in a box and then keep paying every single month to maintain access to the online multiplayer Britannia, hardly requires further clarification. Ultima Online, it seemed, might be the necessary future for Origin Systems, if it was to have a future at all. These incipient ideas were given a new impetus over the last four months of 1996, when two other massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing games — a term coined by Richard Garriott — were launched to a cautiously positive reception. This relative success came even though neither 3DO’s Meridian 59 nor Sierra’s The Realm was anywhere near as technically and socially sophisticated as the Kosters intended Ultima Online to be.

By the beginning of 1997, the Ultima Online developers were closing in on a wide-scale beta test, the last step before their game went live for paying customers. Rather cheekily, they asked the fans who had been following their progress closely on the Internet to pony up $5 each months in advance for the privilege of becoming their guinea pigs; cheeky or not, tens of thousands of fans did so. This evidence of pent-up demand convinced the still-tiny team’s managers to go all-in on their game. In March of 1997, the nine Ultima Online people were moved into the office space currently occupied by the 23 people who were making Ultima IX. The latter were ordered to set aside what they were working on and help their new colleagues get their MMORPG into shape for the beta test. In the space of a year, Ultima Online had gone from an afterthought to a major priority, while Ultima IX had done precisely the opposite. Although both games were risky projects, it looked like Ultima Online might be the better match for where gaming was going.

The conjoined team got Ultima Online to beta that summer and into boxes in stores that September, albeit not without a certain degree of backbiting and infighting. (The Ultima Online people regarded the Ultima IX people as last-minute jumpers on their bandwagon; the Ultima IX people were equally resentful, suspecting — and not without some justification — that their own project would never be restarted, especially if the MMORPG took off as Origin hoped it would.) Although dogged throughout its early years by technical issues and teething problems of design, the inevitable niggles of a pioneer, Ultima Online was soon able to attract a fairly stable base of some 90,000 players, each of whom paid Origin $10 per month to roam the highways and byways of Britannia with others.

It became a vital revenue stream for a studio that otherwise didn’t have much of anything going for it. The same year as Ultima Online’s launch, Wing Commander: Prophecy, an attempt to reboot the series for this post-Chris Roberts, post-interactive-movie era, was released to sales even worse than those of Wing Commander IV, marking the anticlimactic end of the franchise that had been the biggest in computer gaming just a few years earlier. Any petty triumph Richard Garriott might have been tempted to feel at having seen his Ultima outlive Wing Commander was undermined by the harsh reality of Origin’s plight. The only single-player games now left in development at the incredible shrinking studio were the Jane’s Longbow hardcore helicopter simulations, entries in yet another genre that was falling on hard commercial times.

Electronic Arts was taking a more and more hands-on role as Origin’s fortunes declined. A pair of executives named Neil Young and Chris Yates had been parachuted in from the Silicon Valley mother ship to become Origin’s new General Manager and Chief Technical Officer respectively. Much to the old team’s surprise, they opted to restart Ultima IX in late 1997. They read the massive success of the CRPG-lite Diablo as a sign that the genre might not be as dead to gamers as everyone had thought, especially if it was given an audiovisual facelift and, following the example of Diablo, had its gameplay greatly simplified. A producer named Edward Alexander Del Castillo was hired away from Westwood Studios, where he had been in charge of the mega-selling Command & Conquer series of real-time-strategy games. If anyone could figure out how to make the latest single-player Ultima seem relevant to fans of more recent gameplay paradigms, it ought to be him.

What with the ongoing layoffs and other forms of attrition, fewer than half of the 23 people who had been working on Ultima IX prior to the Ultima Online interregnum returned to the project. Those who did sifted through the leavings of their earlier efforts, trying to salvage whatever they could to suit Del Castillo’s new plans for the project. He re-imagined the game into something that looked more like the misbegotten Ultima VIII than the hallowed Ultima VII. The additional party members were done away with, as was the roving camera, and the visuals and interface came to mimic third-person action games like the hugely popular Tomb Raider. Del Castillo convinced Richard Garriott to come up with a new story outline in which Britannia didn’t get destroyed, an event which might now read as confusing, given that people would presumably still be logging into Ultima Online to adventure there after this single-player game’s release. In the new script, as fleshed out once again by Bob White, the player’s goal would be to become one with the villainous Guardian, who would turn out to be the other half of himself, and rise as one being with him to a higher plane of existence; thus the “ascension” of the eventual subtitle. It felt like the older games in the way it flirted with spirituality, for all that it did so a bit clumsily. (Garriott stated in a contemporaneous interview that “I’m enamored with Buddhism right now,” as if it was a catchy tune he’d heard on the radio; this isn’t the way spirituality is supposed to work.)

In May of 1998, Origin brought the work in progress to the E3 trade show. It did not go well. The old-school fans were appalled by the teaser video the team brought with them, featuring lots of blood-splattered carnage choreographed to a thrash-metal soundtrack, more DOOM than Ultima. Del Castillo got defensive and derisive when confronted with their criticisms, making a bad situation worse: “Ultimas are not about stick men and baking bread. Ultimas are about using the computer as a tool to enhance the fantasy experience. To take away the clumsy dice, slow charts and paper and give you wonderful gameplay instead. They were never meant to mimic paper RPGs; they were meant to exceed them.” In addition to being a straw-man argument, this was also an ahistorical one: like all of the first CRPGs, Richard Garriott’s first Ultima games had been literal, explicit attempts to put the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game he loved on a computer. Internet forums and Usenet message boards burned with indignation in the weeks and months after the show.

Those who could abandoned the increasingly dysfunctional ship. Bob White bailed for John Romero’s new company Ion Storm, where he became a designer on Deus Ex. Then Del Castillo was fired, thanks to “philosophical differences” with Richard Garriott. Lead programmer Bill Randolph recalls the last words Del Castillo said to him on the day he left: “They don’t care about the game. They’re just going to shove it out the door unfinished.”

Garriott announced, not for the first time, that he intended to step in and take a more hands-on role at this juncture, but that never amounted to much beyond an unearned “Director” credit. “You know, he had a lot of other obligations, and he had a lot going on, and a lot of other interests that he was pursuing too,” says Randolph by way of apologizing for his boss. Be that as it may, Garriott’s presence on the org chart but non-presence in the office resulted in a classic power vacuum; everyone could see that the game was shaping up to be hot garbage, but no one felt empowered to take the steps that were needed to fix it. Turnover continued to be a problem as Origin continued to take on water. Few of the people left on the team had any experience with or emotional connection to the previous single-player Ultima games.

Del Castillo’s ominous prophecy came true on November 26, 1999, after a frantic race to the bottom, during which the exhausted, demoralized team tried to hammer together a bunch of ill-fitting fragments into some semblance of a playable game in time for EA’s final deadline. They met the deadline — what other choice did they have? — but the playable game eluded them.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time here excoriating Ultima IX in detail, the way I did Omikron: The Nomad Soul in my very last article. I nominated Omikron for Worst Game of 1999, but Ultima IX has run away with that prize. Although I found Omikron to be deliriously lousy, it was at least lousy in a somewhat interesting way, the product of a distinctive if badly misguided vision. Ultima IX, alas, doesn’t have even that much going for it. Whatever original creative vision it might once have evinced has been so thoroughly ground away by outside pressures and corporate interference that it’s not even fun to make fun of. As far as kind words go, all I can come up with is that the box looks pretty good — a right proper Ultima box, that is — and some of the landscape vistas are impressive, as long as you don’t spoil the experience by trying to do anything as you’re looking at them. Everything else is pants.

Imagine the worst possible implementation of every single thing Ultima IX tries to do and be, and you’ll have a reasonably good picture of what this game is like. Even 26 years later, it remains a technical disaster: crashing constantly, full of memory leaks that gradually degrade performance as you play. Characters and monsters have an unnerving habit of floating in the air, their feet at the height of your eyes; corpses — and not undead ones — sometimes inexplicably keep on fighting instead of staying put on the ground (or in mid-air, as the case may be). These things ought to be funny in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way, but somehow they aren’t. Absolutely nothing about this game is entertaining — not the cutscenes that were earmarked for an earlier incarnation of the script only to be shoehorned into this one, not the countless other parts of the story that just don’t make any sense. Nothing feels right; the physics of the world are subtly off even when everything is ostensibly working correctly. The fixed camera always seems to be pointing precisely where you don’t want it to, and combat is just bashing away on the mouse button, an action which feels peculiarly disconnected from what you see your character doing onscreen.

Of course, one can make the argument that Ultima wasn’t really about combat even in its best years; Ultima VII’s combat system is almost as bad as this one, and that hasn’t prevented that game from becoming the consensus choice for the peak of the entire series. What well and truly pissed off the series’s hardcore fan base back in the day was how badly this game fails as an Ultima. A game that was once supposed to correct the ill-advised misstep that had been Ultima VIII and mark a return to the franchise’s core values managed in the end to feel like even more of a betrayal than its predecessor. This final installment of a series famous for the freedom it affords its player is a rigidly linear slog through underwhelming plot point after underwhelming plot point. Go to the next city; perform the same set of rote tasks as in the last one; rinse and repeat. If you try too hard to do something other than that which has been foreordained for you, you just end up breaking the game and having to start over.

And yet it’s not as if Ultima IX doesn’t try to exploit its heritage. In fact, no Ultima that came before was as relentlessly self-referential as this one. You create your character by answering questions from a gypsy fortuneteller, like in the iconic opening of Ultima IV. The plot hinges on yet another corruption of the Virtues, like in the fourth, fifth, and sixth games. You visit Lord British in his castle, like in every Ultima ever. There you find a newly constructed museum celebrating your exploits, from your defeat of the evil wizard Mondain in Ultima I to your recent difficulties with the Guardian, the overarching villain of this third trilogy of trilogies. The foregrounded self-referentiality quickly becomes much, much too much; it gives the game a past-its-time, sclerotic feel that must have thoroughly nonplussed any of the new generation CRPG players, weaned on Baldur’s Gate and Might and Magic VI and VII, who might have been unwise enough to pick this game up instead of Planescape: Torment, its primary competition that Christmas season of 1999. Ultima IX is like that boring old man who can’t seem to shut up about all the cool stuff he used to get up to.

But at the same time, and almost paradoxically, Ultima IX is utterly clueless about its heritage, all too obviously the product — and I use that word advisedly — of people who knew Ultima only as a collection of tropes. I don’t really mean all the little details that it gets wrong, which the fans have, predictably enough, cataloged at exhaustive length. When it comes to questions of continuity, I’m actually prepared to extend quite a lot of slack to a series that went from games written by a teenager all by himself in his bedroom to multi-million-dollar productions like this one over the course of almost twenty years of tempestuous technical and cultural evolution in the field of gaming. Rather than the nitpicky details, it’s the huge, fundamental things that this game and its protagonist seem not to know that flummox me. (Remember, the official line is that the Avatar is the same guy through all nine mainline Ultima games and all of the spinoffs to boot.) At one point in this game, the Avatar encounters the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, the object around which revolved the plot of Ultima IV, probably the best-remembered and most critically lauded entry in the series except for Ultima VII. “The Codex of Ultimate Wisdom?” he repeats in a confused tone of voice, as if he’s sounding out the words as he goes. As Noah Antwiler said in my favorite quip from his video series, this is like the pope asking someone if she happens to know what this Bible thing is that the priests around him keep banging on about.

The most famous meme that came out of Antwiler’s videos is another example of the Avatar’s slack-jawed cluelessness. “What’s a paladin?” he asks the first person he meets in Trinsic, the town of Honor which he has visited many times in the course of his questing. You have to hear him say it, in the voice of a bored television announcer, to fully appreciate it. (Like everything else in this game, the voice-acting, which had to be redone at the last minute to fit the new script, is uniformly atrocious, the output of people who all too clearly have no idea what they’re saying or why they’re saying it. Lord British sounds like a doddering old fool, inadvertently mirroring the state of the series by this point.)

You can make excuses for the existence of some of this stuff, if not the piss-poor execution. Origin obviously felt a need to make Ultima IX comprehensible and accessible to new players, coming as it did fully five and a half years after its predecessor. Lots of people had joined the gaming hobby over those years, and some of the old-timers had left it. But such excuses didn’t keep the people who were most invested in the series from seeing it as a slap to the face. “What’s a paladin?” indeed. They felt as if a treasured artifact of their childhood had been stolen and desecrated by a bunch of philistines who didn’t know an ankh from a hole in the ground. Origin ended up with the worst of all worlds: a game that felt too wrapped up in its lore to live and breathe for newcomers, even as it felt insultingly dumbed-down to the faithful who had been awaiting it with bated breath since 1994.

Any lessons we might hope to draw from this fiasco are, much like the game itself, almost too banal to be worth discussing. But, for the record:

No game can be all things to all people.
Development teams need a clear leader with a clear vision.
Checking off a list of bullet points sent down from marketing does not a good game make.
When the design goals do change radically, it’s often better to throw everything out and start over from scratch than to keep retro-fitting bits and pieces onto the Frankenstein’s monster.
It’s better to release a good game late than a bad game on time.

Beginning with Ultima VIII, the series had begun to chase trends rather than to blaze its own trails. This game, despite all the good intentions with which it was begun, doubled down on that trend in the end. Even if the execution had been better, it would still have felt like a pale shadow of the earlier Ultima games, the ones that had the courage of their convictions. It’s not just a bad game; it’s a dull, soulless one too. If the Ultima series had to go out on a sour note, it would have been infinitely nicer to see it blow itself up in some sort of spectacular failure rather than ending in this flaccid fashion. Origin’s Neil Young could have learned a lesson from his musical namesake: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

You start out in your house on Earth, even though this directly contradicts the ending of Ultima VIII.

The gypsy fortuneteller makes a return to help you choose a class and send you on your way to Britannia.

Lord British has… lost a step.

Yes, that is a euphemism for sex. (Why are so many games from this era so horny?)

“What? Where? By the way, what’s a paladin?”

The Gargoyles still speak only in infinitives. (Hey, Yoda’s speech patterns were already taken.)

Good for you, buddy.

Stanley Kubrick called. He wants his monolith back.

As you have probably surmised, Ultima IX did not do well in the marketplace. There was never any serious discussion of continuing the single-player series after it was greeted with bad reviews and worse sales. In fact, it managed not only to kill the series to which it belonged but for all intents and purposes the studio that had always been so closely identified with it as well. It was the last single-player game ever to be completed at Origin Systems.

Officially speaking, Origin continued to exist for another four years after it, but only as an MMORPG house. Right about the same time that Ultima IX was reaching stores, Ultima Online was actually ceding its crown as the biggest MMORPG of all to EverQuest. Nevertheless, in a bull market for shared worlds like these in general amidst the first wave of widespread broadband-Internet adoption, Ultima Online’s raw numbers still increased, reaching as many as 250,000 subscribers in early 2003. But the numbers started to go the other way thereafter as the MMORPG field became ever more crowded with younger, slicker entrants. Inevitably, there came a day in February of 2004 when it no longer made sense to EA to keep an office open in Austin just to support a single aged and declining online game. And so the story of Origin Systems came to its belated, scarcely noticed end, a decade after its best years were over.

By then, Richard Garriott was long gone; he had left Origin in March of 2000. His subsequent career did little to prove that his dilettantish approach to the later Ultima games had been a fluke. He dabbled in gaming only in fits and starts, most notably by lending his name to several more MMORPGs. As also happened with his old Origin sparring partner Chris Roberts, an unfortunate whiff of grift came to attach itself to him; I tend to think that it’s born more of carelessness in his choice of projects and associates than guile in his case, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to witness. Shroud of the Avatar, his Kickstarter-funded would-be second coming of Ultima Online, produced more than its fair share of broken promises and ethical questions about its pay-to-win focus during the 2010s. More recently, he has talked up an MMORPG based on blockchain technology (Lord help us!) that now appears unlikely to turn into anything at all. It seems abundantly plain that his heart hasn’t really been in making games for many years now. One hopes he will finally be content just to retire from an industry that has long since passed him by.

There’s something a little sad about watching Richard Garriott play the hits in his Lord British get-up as he closes in on retirement age.

However cheerless of a conclusion it might be, this very last article about Richard Garriott and Ultima marks a milestone for these histories. I’ve genuinely loved some of the Ultima games I’ve played these past fifteen years: Ultima I for its irrepressible teenage-Dungeonmaster enthusiasm, Ultima VII for its literary and thematic audacity, Ultima Underworld for its bold spirit of innovation. Most of all, I found myself loving the rollicking Worlds of Ultima games, two of the least played, least remembered entries in the series. (By all means, go check them out if you haven’t tried them!) As for the rest — at least the ones that came before Ultima VIII — I can see their place in history and see why others love or once loved them, even if I do also see them more as artifacts of their time than timeless.

But such carping is almost irrelevant to the cultural significance of Ultima. Richard Garriott had a huge impact on thousands upon thousands of people through Ultima IV in particular, a game which caused many of its young players to think seriously about the nature of morality and their place in the world for the very first time. Coming from a fellow not much older than they were, raised on the same sci-fi flicks and fantasy fiction that they were consuming, moral philosophy felt more real and relevant than it did when it was taught to them in school. Small wonder that so many of them still adore him for what his work meant to them all those years ago, still rush to defend him whenever a curmudgeon like myself points out his feet of clay. And that’s fine; we need to be clear-eyed about things sometimes, but at other times we just need our heroes.

So, let us bid a fond farewell to Richard Garriott — or, if you insist, Lord British, the virtuous king of Britannia. His legacy as one of gaming’s greatest visionaries is secure.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The books Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark by Richard Garriott with David Fisher; Through the Moongate: The Story of Richard Garriott, Origin Systems Inc. and Ultima, in two parts by Andrea Contato; Ultima IX: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide; Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay. Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of December 6 1991, February 10 1995, and September 20 1996; Next Generation of March 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1992 and February 2000.

Online sources include “Ultima IX Nitpicks on the Tapestry of the Ages” on Hacki’s Ultima Page; Noah Anwiler’s video lacerations of Ultima IX; the Ultima Codex’s “Development History of Ultima IX“; Ultima Codex interviews with Mike McShaffry and Bill Randolph; an old GameSpot interview with McShaffry; Julian Schoffel’s Ultima IX retrospective for Growling Dog Games; a December 1999 group chat with some of the Ultima IX team; Desslock’s October 1998 interview with Richard Garriott for GameSpot; Trent C. Ward’s review of Ultima IX for IGN; KiraTV’s documentary about Shroud of the Avatar (but do be aware that the first part of this video uncritically regurgitates the legend rather than the reality of Richard Garriott’s pre-millennial career).

Where to Get It: Ultima IX: Ascension is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.

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Posted by Jimmy Maher on February 6, 2026 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: garriott, origin, ultima, ultima ix

Mr. Roberts Goes to Hollywood, Part 2: The Producer

05 Dec

This article tells part of the story of Chris Roberts.

With the Wing Commander movie having gone down in flames, there was nothing left for Chris Roberts and the rest of Digital Anvil to do but go back to making games. This undoubtedly pleased Microsoft, which had been waiting for some return on its generous investment in what it had thought was a new games studio for more than two years now. Yet Microsoft must have been considerably less pleased by the actual states of the game projects being undertaken by Digital Anvil. For they rather belied Roberts’s repeated assurances that doing the special effects for the movie wouldn’t affect the games at all. Of the five game projects that had been begun before the movies came calling, Robert Rodriguez’s Tribe had ended with his departure and Highway Knight had also been quietly abandoned. Two of the other projects — the real-time-strategy game Conquest and the crazily ambitious alternative-life-in-a-box Freelancer — were spinning their wheels with no firm timetable.

That did at least leave Starlancer to stand out as a rare example of good sense. At the height of his brother’s movie mania, Erin Roberts had flown to Britain, to place his Starlancer design documents in the hands of a new outfit called Warthog, located in the Robertses’ old hometown of Manchester. The first tangible product to result from Microsoft’s investment in Digital Anvil would thus come from a sub-contractor rather than from the studio itself.

Starlancer shipped in April of 2000, whereupon it became clear that, while Warthog had done a competent job with it, they hadn’t been able to make it feel fresh or exciting. “An interest-killing combination of ennui and déjà vu snakes through the whole endeavor,” wrote Computer Gaming World. In terms of presentation, it most resembled a higher-resolution version of Wing Commander II, the last game in the series before digitized human actors entered the picture. It too made do with straightforward mission briefings and the occasional computer-generated cutscene. By no means ought this to have been an automatically bad thing. Yet Starlancer lacked the spark that might have let it challenge the previous year’s Freespace 2 for the title of the 1990s space sim’s crowning glory. It sold like the afterthought it felt like.

In the meantime, Chris Roberts had picked up the pieces after the disappointment of the Wing Commander movie’s reception and unleashed his prodigious capacity for enthusiasm upon the Freelancer project. As he told gaming magazines and websites throughout 1999 and 2000, his goal was to create a “detailed, dynamic, living world” — or rather a galaxy, in which you could travel from planet to planet in your customized spaceship, doing just about anything you could imagine.

Freelancer is way beyond anything I’ve done in the Wing Commander universe. It’s going to be a fully functioning, living, breathing universe with a whole ecosystem. You can see the promise in something like Privateer, but this is geometrically [exponentially?] beyond that game. It’s like building a city. [?] Compared to Privateer, the scope, the dynamic universe — it’s all 3D — is much more interesting. There’s much more intrigue the player can get involved in. Everything’s rules-based versus scripted. Commerce happens, trade happens, and piracy happens because of what’s going on in the game universe and not because of scripted events.

Freelancer could be played alone, but would well and truly come alive only when played online, as described by Computer Gaming World:

Freelancer’s multiplayer game will be a massively-multiplayer universe where thousands of players will be able to fly around and interact with each other in a variety of capacities. Digital Anvil envisions a dynamic, socially-oriented game that features the single-player game’s politics and clans as a backdrop. This multiplayer game will also permit you to ally with one of the main houses in the game, or go it alone.

Perhaps the coolest potential feature is the ability to own your own base…

Any of you reading this article who have been following the more recent career of Chris Roberts will readily recognize the themes here. Roberts is not a designer with a huge number of grand conceptual ideas, but once he has one he likes, he holds onto it like a dog does a bone.

Alas, by the summer of 2000 Microsoft was finally running out of patience. Seeing Digital Anvil’s lack of concrete progress toward finishing Freelancer as their fourth anniversary as a studio approached, the mega-corp was becoming restless. Even Erin Roberts seemed to be losing patience with his brother. With Chris’s acquiescence, he set up his own studio in Austin, called Fever Pitch Studios, to finish Digital Anvil’s long back-burnered real-time-strategy game Conquest. It would emerge in August of 2001 under the name of Conquest: Frontier Wars, the second Digital Anvil game that had had to leave its place of birth in order to come to fruition. It would prove no more successful than Starlancer, drowning in a sea of similar games.

Well before then, Microsoft reluctantly concluded that Chris Roberts, the whole reason it had invested so heavily in Digital Anvil in the first place, was the primary reason that the studio couldn’t finish a single game on its own. Still not wanting to raise a scandal the year before the Xbox launched to signal an even deeper commitment to games, it “offered” to buy Roberts out, a transaction which would give it a majority stake in the studio. On December 5, 2000, the press release went out: “Microsoft has reached a preliminary agreement to buy Digital Anvil. The acquisition will strengthen our commitment to producing top-quality PC and Xbox titles.” Roberts was to be given the face-saving ongoing role of “creative consultant” on Freelancer, but the reality was that he had been fired from his own company for his inability to keep to a schedule and hold to a plan. His time at Digital Anvil had resulted in one commercially failed and critically panned movie, plus two games that had had to be sub-contracted out to other developers in order to get them finished; both of them as well had been or would become commercial failures. Yet Chris Roberts walked away from Digital Anvil much wealthier than when he had gone in. He told the press that he would “take some time off to kind of rethink what I want to do in the interactive-entertainment field.” When he was done thinking, he would decide to go back to movies instead of games.

In the meantime, Microsoft installed a new management team down in Austin, with orders to sort through the unfocused sprawl that Freelancer had become and find out if there was a game in there that was worth saving. Perhaps surprisingly, they decided that there was, and turned the project over to a producer named Phil Wattenberger and a lead designer named Jörg Neumann, both Origin Systems alumni who had worked on the old Wing Commander games. At Microsoft’s behest, they steered Freelancer in a slightly more casual direction, making the player’s ship easily — in fact, optimally — controllable using a mouse alone. The mouse-driven approach had actually originated during Roberts’s tenure, but there it had been tied to a customizable and upgradable “Neuronet,” an onboard artificial intelligence that was supposed to let you vibe-sim your way to glory. That got jettisoned, as did many other similarly unwieldy complications. The massively-multiplayer living galaxy, for example, became a single-player or locally multiplayer one that wasn’t quite so living as once envisioned.

When it finally shipped in March of 2003, Freelancer garnered unexpectedly strong reviews; Computer Gaming World called it “the best Chris Roberts space sim Chris Roberts didn’t actually make.” But it wasn’t rewarded commensurately in the marketplace. Even with its newfound accessibility, it was hard for it to shake the odor of an anachronism of the previous decade among gamers in general; meanwhile the dwindling number of TIE Fighter and Freespace enthusiasts had a tendency to reject it for being irredeemably dumbed-down. Instead of marking the beginning of a new era for the space sim, it went down in history as a belated coda: the very last space sim to be put out by a major publisher with real promotional efforts and the hope — unrealized in this case — of relatively high sales behind it.

As for Digital Anvil: it was shut down by Microsoft once and for all in November of 2005, after completing just one more game, a painfully unoriginal Xbox shoot-em-up called Brute Force. Two games finished in almost nine years, neither of them strong sellers; the most remarkable thing about Digital Anvil is that Microsoft allowed it to continue for as long as it did.

By the time his games studio shuffled off this mortal coil, Chris Roberts had been living in Hollywood for a number of years. And he had found a way to do pretty well for himself there, albeit in a role that he had never anticipated going in.

The decade that Chris Roberts spent in Hollywood is undoubtedly the least understood period of his career today, among both his detractors and his partisans. It is no secret why: documentation of his activities during the decade in question is far thinner on the ground than during any other time. Roberts arrived in Hollywood as just another semi-anonymous striver, not as the “game god” who had given the world Wing Commander. No one in Tinsel Town was lining up to interview him, and no one in the press paid all that much attention to what he got up to. Still, we can piece together a picture of his trajectory in which we can have reasonable confidence, even if some of the details remain hazy.

Roberts moved to Hollywood in the spring of 2001 with his windfall from the Digital Anvil buyout burning a hole in his pocket. Notwithstanding the fiasco that had been Wing Commander: The Movie, he still harbored serious ambitions of becoming a director, probably assuming that his ability to finance at least part of the budget of any film he was placed in charge of would give him a leg up. He even brought a preliminary script to show around town. It was called The American Knight, being a cinematic reinterpretation of another computer game: in this case, Origin Systems’s 1995 game Wings of Glory, which was itself yet another variation on the Wing Commander theme, dealing with the life of a World War I fighter ace in the air and on the ground. In an even more marked triumph of hope over experience, Roberts also nursed a dream of making a live-action Wing Commander television series. He founded a production company of his own, called Point of No Return Films, to forward both of these agendas. January of 2002 found Point of No Return at the Sundance Film Festival; according to E! Online, they “threw an after-hours shindig that attracted 250 revelers, with Treach and De La Soul among them.” It really did help Roberts’s cause to have some money to splash around.

But Roberts soon found that the people he met in Hollywood knew Wing Commander, if they knew it at all, only as a misbegotten flop of a film. And they weren’t much more interested in his World War I movie. They were, on the other hand, always ready to talk backroom business with someone who had some number of millions in his pocket, as Roberts did. What followed was a gradual but inexorable pivot away from being a filmmaker and toward being a film enabler, one of those who secured the cash that the creative types needed to do their thing. A watershed was reached in March of 2002, when Point of No Return Films morphed into Ascendant Pictures, whose focus was to be “improving film value in foreign territories (presales), attracting top talent and film projects, and generating equity investment in films.” It wasn’t the romantic life of an auteur, but it did show that Chris Roberts was learning to talk the talk of back-office Hollywood, aided and abetted by a network of more experienced hands that he was assembling around him. Among them was a German immigrant named Ortwin Freyermuth, who would become the most important and enduring business partner of Roberts’s post-Origin career.

Ortwin Freyermuth, right, discusses a director’s cut of Das Boot with the film’s original editor Hannes Nikel circa 1997. Like Chris Roberts, Freyermuth really does love movies.

Freyermuth was renowned in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of Hollywood for having pioneered an incredibly useful funding model for American films. It hinged on a peculiarity of German tax law that had been intended to encourage local film-making but instead wound up becoming a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, played out on an international stage. The original rule, as implemented by the German Ministry of Finance in the 1970s, stated that any money that a German resident invested into a film production could be immediately deducted from his or her taxable income as if it was a total loss. It was hoped that this would encourage more well-heeled Germans to invest in homegrown movies, in order to combat the creeping mono-culture of Hollywood and ensure that Germans would have films to see that dealt with contemporary life in their own country. In time, this well-meaning measure would produce just the opposite result.

Enter Ortwin Freyermuth, a lawyer who enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the mid-1980s to study international copyright law. When he stumbled across the German law I’ve just described in the course of his studies, he noted with no small excitement what it didn’t say: that the films that were deemed eligible for the tax deduction had to be German films. He arranged to fund the 1990 movie The Neverending Story II almost exclusively with German money. This first experiment in the field was not so egregious compared to what would come later, given that the movie was also shot in Germany, albeit using mostly American actors. Then again, it was only a proof of concept. Freyermuth co-founded Capella Films thereafter to make German financing a veritable way of life for Hollywood. “In the best Hollywood tradition,” wrote Variety in 1994, “the company is rife with layers of relationships, both contractual and personal, here and abroad, such that an organizational chart, if one existed, would have more lines and intersections than fractal math.” Such byzantine structures, which had a way of obscuring realities upon which people might otherwise look askance, were standard operating procedure for Freyermuth.

The Freyermuth model spread throughout Hollywood as the 1990s wore on. It seemed like a win-win, both to those in California and to the Germans who were suddenly funding so many of their movies. In some cases, you could just borrow the money you wanted to invest, use your investment to reduce your taxable income dramatically, then pay off the loan from the returns a year or two later. And there was nothing keeping you from doing this over and over, year after year. Large private-equity funds emerged in Germany, pooling the contributions of hundreds of shareholders to invest them in movies, 80 percent of them made outside of the country. These Medienfonds became as ordinary as any other form of financial planning for Herr und Frau Deutschland. They were great for people on the verge of retirement: make an investment just before retiring, then enjoy the return afterward when your tax rate was lower. They were great for spreading out and reducing the tax liability that accompanied a major windfall, great for parents wishing to move money into the hands of their grown children without getting hit by high inheritance taxes. For Hollywood, meanwhile, they turned into a money spigot like no other. Insiders took to calling it “stupid German money,” because the people behind the spigot tended to take it in stride even if the films they were investing in never turned much of a profit. The real point of the investment was the tax relief; any additional profits that emerged were just gravy. The highest tax bracket in Germany at the time was about 51.5 percent. If you were in this tax bracket, then as long as you got at least half of your money back, you came out ahead.

The sheer ubiquity of these media funds placed the German people’s elected representatives in Berlin in a delicate situation; a growing number of their own constituents were benefiting from the current state of the law. Nevertheless, in 1999 the Ministry of Finance made an attempt to stop the madness. It revised the rules to bring them into closer alignment with those that governed other, superficially similar European incentive schemes: to qualify, a film now had to either be made in Germany at least partially or have a German copyright owner. (A law of this sort in Luxembourg was the reason that the Wing Commander movie had been shot in that country.) But stupid German money was now too entrenched as a modus operandi for people on either side of the Atlantic to walk away from it without putting up a fight. Artful dodgers like Ortwin Freyermuth realized that they could sell the copyright to a Hollywood production to a German media fund, whilst inserting into the sales contract a right to buy it back at a future date for an agreed-upon price. Far from being hobbled by the change in law, they realized that they could use it to charge a premium for the tax relief they were providing to the citizens of Germany. For example, the Germans paid $94 million to Paramount Pictures for the copyright to the 2001 videogame adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. When they sold it back, the Germans were paid only $83.8 million. The tax benefits were so great that it was still worth it. By now, half of all the foreign money pouring into Hollywood was coming from the single country of Germany: $1.1 billion in 2004 alone.

Despite their ongoing popularity among the well-heeled classes, the media funds became more and more controversial in Germany as the young millennium wore on. Germany was, it was more and more loudly complained, effectively subsidizing Hollywood using money that ought to have been going to roads, schools, hospitals, and defense. Stefan Arndt, the producer of the rather wonderful German movies Run Lola Run and Good Bye Lenin!, noted that he had had to go outside his homeland to finance them because his fellow citizens all had their gazes fixed so firmly on Hollywood. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Every other country in the world ties strings to its film subsidies.” Even a group of hardcore Tolkien fans sleeping in line the night of the premiere of The Return of the King, the third film in Peter Jackson’s disproportionately German-funded Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought the situation a little bit absurd when they were told about it: “I don’t think that’s good, because I think that the three films carry themselves, that they put in enough money, that it doesn’t necessarily have to be financed with taxes.”

Whether we wish to see him as a devil tempting a young Faust named Chris Roberts, or just as a savvy man of business who found a mentee he deemed well worth his time, Ortwin Freyermuth showed our once and future game developer how this particular game was played. In April of 2004, Roberts was credited onscreen for the first time in a finished wide-release film as an executive producer. As if to underscore the transition he had made from creator to enabler, it was not a terribly Chris Roberts sort of movie. The Punisher was based on a Marvel Comics character, but it was no family-friendly superhero movie either. It was a grim, dark, and brutally violent revenge fantasy that made Dirty Harry look cute and cuddly. “At the end,” wrote the late great Roger Ebert in his review, “we feel battered down and depressed, emotions we probably don’t seek from comic-book heroes.” Whatever else you can say about Wing Commander, it does care deeply about the nobler human virtues which The Punisher submerges under fountains of blood, even if Chris Roberts is often irredeemably clumsy at presenting them.

Although The Punisher may have had a B-movie attitude, it wasn’t a B-movie, any more than Wing Commander had been. It was made for a budget of $33 million, with a cast that included John Travolta. (Admittedly, he sleepwalks through his performance as if he can barely be bothered to learn his lines, but one can’t have everything.) However joyless fuddy-duddies like yours truly and Roger Ebert may find movies like this, there was and is a market for them. The Punisher earned $20 million more than it had cost to make at the box office even before the long tail of cable-television showings and home-video rentals was factored into the equation.

Chris Roberts was off and running as a backstage Hollywood player. At the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2005, his name could be seen alongside those of George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh among the producer credits for The Jacket, an arty but flawed science-fiction film starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, and the future Agent 007 Daniel Craig, with a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Again, these names are not the stuff of B-movies.

After The Jacket, Ascendant Pictures graduated from being an ancillary source of funding to becoming one of the primary production houses behind four reasonably high-profile independent features during 2005 and 2006. None of Lord of War, The Big White, Ask the Dust, or Lucky Number Slevin has gone down in film history as a deathless classic. Yet all of them could boast of A-list actors: Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ethan Hawke, Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson, Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, and Bruce Willis can all be found amongst their casts.

As you have probably guessed, all of these films were funded primarily with German money. The aggregate return on them was middling at best. Lord of War and Lucky Number Slevin did pretty well; The Big White and Ask the Dust flopped miserably. As already noted, though, the fact that most of their investors were more concerned about the tax benefits than a more conventional return on investment made this less of an issue than it might otherwise have been. Then, too, like mutual funds on the conventional stock market, the German media funds put money into many movies in order to avoid a single point of failure. A film that became an unexpected hit could easily offset two or three duds.

Chris Roberts had arrived in the Hollywood inner circle — perhaps still the outer edge of the inner circle, but still. He had come a long way from that nerdy bedroom coder who had bumped into an artist from Origin Systems one day in an Austin games shop. Now he was living in a luxury condo in the Hollywood Hills, with one live-in girlfriend and a former one stalking him. (Oddly, it would be the latter whom he would wind up marrying.) I’ve been pretty hard on Roberts in these articles, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to be so again — harder than ever, in fact — before we’re finished. But two things he most definitely is not are stupid or lazy. I wrote at the outset of this pair of articles that few people have ever stretched so thin a thread of creative talent as far as he has. Let me amend that bit of snark now by acknowledging that he could never have done so if he wasn’t smart and driven in a very different sort of way. And let me make it crystal clear as well that nothing I’ve written about Roberts’s tenure in Hollywood so far should necessarily lead us to criticize him in any but the most tempered of ways. In exploiting a loophole in German tax law for all it was worth, he wasn’t doing anything that tons of others — a full-fledged cottage industry worth of them, on both sides of the Atlantic — weren’t also doing. But there’s more to the story in his case. Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were actually near the center of one of the biggest financial scandals in modern German history, where dubious ethics crossed over into outright fraud.

Hollywood accounting is never simple. In that spirit, Ascendant Pictures spun off another company not long after its own founding. The wholly-owned subsidiary Rising Star Pictures was created to “closely cooperate with VIP Medienfonds Film and Entertainment”; this was the largest of all the German media funds, which collected almost half a billion Euros every year from its shareholders. Rising Star’s purpose was to be VIP’s anointed agent on the left side of the Atlantic, directing that fire hose of stupid German money around Hollywood. This meant the films of Ascendant, yes, but also those of others, to which Rising Star presumably charged a brokering fee. The final incarnation of Ascendant’s website, which is for some reason still extant, claims that Rising Star was involved in the funding of fourteen films in 2003 alone. A version of their site from March of 2005, accessible today via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, heavily stresses the relationship with VIP, calling Rising Star the latter’s “primary placement agent.” This was a big, big deal, given the sheer quantity of money that VIP was taking in and paying out; more than $250 million came into Rising Star from VIP during 2003. The speed and scale of Chris Roberts’s rise in Hollywood becomes even more impressive when figures like these are taken into consideration.

Andreas Schmid

Unfortunately, Andreas Schmid, the head of VIP, was arrested for tax fraud in Cologne in October of 2005. It seemed that he had not been putting most of the money he collected into movies with even ostensibly German owners, as the law required. At regular intervals, Schmid dutifully gave his shareholders a list of films into which he claimed to have invested their contributions. In actuality, however, VIP used only 20 percent of their money for its advertised purpose of funding movies. Schmid deposited the remaining 80 percent into his bank, either parking it there to earn long-term interest or sending it elsewhere from there, to places where he thought he could get a higher rate of return. He then sent fake earnings reports to his shareholders. By defrauding both the government and his clients in this way, he could make a lot of money for himself and his partners in crime. There is reason to believe that Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were among said partners, working the scam with him through Rising Star. I’ll return to that subject shortly.

For now, though, know that Schmid may have gotten so greedy because he knew the jig was soon to be up. Rumors were swirling in both Hollywood and Berlin throughout 2005 that the German Ministry of Finance had just about had enough of watching its tax money fly out of the country. The VIP Media scandal proved the last straw, if one was needed. In November of 2005, just one month after Schmid’s arrest, it was announced that blanket tax write-offs for film investments of any stripe were a thing of the past. Going forward, Hollywood would have to find another golden goose.

Even if they weren’t in on the fix, so to speak, the arrest of Schmid and the elimination of their primary funding mechanism could only have had a deleterious effect on Ascendant Pictures. Just when they had seemed to be hitting the big time, the ground had shifted beneath their feet. Those films that were already paid for by Germans could still be made, but there would be no more like them. The last Ascendant movie from the salad days to emerge from the pipeline was Outlander, their most expensive one ever and arguably also their worst one yet; not released until 2008 due to a whole host of difficulties getting it done, it managed to lose $40 million on a $47 million budget.

Deprived of the golden eggs, Ascendant blundered from lowlight to lowlight. They had to renege on a promise to Kevin Costner to line up the financing for a movie called Taming Ben Taylor, about “a grouchy, divorced man who refuses to sell his failing vineyard to the golf course next door.” Costner, who had been so excited about the movie that he had co-written the screenplay himself, sued Ascendant for $8 million for breach of contract; the case was settled in March of 2008 under undisclosed terms.

The first and only film that Ascendant helped to fund without German money only served to advertise how far down they had come in the world. Keeping with the golf theme, the low-rent Caddyshack ripoff Who’s Your Caddy?, which made Wing Commander look like Hamlet, was released in 2007 and failed to earn back its $7 million budget. It’s best remembered today for an anecdotal report that Bill Clinton loved it. By this point, Ascendant was little more than Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth; everyone else had jumped ship. (Freyermuth seems genuinely fond of Roberts. He has stuck with him through thick and thin.) The company would nominally continue to exist for another three years, but would shepherd no more movies to completion. Its final notices in the Hollywood trade press were in association with Black Water Transit, a locus of chaos, conflict, and dysfunction that culminated in a film so incoherent that it would never be released.

Over in Germany, Andreas Schmid was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in November of 2007. Yet the fallout from the VIP scandal was still ongoing. Shortly after his conviction in criminal court, 250 former shareholders in his fund, from whom the German government was aggressively demanding the taxes they ought to have paid earlier, launched a civil lawsuit against Schmid and the UniCredit Bank of Munich, where he had been depositing the money he claimed was being used to fund movies. The case hinged on a single deceptively simple question: had the information that Schmid sent to his shareholders in the reports issued by his fund been knowingly falsified? Some of the documents from these court proceedings, which would be decided in favor of the plaintiffs on December 30, 2011, can be accessed online at the German Ministry of Justice. I’ve spent some time going over them in the hope of learning more about the role played by Roberts and Freyermuth.

It’s been a challenge because the documents in question are not the trial transcripts, transcripts of witness interviews, nor the detailed briefs one might wish to have. They are rather strictly procedural documents, used by the court to schedule its sessions, outline the arguments being made before it, and handle the other logistics of the proceedings. Nonetheless, they contain some tantalizing tidbits that point more in the direction of Roberts and Freyermuth as co-conspirators with Schmid than as his innocent victims. I’ll tell you now what I’ve been able to glean from them as a non-lawyer and non-accountant. I’ve also made them available for download from this site, for any readers who might happen to have a more nuanced command of the German language and German law than I do.

The claimants in the lawsuit show great interest in Ascendant’s daughter company Rising Star, which they believe had no legitimate reason for existing at all, a judgment which is confirmed by the court in a preliminary draft of the final ruling. A document dated June 27, 2008, contains the startling charge that Rising Star “never produced films, but were merely an intermediary layer used for concealment,”^[1]Diese produzierten nie Filme, sondern waren lediglich eine zur Verschleierung eingeschaltete Zwischenebene. citing emails written by Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth to Andreas Schmid between 2003 and 2005 that have been submitted into evidence. (Sadly, they are not included among these papers.) Another document, dated May 15, 2009, calls Rising Star “an artificially imposed layer.”^[2]Eine künstlich dazwischen geschaltete Ebene. The final judgment concludes that Rising Star was an essential conduit of the fraud. What with Rising Star being “the primary placement agency for VIP,” as was acknowledged on the Ascendant website, all of the money passed through it. But instead of putting the entirety of the money into movies, it only used 20 percent of it for that purpose, funneling the rest of it back to the UniCredit Bank of Munich, Andreas Schmid’s co-defendant in the shareholder lawsuit. Even the 20 percent that stayed in Hollywood was placed with other production companies that took over the responsibility of overseeing the actual movies. Rising Star, in other words, was nothing but a shell company, a false front for getting the money from the investment fund into Schmid’s bank.

Both Roberts and Freyermuth were interviewed at least once, presumably in the United States, by investigators from the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office; this must have been done in the run-up to Schmid’s earlier, criminal trial. They were witnesses in that trial rather than defendants, yet the facts from their testimony that are cited here leave one wondering why that should be the case. From a document dated May 15, 2009: “The structure provided by VIP was a ‘pro forma transaction,’ solely intended to achieve a certain tax advantage. This was also explained by witness Freyermuth.”^[3]Die von VIP vorgegebene Struktur sei ein „Pro-Forma-Geschäft“ gewesen, alleine mit der Zielsetzung einen gewissen Steuervorteil zu erreichen. Dies habe auch der Zeuge Freyermuth so erläutert. The claimants cite the testimony of Roberts and Freyermuth as evidence that “the fund managers therefore instructed their American partners to submit inflated estimates.”^[4]Die Fondsverantwortlichen hätten deshalb ihre amerikanischen Partner veranlasst, überhöhte Schätzungen abzugeben. Likewise, it is written that Roberts and Freyermuth confessed to a falsified “profit distribution for the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which, according to the fund’s information, was 45 percent produced by VIP. In reality, the profit distribution did not correspond to the alleged 45-percent co-production share; it was significantly less favorable.”^[5]Insoweit greift die Klageseite auf eine Gewinnverteilung (sog „waterfall“) für den Film „Das Parfum“ zurück, der nach den Fondsangaben zu 45 % von VIP 4 produziert worden sei (sog. Coproduktion). Tatsächlich habe die Gewinnverteilung keinesfalls dem angeblichen Co.-Produktionsanteil von 45 % entsprochen, sie sei wesentlich ungünstiger gewesen. Even with the most open of minds, it is very hard to read statements like this and conclude that Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were anything other than active, willing co-conspirators in a large-scale, concerted fraud perpetrated on German investors and ordinary taxpayers.

In a document dated May 17, 2010, it is stated that Freyermuth and Roberts are being summoned to appear as witnesses before this court, on the morning and afternoon respectively of July 16, 2010. But a report dated July 8, 2010, states that “the hearing scheduled for July 16, 2010, is cancelled after witness Freyermuth informed the court that he could not appear on such short notice, and the summons for witness Chris Roberts was returned to the court as undeliverable.”^[6]Der Termin vom 16. Juli 2010 wird aufgehoben, nachdem der Zeuge Freyermuth mitgeteilt hat, nicht so kurzfristig erscheinen zu können, und die Ladung des Zeugen Chris Roberts als unzustellbar wieder in den Gerichtseinlauf gekommen ist. On August 3, 2010, the court states that they will be ordered to appear again, this time on September 20, 2010, saying that Freyermuth will be told to inform Roberts, who apparently still cannot be reached, about the summons.^[7]Zu diesem Termin sind die Zeugen Freyermuth und Roberts, letzterer über Freyermuth, zu laden. However, the paper trail ends there. It seems most likely that the two never did come to Munich to answer questions before the court.

Assuming all of this really is as bad as it looks, the final question we are left with is why and how Roberts and Freyermuth escaped prosecution. This question I cannot even begin to answer, other than to say that international prosecutions for financial malfeasance are notoriously difficult to coordinate and carry off. Perhaps the German authorities decided they had the ringleader in Andreas Schmid, and that was good enough. Perhaps Roberts and Freyermuth were given immunity in return for their testimony about the mechanics of the fraud in the United States. Or maybe there were some extenuating circumstances of which I am not aware, hard as it is to imagine what they might be.

In July of 2010, Roberts and Freyermuth sold Ascendant Pictures and all of its intellectual property to a film studio, film school, film distributor, real-estate developer, venture-capital house, and children’s charity — never put all your eggs in one basket! — called Bigfoot, located in, of all places, the Philippines. Roberts had left Hollywood some weeks or months before this transaction was finalized; thus the undeliverable court summons from Germany, addressed to the old Ascendant office. I do not know whether or how much he and Freyermuth ended up profiting personally from the VIP Media affair when all was said and done. I can only say that he does not seem to have been a poor man when he moved back to Austin to think about his next steps in life.

Most of you probably know what Chris Roberts got up to after leaving Hollywood, but a brief precis may be in order by way of conclusion, given that it will be many years at best before we meet him again in these histories.

Man of good timing that he was, Roberts started looking for fresh opportunities just as the new Kickstarter crowd-funding platform was tempting dozens of figures from the old days of gaming to launch new projects. In 2012, he joined together with a number of his earlier business partners, from both Digital Anvil and Ascendant Pictures — Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec, and Ortwin Freyermuth were all among them — to found Cloud Imperium Games and kick-start Star Citizen, the “virtual life in space” game that he had once thought Freelancer would become. Brilliantly executed from a promotional standpoint, it turned into the biggest crowd-funded game ever, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

As of this writing, thirteen years later, Star Citizen is officially still in the early alpha stage of development, although it is actively played every day by tens of thousands of subscribers who are willing to pay for the privilege. A single-player variant called Squadron 42 — the Starlancer to Star Citizen’s Freelancer — was originally slated for release in 2014, and is thus now eleven years behind schedule. Cloud Imperium promises that it is coming soon. (If and when it finally does surface, it will include motion-captured footage, shot in 2015, of Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, and Gary Oldman.)

Having long since exhausted its initial rounds of crowd-funding, Cloud Imperium now pays its bills largely through pay-to-win schemes involving in-game spaceships and other equipment, often exorbitantly priced; Ars Technica reported in January of 2024 that buying the full hangar of ships would set up you back a cool $48,000, almost enough to make you start looking around for the real spaceship in the deal. By any standard, the amount of money Cloud Imperium has brought in over the years is staggering. Assuming the whole thing doesn’t implode in the coming months, Star Citizen seems set to become the world’s first $1-billion videogame. While we wait, Wing Commander IV, the last game Chris Roberts actually finished, looks forward to its swift-approaching 30-year anniversary.

Naturally, all of this has made Cloud Imperium and Chris Roberts himself magnets for controversy. The loyal fans who continue to log on every day insist that the scale of what Star Citizen is trying to achieve is so enormous that the time and money being spent on it are unavoidable. Others accuse the game of being nothing but a giant scam, of a size and shameless audacity that would put a twinkle in even Andreas Schmid’s jaundiced eyes. Some of those who think the truth is most likely somewhere in between these extremes — a group that includes me — wonder if we should really be encouraging people to upload so much of their existence into a game in the first place. It seems to me that games that are meant to be enjoyed in the real world are healthier than those that set themselves up as a replacement for it.

Even if everything about Star Citizen is on the up-and-up, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that breathtaking incompetence has played as big a part as over-ambition in running up the budget and pushing out the timeline. I tend to suspect that some sort of spectacular collapse is more probable than a triumphant version 1.0 as the climax of the Star Citizen saga. But we shall see… we shall see. Either way, I have a feeling that Chris Roberts will emerge unscathed. Some guys just have all the luck, don’t they?

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: Computer Gaming World of November 1999, August 2000, and May 2003; PC Gamer of November 2000; Los Angeles Times of August 14 2008; Der Spiegel of June 13 1993; Variety of February 24 1994 and November 13 2007; Los Angeles Daily News of March 5 2008; Billboard of April 19 2005, May 10 2005, September 20 2005, October 4 2005, and October 11 2005; Austin Business Journal of April 20 2001; Die Welt of December 6 2009; Deutsches Ärzteblatt of May 2 2003; New York Times of December 13 2004; Forbes of May 31 2019.

Online sources about games include a 2002 Wing Commander retrospective by the German website PC Player Forever; a 2000 GameSpot interview with Chris Roberts; Freelancer previews on ActionTrip and Games Domain; the old Freelancer News site; and the GameSpot review of Freelancer. Vintage reports of Digital Anvil’s acquisition by Microsoft can be found on GameSpot, IGN, Microsoft’s home page, and EuroGamer.

Online sources about movies include “Send in the Clowns (But Beware of Their Funny Money)” by Doug Richardson, Roger Ebert’s review of The Punisher, a profile of Ortwin Freyermuth at Alumniportal Deutschland, “How to Finance a Hollywood Blockbuster” and “Hollywood’s Big Loss” by Edward Jay Epstein at Slate, the current zombie version of Ascendant’s website and the more incriminating 2005 version, Bigfoot’s 2011-vintage website, E! Online’s report from the 2002 Sundance festival, “Medienfonds als ‘Stupid German Money'” by Dr. Matthias Kurp at Medienmaerkte.de, “Filmfonds für Reiche” at ansTageslicht.de, “Was sind Medienfonds?” at Investoren Beteiligung, and “Stupid German Money” by Günter Jagenburg at Deutschlandfunk. I made extensive use of the Wing Commander Combat Information Center, and especially its voluminous news archives that stretch all the way back to 1998.

As noted above, I’ve made the documents I found relating to Rising Star in the class-action lawsuit against Andreas Schmid available for local download. By all means, German speakers, dive in and tell me if you can find anything I’ve missed! I retrieved them from the official German Federal Gazette, or Bundesanzeiger.

My invaluable cheat sheet for this article, as for the last, was “The Chris Roberts Theory of Everything” by Nick Monroe from Gameranx.

But my superhero and secret weapon was our own stalwart commenter Busca, who used his far greater familiarity with the German Web and the German language to find most of the German-language sources shown above, and even provided some brief summaries of their content for orientation purposes. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Do note, however, that the buck stops with me as far as factual accuracy goes, and that all of the opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are strictly my own.

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	Diese produzierten nie Filme, sondern waren lediglich eine zur Verschleierung eingeschaltete Zwischenebene.
↑2	Eine künstlich dazwischen geschaltete Ebene.
↑3	Die von VIP vorgegebene Struktur sei ein „Pro-Forma-Geschäft“ gewesen, alleine mit der Zielsetzung einen gewissen Steuervorteil zu erreichen. Dies habe auch der Zeuge Freyermuth so erläutert.
↑4	Die Fondsverantwortlichen hätten deshalb ihre amerikanischen Partner veranlasst, überhöhte Schätzungen abzugeben.
↑5	Insoweit greift die Klageseite auf eine Gewinnverteilung (sog „waterfall“) für den Film „Das Parfum“ zurück, der nach den Fondsangaben zu 45 % von VIP 4 produziert worden sei (sog. Coproduktion). Tatsächlich habe die Gewinnverteilung keinesfalls dem angeblichen Co.-Produktionsanteil von 45 % entsprochen, sie sei wesentlich ungünstiger gewesen.
↑6	Der Termin vom 16. Juli 2010 wird aufgehoben, nachdem der Zeuge Freyermuth mitgeteilt hat, nicht so kurzfristig erscheinen zu können, und die Ladung des Zeugen Chris Roberts als unzustellbar wieder in den Gerichtseinlauf gekommen ist.
↑7	Zu diesem Termin sind die Zeugen Freyermuth und Roberts, letzterer über Freyermuth, zu laden.

58 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on December 5, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: chris roberts, freelancer, microsoft, origin, space-sim, starlancer, wing commander

Mr Roberts Goes to Hollywood, Part 1: A Digital Anvil

21 Nov

This article tells part of the story of Chris Roberts.

What I’d really like to do is a game where you could travel from planet to planet — and there would be hundreds of planets — with full 3D action. You could go down and explore each planet in detail and interact with all sorts of live-action characters. Plus you could retool your ship with lots of different guns and engines.

The project would feature all the best elements of adventure and virtual reality, but with the same high production level of a Hollywood blockbuster. That means big-name stars and the look and quality of, say, Bladerunner. I guess my goal is to bring the superior production values of large Hollywood movies into the interactive realm — creating an environment that is really cool and fun and where you can spend hundreds of hours exploring a virtual universe that seems totally lifelike down to the smallest detail. Sort of a SimUniverse on steroids!

— Chris Roberts in early 1995, speaking from the department of The More Things Change…

One thing I believe I have learned during my 50-plus years on this planet is that flawed people are far more commonplace than genuinely, consciously bad ones. Given this, I try not to rush to attribute to malice aforethought that which can be explained by simple human weakness. I try to apply this rule when I weigh the surprising number of game developers who were well-nigh universally admired giants in their field during the twentieth century, only to become magnets for controversy in the 21st.

Thus I prefer to believe that Richard Garriott’s habit of lending his name to sketchy endeavors that never live up to expectations stems not from conscious grift but from a desire to still be seen as a gaming visionary, which is unfortunately accompanied by a reluctance to do the hard work that making really good games entails. Likewise, I think that Peter Molyneux’s habit of wildly over-promising stems not from his being “a pathological liar,” as journalist John Walker once infamously called him, but rather from a borderline pathological tendency to get high on his own supply. I’m prepared to come up with excuses for John Romero, for George Broussard, even for those two guys who have been trying to make a Space Quest successor — a dubiously necessary proposition in itself — for about fifteen years now. When you combine real but fairly venial character flaws with the eternal tendency of some fans to take their hobby just a little bit more seriously than it probably deserves, the result can be a toxic stew indeed.

Yet I must confess that one old warhorse from gaming’s younger days does give a degree of pause to my rationalizing. Few people have ever stretched so thin a thread of actual creative talent so far as has Chris Roberts. In the process, he’s amply demonstrated that his larger talents are for failing upward, and getting people to give him flabbergasting amounts of money while he’s at it. I’m not yet prepared to call him a conscious grifter, mind you, but I do think that there is a lot more plotting going on behind that seemingly guileless chipmunk smile of his than we might first suspect. Never fear: I’m not going to jump the chronology entirely to wade into the argument over whether Star Citizen, the most expensive game ever made even though it has not yet been made, was a giant scam from the start, a good-faith effort that later became a scam, or is still an honest endeavor thirteen years after its initial Kickstarter. What I do want to do is examine the period in Chris Roberts’s life between Wing Commander IV in 1996 and that first splashy Star Citizen Kickstarter of 2012. Who knows? Maybe doing so will help to explain some of what came later.

I have infinite respect for Chris Roberts, who wants to make interactive movies, but I can get a better cinematic experience by watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes than by playing Wing Commander IV.

— Warren Spector, March 1997

In the summer of 1996, after it had become clear that Wing Commander IV was going to struggle just to earn back its development budget of more than $10 million, the management of its publisher Origin Systems sat down with Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander series’s creator and mastermind, to discuss the future of what had been the most popular franchise in computer gaming just a few years earlier. With a heritage like that behind it, the inhabitants of Origin’s executive suites weren’t yet ready to give up on Wing Commander completely. Yet they made it clear to Roberts that the next installment would have to scale back the budget and place less emphasis on the interactive-movie side of the experience and more on the space-combat side, in order to address a mounting chorus of complaints that the latter had been allowed to grow stale and rote in the last couple of installments while Roberts poured all of his energy into the former. Roberts thought for a few days about whether he was willing to continue to make Wing Commander games under his managers’ new terms, then turned in his resignation. No one could possibly have imagined at the time that Chris Roberts, who was not yet 30 years old, would still be one of the most prominent game developers in the world 30 years later, even though he would never manage to complete and ship another game of his own during that span of time. Our world is a deeply strange place sometimes.

That October, Roberts filed the necessary paperwork to found a company of his own with two other former Origin people: his brother Erin Roberts, who had just produced the poorly received Wing Commander spinoff Privateer 2: The Darkening, and Tony Zurovec, the programmer and designer behind the reasonably successful action-adventures Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret. They called their new studio Digital Anvil. “I liked the idea of a name that could suggest Old World care and craftsmanship in the digital age,” said Roberts. “It’s like we’re hammering out fantastic experiences in our little forge.” By his account, their method of seeking funding was breathtaking in its naïveté. They got their hands on Bill Gates’s email address, and simply wrote him a letter. Incredibly, they received a call the next day from Ed Fries, who had been tasked with making Microsoft a major player in games, one of the few software markets the foremost ruthless mega-corporation of the era had yet to conquer. He had been given serious money to spend to make that initiative a reality. Digital Anvil, in other words, had been lucky enough to strike while the iron was hot.

On February 19, 1997, a press release announced that Microsoft had signed Digital Anvil to “a multi-title publishing deal” which entailed “a significant investment” on its part — in fact, an investment that made Microsoft the owner of just short of half of the new company. The trio of founders set up shop in rather lavish fashion in downtown Austin, Texas, not far from Origin’s offices. They hired an initial staff of about 35 people, who got to enjoy such Microsoft-funded perks as an onsite state-of-the-art movie theater with Dolby Sound and leather seats. On paper at least, the staff of Digital Anvil made for a diverse and impressive group. Hidden amidst a galaxy of bright and eager faces out of the nearby University of Texas could be glimpsed Chief Technology Officer John Miles, whose Miles Sound System had long been the standard for audio programming among game developers, and Robert Rodriguez, a young filmmaker who had recently directed Quentin Tarantino’s script of From Dusk Till Dawn and was now being talked about as the burgeoning Austin film scene’s next Richard Linklater. “The parameters of the film world are pretty set,” said Rodriguez. “You’ve got to work with a two-hour chunk of time and things like that. Some of the stories I want to tell don’t fit within those slots.”

Rodriguez’s presence was arguably the first sign of the muddled priorities that would become a fact of life at Digital Anvil. Chris Roberts told the magazine Texas Monthly in the summer of 1997 that the studio had four games in the works: a real-time-strategy game called Conquest, a Mad Max-inspired driving game called Highway Knight, a hyper-ambitious multiplayer space sim called Freelancer, and Rodriguez’s amorphous project, which was called Tribe. (“The idea is, he will write a movie, possibly direct it, and then write a game.”) Another game in the pipeline that went unmentioned was Erin Roberts’s Starlancer, which was to be a linear space sim with a set-piece story line, an even more obvious successor to Wing Commander than was Freelancer. (Students of the Robertses’ later careers will recognize a kinship between Freelancer and Starlancer on the one hand and Star Citizen and its single-player companion Squadron 42 on the other.) That’s five games in all: it was quite the agenda for such a small studio. And then the movies came calling.

If Robert Rodriguez was a filmmaker who was tempted by the possibilities of games, Chris Roberts was the opposite, a game maker who seemed for all the world like he really wanted to be making movies; if Wing Commander III and IV had shone a spotlight on nothing else, it was this. While still working for Origin Systems, he’d come up with an outline for a non-interactive Wing Commander movie. He gave it to Kevin Droney, a screenwriter who had earlier turned the Mortal Kombat games into a movie, to make a proper script out of it, then sent it to Hollywood on a wing and a prayer: “It was my passion project, my baby.” It finally reached a hard-bitten Svengali of a producer named Todd Moyer. He pronounced it “pretty bad” — “basically, it was a C-rate Star Wars ripoff” — but his ears perked up when the agent who had sent it to him explained that Wing Commander was a hit series of computer games. “I’m not very reverential toward videogame creators,” Moyer confesses. “Games just don’t get me excited.” Or rather, they didn’t do so as creative productions in their own right; as product lines, Moyer saw them as a largely untapped opportunity for franchising: “Once you own [the] intellectual property, you can carve out very different deals for the creators and for a lot of people.” Chris Roberts fell under Moyer’s spell from the first meeting, which came right in the middle of all of the work to build out Digital Anvil. For he had no fonder dream than that of making a real Hollywood movie, and he definitely wasn’t going to let the games studio he was building at the same time get in its way. Moyer was telling him precisely what he most wanted to hear.

That said, it’s fair to ask who was really pulling the wool over whose eyes. For all that the movie industry had a well-earned reputation for all manner of financial trickery, it was expected to reveal as a matter of course and trade-union law how much each film had cost to make and how much it earned back in ticket sales. Meanwhile budgets and sales figures were regarded as trade secrets by game publishers, to be divulged only when doing so served their interests. It’s hard not to suspect that Chris Roberts benefited from this opacity, which required an insider’s perspective to begin to penetrate. Todd Moyer was no one’s idea of a babe in the wood; nor for that matter was Microsoft’s Ed Fries. Yet both were new to the games industry, and by all indications in a bigger hurry to sign deals than to do their due diligence. The culture of gaming moved fast in the 1990s. Describing Wing Commander as a “series of hit computer games” in 1997 wasn’t an outright lie, but it did neglect the salient fact that this series’s best days as a marketplace proposition were already well behind it, that the last couple of Wing Commander games hadn’t been hits at all. While the series certainly still had its fans, far more hardcore gamers in 1997 were excited about Quake and Warcraft II and Diablo than Wing Commander. In short, there was ample reason for the observant to question how much appetite there really was for a Wing Commander movie — or, now that we’re on the subject, for the new space sims that Digital Anvil proposed to craft in the image of Chris Roberts’s most famous creation.

Nevertheless, Todd Moyer took it upon himself to make the movie happen, just as Microsoft had agreed to fund the games. He sent Droney’s screenplay to some (uncredited) script doctors for some hasty revision. He judged the new version “only a little bit better” when it came back to him, but decided it was good enough for franchise work. He convinced a rather bemused-seeming Origin Systems to agree to license the Wing Commander name and characters in return for a small piece of any profits. He convinced 20th Century Fox — the house that built Star Wars, as Chris Roberts knew well — to agree to distribute the eventual film to theaters. He didn’t even blink when Roberts came to him with his one real demand: that he be allowed to direct the movie himself. “No one gave a shit about Chris Roberts as a director or not a director,” he says. “With these movies, at the right price, nobody cares who directs them.”

In the end, Moyer put together what journalist Jamie Russell describes as “a stunning deal — or rather series of deals — that jigsawed together money from all over. It began with a small domestic minimum guarantee from Fox and was followed by a Luxembourg tax incentive, some French investment, an Australian tax shelter, UK financing, and foreign sales.” The whole pot together came to almost $30 million — a relatively modest sum by Hollywood action-movie standards, but three times what Chris Roberts had had to hand when he shot the movie parts of Wing Commander IV.

Roberts and Moyer would have few kinds words to say about one another in later years. “While Todd was good at doing deals, he didn’t give a damn or even know much about the creative process,” said Roberts in 2012. “As a first-time director, I really could have used the support of a proper creative producer who understood film-making and being on the set, rather than an ex-agent who couldn’t tell you the difference between a single or a master shot.” And yet for all the rancor that would follow the Wing Commander film becoming a laughingstock, it seems pretty clear from his subsequent career that Roberts was watching with keen eyes as Moyer scraped together funding for the movie in all sorts of head-scratching ways.

Indeed, even at this early juncture, Roberts was savvy enough to put together one eyebrow-raising arrangement of his own: he “hired” Digital Anvil, his own company, to provide the movie’s visual effects, thus funneling some substantial portion of that $30 million budget into his and his colleagues’ own coffers long before the movie ever made it into theaters. With this windfall, Digital Anvil doubled in size and announced to the world that they were now a cinematic special-effects house as well as a games studio. Chris Roberts insisted publicly that the two halves of the company were “entirely unrelated, except for me,” but nobody believed him. Coincidentally or not, John Miles and Robert Rodriguez both left Digital Anvil soon after. (Rodriguez would go on to become the marquee Hollywood director that Roberts had always dreamed of becoming, turning out hits such as Spy Kids and Sin City.) Microsoft, which had made its “significant investment” in Digital Anvil in the expectation that the studio would exclusively make games exclusively for it, could hardly have been pleased by the pivot into conventional film-making, but it showed remarkable patience and forbearance on the whole. Knowing that his mega-corp’s reputation as a ruthless monopolist preceded it, Ed Fries was determined to present a different face to the games industry, to show that Microsoft could be a good, supportive partner to the studios it took under its wing. An ugly lawsuit against Digital Anvil — even a justified one — would not have forwarded that agenda. Once again, in other words, Chris Roberts got lucky.

The cast of the Wing Commander movie was brokered by Todd Moyer, in ways intended to protect the piebald interests of his many investors. In one of their first conversations, he had carefully explained to Chris Roberts that Mark Hamill, the star of the third and fourth Wing Commander games, was not adored by the general public for having once played Luke Skywalker in the same way that he was by the hardcore-gaming demographics. To John and Jane Doe, he was just a middle-aged curiosity for the “Where are they now?” file. The rewritten script offered up as the protagonist a fresh-faced space jockey who had just earned his wings, a perfect fit for a younger, up-and-coming actor. It turned out that Fox had just such an actor in mind: Freddie Prinze, Jr., a 21-year-old who had recently become regular cover fodder for the teen magazines, thanks to a star turn in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a slasher flick that earned $125 million at the box office in 1997. He would play an earlier incarnation of Christopher Blair, Mark Hamill’s old role. For his sidekick Todd “Maniac” Marshall, Fox proposed another product of the 1990s teen-horror craze: Matthew Lillard, who had played a serial killer in Scream. Other cast members were hand-picked to enhance the film’s appeal in foreign markets: David Suchet, known to a generation of British television viewers for his depiction of Agatha Christie’s fussy detective Hercule Poirot; Jürgen Prochnow, who had portrayed a U-Boat captain in the German classic Das Boot; Tchéky Karyo, a veteran French character actor whose CV included films like The Bear and La Femme Nikita. Betwixt and between all of the new faces, there was some talk of bringing back some of the supporting cast from Wing Commander III and IV — the most sustained discussions were held with Malcolm McDowell — but all of those negotiations ultimately fell through for one reason or another. When all was said and done, the cast for the movie overlapped not at all with the one from the games.

As a byproduct of the Luxembourg tax incentives that had helped to bring it into being, the entirety of the movie was shot on a sound stage there between February and April of 1998. The process was by most accounts a difficult one at times. Not only had Chris Roberts never received any formal training as a film director, but the cast and crew had three different mother tongues, with wildly varying levels of proficiency in the other two languages. Still, by no means was it a case of rank amateurs at every level. The set designer, for example, was Peter Lamont, who came in fresh off James Cameron’s Titanic, the biggest blockbuster in film history; the cinematographer was Thierry Arbogast, who had just performed that same task for the The Fifth Element.

Once the shoot was finished, Chris Roberts returned to Austin with his reels of raw footage, to begin the work of splicing it together with the outer-space scenes being generated at Digital Anvil and turning it all into a proper movie. By December of 1998, he had a rough cut ready to go. In keeping with time-tested Hollywood tradition, Fox arranged for a handful of preview showings to ordinary members of the public. The feedback that came in was enough to tell the Fox executives, even if their own critical faculties could not, that they had a potential boat anchor — or maybe an anvil? — on their hands. They were left pondering what to do with this less-than-stellar take on outer-space adventure.

After hearing that Fox was considering condemning the movie to the memory hole of a direct-to-videotape release, Todd Moyer tried to buy the film studio out so that he could shop Wing Commander elsewhere. But at the end of January of 1999, just when he thought the buy-out deal was done, he got a phone call from Tom Sherack, Fox’s head of distribution. As Moyer reported it to Jamie Russell decades later, their conversation went something like this:

“Todd, I’m not giving you the picture.”

“But we had a deal!”

“Good fucking luck. I’ll never sign the papers. I don’t give a shit. I’m not doing it. If you want to have a huge lawsuit, go ahead.”

“Tom, I’ve got to tell you…

“No! It’s coming out in six weeks, and it’s going to have the Phantom Menace trailer on it.”

The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’s feverishly anticipated first prequel to his classic Star Wars trilogy, was scheduled to hit theaters in May of 1999. At the last minute, Fox had had the clever idea of attaching the second trailer for that movie — the first had come in November of 1998 — to the start of Wing Commander, making the latter the first place where the Star Wars faithful could catch this glimpse of what awaited them in a couple of months. Wing Commander was promptly slated for release in March of 1999, giving George Lucas and company just enough time to put the trailer together. It left no time, on the other hand, to mount a proper advertising campaign for Wing Commander. Nor did it leave Chris Roberts and company much time to try to fix the many infelicities that had been pointed out by the preview audiences.

The official Wing Commander world premiere took place on March 12. It was less than a gala affair, being held in Austin rather than Hollywood, with none of the cast in attendance; the actors in question were still saying polite things about the movie when forced into it, but quite obviously preferred to talk about something else. (Freddie Prinze, Jr., would grow less polite in later years, calling Wing Commander “a piece of shit” that he couldn’t stand to see or even think back on.) It appeared on 1500 screens across the country that same weekend, complete with the Star Wars trailer that Fox hoped would prove its secret weapon.

Alas, even this potent last-minute triage wasn’t enough to save the patient. Wing Commander brought in $5 million the first weekend, good for seventh place in the box-office listings. The reviews that appeared at the start of the following week were savage. Every critic in the land piled on to see who could come up with the best zinger. (Cinemax: “Filmed in Luxembourg(!), this low-flying turkey is an international co-production between the U.S., France, England, Germany, and Ireland. That pretty much spreads the blame as Wing Commander, in any language, goes down in computer-generated flames.” Entertainment Weekly: “It’s enough to make you wonder if the geniuses at Fox deliberately decided to release a movie this lifeless. They may have figured that everyone who showed up to see the new Star Wars trailer would be so bored by the main feature that they’d exit the theater screaming for a science-fiction movie that was actually fun.” SF Gate: “Wing Commander is the latest exhibit in the case to prove that Star Wars has wrecked American cinema.”) Perhaps in response to the reviews, more likely just as a result of natural gravity — most of the hardcore fans of the computer games presumably went out to see it right away — the movie earned just $2.2 million the next weekend, dropping to eleventh place. The third weekend, it was in fifteenth place with earnings of $1.1 million, and then it was out of American theaters and off the charts forever. A planned panoply of Wing Commander action figures, toy spaceships, backpacks, lunchboxes, tee-shirts, and Halloween costumes either never reached stores at all or were pulled from the shelves in short order. Star Wars this movie was not, in all sorts of ways.

Origin flew the teenage proprietors of the biggest Wing Commander fan site down to Austin for the premiere. (Aren’t they adorable, by the way?) They saw the movie four times in a single weekend — not a fate I would wish on anyone, but more power to them.

Chris Roberts at the premiere. Another fan in attendance wrote that “he seemed to be stressing that if he had had more money and time to spend on the movie, he would have made some changes.”

Richard Garriott at the premiere.

The general public was somewhat less enthused than our friends who saw the movie four times. These signs started to appear in theaters after it became a trend for patrons to buy a ticket, go in to watch the Star Wars trailer, then walk out and ask for their money back.

In light of the critical drubbing to which it was subjected and its modern-day status as a cinematic punchline, I watched Wing Commander: The Movie for the first time recently with, shall we say, considerable trepidation. My first reaction might serve as an argument for the value of low expectations: in many ways, it actually wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.

The opening credits were snazzy and stylish, worthy of a far more respectable film. Even once the movie proper began, the production values and acting weren’t anywhere near as terrible as I had anticipated. This is not inexplicable: the belief shared by many fans that Wing Commander was an ultra-low-budget movie doesn’t hold water. As points of comparison, take the three vastly better received films which created and for a time cemented Freddie Prinze, Jr.’s standing as a teen heartthrob. I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and She’s All That all sported budgets well below that of Wing Commander; the last named, which was shot after Wing Commander but released before, had only one-third the budget of Chris Roberts’s film. Of course, none of these others were science-fiction films with a need for lots of fancy visual effects. Nonetheless, you don’t sign a heavyweight production designer like Peter Lamont, nor for that matter a potential star-in-the-making like Prinze, if you don’t have a certain level of connections and financial resources.

All of which is to say that, if you were to walk into a room where Wing Commander happened to be showing on the television, it wouldn’t jump out to you immediately as B-grade schlock in the way of, say, the notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space. The sets look good enough; the cinematography and sound design are perfectly professional; the acting doesn’t stand out for being awful either. In an ironic sort of way, all of this is a problem, for it means that Wing Commander manages to be just good enough to be merely boring and irritating rather than lovable in its sheer cluelessness.

My second big takeaway from watching the Wing Commander movie is closely related to my first: I was surprised at how similar it is to the computer games, after having heard legions of fans complain about just the opposite. There’s the same jarring bifurcation between the scenes of character interaction, which are shot like a conventional movie, and the ones depicting the action in outer space, which are completely computer-generated and, indeed, look very much like scenes from a game — a game, that is, made five to ten years after this movie was made. Likewise, there’s the same sense of a cast and crew of professionals doing their level best, knowing that what they’re creating is never going to be high art or even high entertainment, but feeling a craftsman’s responsibility to make the material come across as well as it possibly can. Nobody in film ever wants to be the weak link, even on a bad movie.

Rather than being awful on the face of it, then, Wing Commander is awful in a subtler way. Its problems all stem from the script, which doesn’t do the things that even popcorn-movie storytelling needs to do to be successful, and from its director’s baffling decisions about what parts of the script to leave in and leave out. A work of fiction — any work of fiction — is a clockwork mechanism beneath the surface. The author has to move her characters around in arbitrary ways to set up the plot beats her narrative requires. The art comes in making the mechanistic feel natural, even inevitable; at the risk of hopelessly muddling my metaphors, call it applying the flesh and sinew that are needed to conceal the bones of the story. In Wing Commander, said bones are poking out everywhere. The result feels so artificial that one is left looking for a stronger word than “contrived” to try to capture it.

Take the opening beats. The race of evil felines known as the Kilrathi attack a Terran Confederation flagship and secure — just to provide a note of contemporary relevance for those of us living in the third decade of the 21st century — an “AI” that can lead them to Earth, the location of which planet is for some reason unknown to them. This is an existential threat for the Terrans.

There’s just one ship that might be able to intercept the Kilrathi and report on their numbers and disposition before they make the jump to Earth: the outer-space aircraft carrier Tiger’s Claw. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for Terran High Command to tell this ship to do so because it is “beyond the reach of our communications.” (Presumably, the Tiger’s Claw’s radio will start working again before it’s time to send the report on the Kilrathi.) Luckily, a resupply vessel which can be reached is on its way out to the Tiger’s Claw. Even better, this resupply vessel is captained by one “Paladin,” some sort of special Terran “scout” who is only playing the role of the captain of an ordinary freighter. (What he or anyone else hopes to achieve by this deception is never explained.) Admiral Tolwyn, who stands at the head of the Terran High Command brain trust, such as it is, likes Paladin so much that he gave him his ring. (Isn’t that sweet?) Now, he needs only call up his favorite scout and tell him to tell the captain of the Tiger’s Claw to get a move on and intercept the Kilrathi.

Is this what he in fact does? No, reader, it is not. Instead Tolwyn remembers that the freighter happens to be ferrying a couple of young pilots fresh out of flight school over to the Tiger’s Claw. One of them is named Christopher Blair. Another Blair with whom he once served — now sadly deceased — was the kid’s father. “He was a good man,” Tolwyn says. On the basis of a zealous belief in eugenics, he elects not to convey the vital orders and intelligence to the grizzled special agent to whom he gave his ring but rather to the wet-behind-the-ears kid whom he’s never met.

It just goes on and on and on like this, with characters constantly making decisions that don’t make any sense. If you want your audience to become invested in your story, you have to provide them with a coherent internal logic that they can follow, no matter how outlandish your larger premise may be.

Another barrier to investment, likewise reflecting a bizarre lack of understanding of the fundamentals of this sort of fiction, is the yawning absence of a villain. Star Wars had Darth Vader; the best-ever Star Trek movie had Khan. Wing Commander has a few animatronic cats who spend less than five minutes onscreen and look absolutely appalling — and not in a good way — while they’re doing it; the Kilrathi are the one place where Wing Commander really does look like a B-movie through and through. To his credit, Chris Roberts was perceptive enough to see that it wouldn’t be a good idea to use the version of the Kilrathi from the games, actors in furry costumes who wound up looking more like cuddly department-store mascots or sports-team cheerleaders than a galaxy-enslaving force for evil. But what he was able to put in their place was not any better, as he also recognized. This explains why they got so little screen time: “The Kilrathi sucked and were basically cut out of the movie.”

A subtler, more aesthetically sensitive director might have spun our lack of eyes on the Kilrathi into a positive, turning their very mysteriousness into a sinister virtue in much the same way that the FreeSpace space sims did their evil aliens, the Shivans. Suffice to say that Chris Roberts was not such a director. The lack of an identifiable antagonist just emphasizes the sense of plot gears arbitrarily clanking around, oblivious to the requirements of compelling fiction. We see a lot of people fighting and dying, but we never know why or against whom or what. A popcorn movie without a villain just doesn’t work.

As for the heroes: this cast could have easily served the purpose if given a stronger script to work with. None of the young actors comes across as unlikable, but no actor could fully compensate for dialog as bad as this. “It takes balls — big balls, not ovaries — to keep track of four enemy fighters!” says Maniac, as the script desperately tries to interest us in a bantering will-they-or-won’t-they situation between him and one of the female pilots. Wing Commander is that guy at a party who thinks he’s hilarious and cool, whom everyone else just thinks is an annoying dweeb.

The image that springs to my mind now when I think back on Wing Commander: The Movie is one that nobody ever talks about. Early in the film, when he and Maniac are still aboard the tramp freighter, Blair has to plot a daredevil hyperspace jump because… Reasons. He does so, using what looks like a Casio calculator keyboard and some innate genetic talent that comes courtesy of his background as a “Pilgrim,” a whole other unnecessary and confusing thing in the script that I can’t be bothered to go into here. Anyway, he plots the jump, and just as it’s about to be made Maniac raises his hands above his head as if he’s riding a roller coaster. As he does so, you can see the most delicious expression on actor Matthew Lillard’s face: he looks all sorts of confused and bemused, as if wondering if this lame joke is really what he’s being asked to do here, even as he’s gamely trying to stay in character and look cocksure and pumped. He gets through the scene, the joke utterly fails to land… and Chris Roberts proceeds to put it in the final cut of his movie, no doubt sure that his audience will find it hilarious. It’s what the kids today call Cringe.

In a saner world, I would be able to end this article by telling you that all of the foregoing explains why Chris Roberts never got another sniff at a career in Hollywood. But he did, my friends… he did. Failing upwards is his superpower.

You might want to hold on tight, Maniac. It’s gonna be a rough ride.

Our principal cast of hot young pilots. From left to right, Saffron Burrows plays Lieutenant Commander “Angel” Deveraux; Ginny Holder is Lieutenant Rosie “Sassy” Forbes; Mathew Lillard is Todd “Maniac” Marshall; Freddie Prinze, Jr., is Lieutenant Christopher “Maverick” Blair. (Is a case of Top Gun envy involved?) Of the four, Lillard makes the best of the bad situation and delivers the most energetic performance. Prinze mostly just stands around looking conflicted and earnest. “I tried to make him young and confused,” Prinze said when asked what he wanted to bring to the character. Exactly what every action-movie lead should aspire to be, right?

Devearux enforces discipline in her squadron by pulling out a gun and threatening to murder one of her pilots. None of her superiors aboard the Tiger’s Claw expresses any concern about this unhinged behavior. For all his obvious fascination with military culture, I’m not sure that Chris Roberts understands how it works.

Maniac and Sassy consummate their romantic relationship with a lot of clumsy thrashing about without ever actually taking off their clothes. Thank God for small mercies. I shudder to think what a real Chris Roberts-directed sex scene would be like.

Oddly, it’s the veteran David Suchet who delivers the worst performance of the cast, constantly swinging between equanimity and rage for no apparent reason. I’m not sure I’d put Hercule Poirot in charge of a starship anyway.

At one point, our World War II aircraft carrier in space suddenly turns into a submarine, complete with sonar pings and “Silence in the boat!” (never mind the soundless vacuum of space) and all the rest. Why? Because Chris Roberts thinks submarines are pretty cool too, that’s why. At least actor Jürgen Prochnow (left) had experience with this sort of thing…

Our space fighters, on the other hand, are decommissioned 1950s-era fighter jets when they’re at home in the hangar.

For the most part, the visual effects that were created by Digital Anvil while they were supposed to be making games for Microsoft aren’t terrible.

The special effects get themselves into serious trouble only when they’re blended with shots of the actors. Not coincidentally, videogames tended to have the same problem.

Do you prefer your Kilrathi plush, as in the games…

…or plastic, as in the movie? This is what is known as a Hobbes’s Choice. (There’s a dad joke in there for you old-school Wing Commander fans.)

There has to be someone else out there besides us. I hope they won’t be hostile, and I hope Earth is cool and doesn’t screw up first contact. No doubt our military will be there to greet them, defending the country. That’s not good. These aliens will come out, and they’re not going to be heavily armed because they’re not about that. We have to be mellow and peaceful. If that happens, it’ll be cool. But I don’t think it’ll happen that way. I think we’ll come hard, which is probably standard operating procedure. And that’s not a cool thing because we’ll probably get worked.

— Words of wisdom from Freddie Prinze, Jr., on the possibility of real extraterrestrial contact

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell. Next Generation of March 1997; Computer Gaming World of May 1995 and June 1998; Starlog of May 1999, Austin Business Journal of March 2 1997, Texas Monthly of September 1997.

Online sources include “Chris Roberts explains what went wrong on the Wing Commander film” by Ben Kuchera at Penny Arcade, a 1998 Games On Line interview with Chris Roberts, a 2012 Chris Roberts “Ask Me Anything” from Reddit, a Microsoft press release announcing the Digital Anvil investment, the 1999-vintage Dan’s Wing Commander: The Movie Page (including the proprietor’s story of attending the premiere), and a 2002 Wing Commander retrospective by the German website PC Player Forever. I made extensive use of the Wing Commander Combat Information Center, and especially its voluminous news archives that stretch all the way back to 1998.

My invaluable cheat sheet for this article was “The Chris Roberts Theory of Everything” by Nick Monroe from Gameranx.

59 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on November 21, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: chris roberts, microsoft, origin, space-sim, wing commander

The Space Sim’s Last Hurrah

07 Nov

This article tells part of the story of space sims.

Amidst so much else, the 1990s saw the rise and fall of the narrative-driven space sim. The sub-genre was effectively invented in 1990, when Wing Commander dared to add a set-piece story line to the sturdy foundation of the more open-ended British classic Elite. It reached a peak of commercial and critical acceptance in 1994 with Wing Commander III and TIE Fighter, only to fall off the big publishers’ radar completely by shortly after the turn of the millennium. As you regular readers know, I’ve been writing the final installments to a lot of stories recently, a symptom of the period of churn and consolidation in which these histories currently find themselves. Now I’m on the verge of writing my last words on not just a company but a whole category of games as a mainstream commercial force — almost, I’m tempted to say, a whole subculture of gaming, one of the oddest of them of all when you stop to think about it.

Even the phrase “space sim” is kind of strange and misleading. What were these games supposed to be simulating? Definitely not any form of real spaceflight — not when they chose to implement atmospheric drag, meaning that your ship slows down if you let off the throttle in exactly the way that a real vehicle out in the vacuum of space doesn’t. Their developers started with the way space combat was presented in the Star Wars films, which had themselves happily ignored everything we know about the nature of real space travel in favor of dogfights borrowed from old Second World War movies. Then they just piled on whatever seemed fun and interesting to them, which often entailed delving deeper into the same wellspring as George Lucas. (It was no coincidence that Lawrence Holland, one of the foremost practitioners of the space sim, cut his teeth as a game developer on World War II flight simulators.) Space sims were known by that name because of their vibe alone — because they subjectively felt like simulators, no matter how divorced they were from the reality of space travel. (There are lessons to be drawn from this, if we choose to heed them. The fact is that almost every game which is labelled a simulator is less of one than it purports to be. This is worth remembering any time anyone encourages you to take any game too seriously as a reflection of the real world.)

Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander games made the space-sim formula still more uncanny, by interleaving the missions in space with potboiler relationship drama. It may have been weird on the face of it, seemingly more a product of some random butterfly somewhere flapping its wings than anything flown in on the wings of fate, but for the better part of a decade quite a lot of people loved it.

And then they didn’t so much anymore…

Wing Commander III includes a love triangle. Because of course it does…

Being an inveterate hiker when I’m not sitting behind a computer, I can tell you that it’s sometimes harder than you think it ought to be to realize when you’ve reached peak elevation in a landscape. The same is true in the landscape of media. As I noted above, the space sim reached its peak already in 1994, even though it would take a few years for everyone to cotton onto that fact. For this was the year that both the Wing Commander series and LucasArts’s Star Wars space sims, the eternal yin and yang of the sub-genre, released their best-remembered installments.

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger doubled down on creator Chris Roberts’s passion for the cinematic side of the experience by interleaving a fairly workmanlike space-combat game with a semi-interactive movie that featured digitized human actors, among them such established Hollywood talents as Jason Bernard, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies, and Tom Wilson. In what was arguably the greatest feat of stunt casting in the history of games, the star of the show was none other than Mark Hamill. Over a decade after he had last portrayed Luke Skywalker on the big screen, he portrayed here another space-fighter jock, the player’s own avatar, Colonel Christopher Blair. The presence of so many recognizable actors garnered Wing Commander III considerable attention in the glossy mainstream press. The “Siliwood” dream of Northern and Southern California joining forces to forge a new form of entertainment was nearing its frenzied peak in tandem with the space sim in 1994. Wing Commander III was widely hailed, notwithstanding its computer-generated sets and general B-movie aesthetics, as a proof of concept for the better, richer interactive movies that were still to come. Hyped inside the industry as the most expensive game yet made, it garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World, and sold at least half a million copies in the United States alone, at an average street price of about $70.

If Wing Commander III was trying to capitalize on gamers’ love for Star Wars in some less-than-subtle ways, LucasArts’s TIE Fighter had the advantage of literally being Star Wars, coming out of George Lucas’s very own games studio. It also had the advantage of being a much better, deeper game where it really counted, eschewing digitized actors and soapy relationship drama to focus firmly on the action in the cockpit. It too was given a perfect score by Computer Gaming World, and sold in similar numbers to Wing Commander III, albeit without attracting the same level of attention from the mainstream press.

Alas, it was mostly downhill for the two franchises from there; such is rather the nature of peaks, isn’t it? In early 1996, barely eighteen months after Wing Commander III, Chris Roberts and his employer Origin Systems were ready with Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. Despite the short turnaround time, it represented another dramatic escalation in budget and ambition on the cinematic side of the equation. (The combat engine, with which Roberts by now hardly bothered to concern himself, was largely unchanged.) Mark Hamill and most of the rest of the previous cast were back, for a production that was shot on film this time rather than videotape, on real sets rather than in front of green screens that were filled in with computer-generated backgrounds after the fact. Yet many gamers found the end results to be paradoxically less stunning. The filmed sequences of Wing Commander IV fell into a sort of uncanny valley, being no longer clearly part of a computer game and yet having nowhere near the production values of even the most modest Hollywood features of the standard stripe. Probably more importantly, the Siliwood cultural moment was quickly passing, leaving the game with something of the odor of an anachronism. The mainstream was becoming more interested in the burgeoning World Wide Web than the wonders of multimedia and CD-ROM, even as hardcore gamers were embracing the non-stop action of the first-person-shooter and real-time-strategy genres, having lost patience with the long cutscenes and endless exposition of interactive movies.

For a cost of more than three times that of Wing Commander III, Wing Commander IV sold a third as many copies. Origin’s management told Chris Roberts that any future games in the series would have to scale back the movie angle and try harder to refresh the increasingly stale gameplay. By way of a response, Roberts quit his job at Origin.

From here, the decline was steep for Wing Commander. In September of 1996, the USA television network debuted Wing Commander Academy, a Saturday-morning cartoon featuring the voices of Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Wilson among other actors from the last couple of games. All of the parties involved had envisioned the show capitalizing on a hit game. Absent said hit, it disappeared from the airwaves after just thirteen episodes.

The franchise’s last hurrah as a game came with Wing Commander: Prophecy, which appeared at the end of 1997. “Wing Commander III and IV were both great products,” said Prophecy’s producer Adam Foshko, straining hard to be diplomatic toward his predecessor Chris Roberts, “but they are more like unequal halves. This is a much more synergistic product. It’s very team-driven. It’s not one person’s vision, and I think it shows.” At its best, Prophecy really did play better than any Wing Commander in years, evincing the far greater level of attention the team paid to the action in the cockpit. Less positively, the movie sequences were cheesier and more constrained, even as a plan to bring the game fully in line with the hardcore set’s current priorities by adding a multiplayer component ultimately came to naught. When Prophecy didn’t sell well, that was that for Wing Commander as a gaming franchise. The commercial prospects of an expansion pack that the team had been working on — a return to the old “mission disks” that had made Origin a bundle back before the former Luke Skywalker and his Hollywood friends had entered the picture — looked so dire that Origin just dumped the whole thing onto the Internet for free.

Meanwhile Lawrence Holland and his colleagues had been going through some travails of their own. After making a well-received TIE Fighter expansion pack and a “Collector’s CD-ROM” with yet more new missions to fly, Holland left LucasArts on amicable terms to start a studio called Totally Games, taking his technology and most of his team with him. From the average fan’s perspective, this was a distinction without a difference: Totally’s games would still be Star Wars space sims, and they would still be published by LucasArts.

Like their counterparts at Origin, the folks at Totally could totally see the potential in offering a multiplayer mode to keep up with the changing times. But unlike them, they stuck with the program. In fact, the next iteration of their series was designed to be multiplayer first and foremost. Holland and his people spent almost two years finding ways to make multiplayer work reliably despite all of the challenges of the high-latency, dial-up Internet of the era.

The result of those efforts landed with a resounding thud in the spring of 1997, becoming a case study in the dangers of failing to understand your customers. Holland’s X-Wing and TIE Fighter games may not have been interactive movies in the sense of Wing Commander III and IV, but people had nevertheless loved their unfolding campaigns, loved the sense of playing a part in what could easily have been a novel set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The ingeniously titled X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter didn’t give them any of that; its single-player mode was little more than a place to practice for multiplayer matches. “The sad part is, I was really looking forward to this game,” wrote Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, echoing the sentiments of thousands upon thousands of deeply disappointed ordinary players. “After the high of TIE Fighter, I wanted another Star Wars experience that would be just as immersive and fun. And while my wish for multiplayer Star Wars action was fulfilled, my hope for an equivalent single-player experience wasn’t.” In a last-ditch attempt to save their baby, Totally put together an expansion pack whose sole purpose was to provide a single-player campaign of the old style. It did so competently enough, but inspired it was not, and it never had much chance of rescuing a base game that was already a fixture of bargain bins by the time the expansion appeared in January of 1998.

In contrast to Wing Commander, however, LucasArts and Totally’s space-sim series was afforded one more kick at the can after 1998. To hear Lawrence Holland talk about it when it was still in development, Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance was the be-all, end-all in space sims. For those who wanted a story-driven campaign, this game’s would be the biggest and best ever. For those who wanted multiplayer action, this game’s multiplayer mode would be more stable and convenient than that of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. For those who cared about graphics, this game’s would be the best yet, taking full advantage of the 3D-accelerator cards that were proliferating everywhere. It was an ambitious plan, especially considering that this old-school Star Wars game had to be finished before The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie in more than a decade and a half, reached theaters in May of 1999, bringing with it an onslaught of next-generation toys and games.

X-Wing Alliance met that goal, being released in March of 1999. The most remarkable thing about it is how many of its other lofty goals it managed to achieve against the strictures of time and budget. The story is almost Wing Commander-like in its elaborateness, presenting for the first time a named, strongly characterized protagonist, a youthful member of a trading family caught between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. His story is told not only through the usual mission briefings but also through emails and radio chatter full of enough interpersonal drama to warm the cockles of Chris Roberts’s heart. The campaign begins on the ice-planet Hoth, is interwoven with the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and climaxes with you getting to fly the Millennium Falcon at the Battle of Endor. What dedicated Stars Wars fan could resist?

Sadly, further examination of X-Wing Alliance reveals some significant shortcomings. The individual missions are often unpolished, sometimes failing to even convey adequately what their goals are; trying to complete some of them feels like trying to read the designers’ minds. Ironically, this is the same general set of issues that dragged down the original X-Wing, upon which TIE Fighter did such a magnificent job of improving. It’s disheartening to see them making a return at this late date. Like so many flawed games, X-Wing Alliance might have been amazing if it had just been allowed a few more months in the oven.

That said, the biggest obstacle that X-Wing Alliance faced in the marketplace was probably just the tenor of the times. As I already noted, at a time when everyone was excited and optimistic about The Phantom Menace, the new face of Star Wars, this game was old-school. And yet that was only the beginning of the commercial headwinds it faced. Gamers in general were turning away from simulations in droves; real-world flight and combat simulators too, which had in some earlier years accounted for more than 20 percent of the computer-game industry’s total revenues, had now fallen markedly out of favor. Fewer and fewer gamers even owned joysticks anymore. (To what extent this was a cause and to what extent it was a symptom of simulators’ declining fortunes is a matter of debate.) Existing fans and would-be fans of simulations were being tempted away by other action-packed genres that were quicker and easier to pick up and play for the first time, while still offering plenty of long-term rewards for those who stuck with them. It seemed that fewer people had the patience for games that started by asking you to read a thick manual, then required you to go through a veritable digital flight school before you could start playing them for real.

At any rate, by Y2K both Wing Commander and the Star Wars space sims had been consigned by their publishers to the dustbin of history. Other titles in development that had dreamed of competing with the space sim’s dynamic duo head-on suffered the same fate. The most high-profile of the cancellations was a space sim from Sierra that took place in the universe of the recently concluded Babylon 5 television series. Created with heavy input from Christy Marx, a Babylon 5 scriptwriter who had earlier designed a couple of point-and-click adventure games for Sierra, it was supposed to “tart up a tired genre” and “radically change the face of gaming” with “non-linear, non-branching storytelling, a brilliant modular refit job on nearly five hours of [television composer] Christopher Franke’s music, plus an attention to the physics of space travel that will raise the high bar on space-combat games for years to come.” It got to within a few months of completion, got as far as having the box art prepared before falling victim in late 1999 to an uncongenial marketplace and to the chaos inside Sierra that had followed that venerable mom-and-pop company’s purchase by two separate corporate conglomerates in a period of just a few years.

Still, the space-sim diehards did get one last pair of classics from an utterly unexpected source before their favored sub-genre disappeared from the catalogs of the big publishers forever. In fact, many a grizzled joystick jockey will tell you even today that the second of the two Freespace games is the best of its type ever created — yes, better even than the hallowed TIE Fighter.

The first mover without whom Freespace would never have come to be was a native Chicagoan named Mike Kulas, whose early gigs as a game programmer included stints at subLogic of Flight Simulator fame and at Lerner Research, a precursor to the legendary Looking Glass Studios. At the latter workplace, he befriended one Matt Toschlog. “If this is what it means to run a company, we can do it too,” the friends decided after spending two years at the dawn of the 1990s on an ultimately unsatisfying racing game that was sold in the trade dress of Car and Driver magazine. “What’s the worst that could happen? It’ll fail and we’ll have to go back to work for somebody else.” Kulas and Toschlog moved out of the Boston area and back to Champaign, Illinois, also the home of subLogic. Champaign seemed a good place to open a new studio: it had the advantages of fairly cheap rents and a large pool of enthusiastic young tech talent, thanks to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the source of such innovations as the pioneering PLATO system of the 1970s and the point-and-click Mosaic browser that was popularizing the nascent World Wide Web at that very moment.

Kulas and Toschlog founded Parallax Software in June of 1993, six months before DOOM ignited a craze for immersive 3D action that would remake much of the industry in its image over the next few years. Luckily, Parallax was well-equipped to capitalize on the trend, what with the founders’ experience with 3D graphics and the passionate young sparks they were able to recruit from the nearby university. Descent, their very first game, put you behind the controls of a small flying vehicle and set you loose inside a series of 3D-rendered outer-space mining complexes, filled with robots gone haywire. It was different enough to stand out in a sea of DOOM clones, yet felt very much in step with the times in a broader sense. Upon its release in March of 1995, Descent became a surprise hit for its publisher Interplay, whose marketers were left scrambling to catch up to the buzz on the street with a port to the Sony PlayStation and television campaigns starring mid-tier celebrities. Made for less than half a million dollars, the game was one heck of a debut for Parallax. It and its almost-as-successful 1996 sequel were enough to make them think that winning fame and fortune in the games industry was actually pretty easy.

Matt Toschlog had never been happy in Champaign. Flush with all of that Descent cash, he wanted to move Parallax somewhere else. Mike Kulas, on the other hand, preferred to stay put. Unable to find any other way out of the impasse, the founders agreed to split the company between them. In late 1996, Toschlog moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start Outrage Entertainment. Kulas decided to rename his half of the company Volition — “an intense act of will to accomplish something” — after stumbling across the word in a book. Outrage’s first project was to be the inevitable Descent³; Volition’s was to be Freespace, a space sim that would, as its name implied, take the player out of the asteroid mines and into the limitless inky-black freedom that lay beyond.

Freespace isn’t shy about displaying its influences. Created by a bunch of guys who adored LucasArts’s X-Wing and TIE Fighter sims, it hews unabashedly to their template. After the requisite flight training, you’re tossed into an interstellar war between your Terran Alliance and an alien race known as the Vasudans. Then another group of aliens shows up, a shadowy enigma that comes to be called the Shivans, who are so powerful that the old antipathies are quickly forgotten, and Terrans and Vasudans unite to face the greatest threat either of their races has ever known.

Although neither its core gameplay model nor its fiction is remotely revolutionary, Freespace stands out for how well it executes on this derivative material. The graphics are exceptional for their era, the possibility space behind the controls expansive, the mission design uniformly solid. Inspiration in game design is wonderful, but we should never forget the value of perspiration. The people who made Freespace loved what they were doing enough to sweat every small detail, and it shows. The only place where the game fell down a bit back in the day was a somewhat under-baked multiplayer mode.

Interplay insisted on calling the game Descent: Freespace (“From the creators of Descent!”) in the hope of riding the coattails of the publisher’s biggest hit in recent memory. Whatever else you can say about it, it certainly wasn’t their worst exercise in Descent branding. (That would be Descent to Undermountain, an ill-advised attempt to use the old Parallax engine for, of all things, a Dungeons & Dragons-licensed CRPG.) And who knows? Maybe the branding even did some good. Upon its release in June of 1998, Freespace sold well enough to be modestly profitable for its studio and publisher and convince Interplay to fund an expansion pack and a sequel. The only catches were that Volition had to turn both out quickly, without spending too much money on them.

The expansion pack, which they called Silent Threat, ended up being short and perfunctory, the definition of inessential. The full-fledged sequel, however, was a minor miracle. It defied every cynical expectation raised by its abbreviated development cycle when it shipped on September 30, 1999.

Freespace 2 — Interplay allowed the cleaner name this time, perhaps to avoid confusion with the recently released Descent³ — did everything its predecessor had done well that much better, then added a finishing touch that it had lacked: a real sense of gravitas, provided largely by the one significant addition to the development team. Jason Scott (not to be confused with the archivist and Infocom documentarian of the same name) was Volition’s first dedicated writer. He made his presence felt with a campaign that was sometimes exhilarating, sometimes harrowing, but always riveting. The outer-space kitty-cats of Wing Commander, even Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, paled in comparison to the Shivans after Jason Scott got his hands on them. “The universe is very impersonal,” he says. “Your character is referred to only as ‘Pilot’ or ‘Alpha 1,’ and you’re up against countless waves of a seemingly unbeatable, genocidal adversary that never communicates its goals or motives. In the briefings, we tried to convey the sense of a much larger conflict unfolding in multiple systems, while at the same time hinting that your commanders weren’t telling you the whole story.”

Freespace 2 was never going to single-handedly rescue the space-sim sub-genre, but it did ensure that it went out on a high note. It’s a demanding game even by the usual standards of its kind, one that uses every key on the keyboard and then some, one that is guaranteed to leave you wishing you had more buttons on your joystick, no matter how nerdily baroque it might already be. Some of its more counter-intuitive commands, such as “target my target’s target,” have become memes in certain circles. Yet the developers are unapologetic. “We wanted players to feel like pilots in control of a complex, powerful, responsive, and technologically advanced machine,” says Jason Scott. “Complexity was a virtue.”

I’m almost tempted to write here that this was a shame, in that it put such a high barrier to entry in front of what was actually one of the more sophisticated ludic fictions of its era. My experience with the game probably isn’t unique: I struggled with it for a while, reached a point where I couldn’t seem to hit any enemy that I shot at even as said enemies had become all too good at hitting me, and wound up watching the rest on YouTube, as you do these days. On the other hand, though, why shouldn’t unabashedly demanding games that aren’t quite for me have good writing too?

Because you deserve to hear from someone other than a dabbler like me before we move on, I’m going to take the liberty of quoting Lee Hutchinson, who is a good friend of this site, a stalwart voice of reason in these increasingly unreasonable times of ours through his day job as a senior editor at Ars Technica, and, most importantly for our purposes, a hardcore space-sim junkie in all the ways that I am not. He can explain better than I can what Freespace 2 came to mean to its biggest fans, how it melded gameplay and narrative into an unforgettable roller-coaster ride.

If you’ve seen one of those simplified “evolution of man” charts, showing a chimp-like predecessor far at the left and an upright tool-using human all the way at the right, you’ve got a good idea of how Freespace 2 capped off the genre. It was the culmination of everything that had come before it, and every single gameplay element was refined and polished to a razor-sharp gleam.

Freespace 2 lets players experience a tremendous variety of missions in different fighters with a gamut of capabilities. Each mission is connected by an overarching plot: you may be ambushed while escorting some capital ships in one mission, and then in the next mission you might switch to flying a bomber and be assigned to take those capital ships out. You might be temporarily attached to a special-operations wing flying a prototype starship, or have to fly captured Shivan fighters in a deep-cover mission to scope out an enemy staging point, or deal with total mission failure and objective changes right in the middle of doing dozens of other things. Capital ships fire ridiculously large, ridiculously powerful beam weapons at each other, slicing each other to ribbons and providing a fantastic Babylon 5-esque backdrop while the player duels enemy fighters.

The targeting system is complex and rich; the wingman and escort system is complex and rich; the comms system is complex and rich. Everything about Freespace 2 shows care, love, and craftsmanship — from the chatter going back and forth between your wingmen as you blindly scout a nebula looking for a lost frigate, to the amazingly well-acted mission briefings. In practically every way, it is the Platonic ideal of a space-combat sim.

Starting at about the halfway point, Freespace 2 drops the hammer on the player with a series of tightly linked missions that absolutely do not let up. The war against the Shivans isn’t going well. A faction of Quisling-like humans is trying to defect to the Shivans’ side, taking a large chunk of the human military with it. At several points throughout the long campaign, it feels like the game is about to come to a crashing climax — only it doesn’t end. Things just get worse, and it’s an absolute rush to experience — flying your guts out, desperately trying to fight a rear-guard action against an unknowable enemy that seems to be totally unable to feel remorse, pity, or even fatigue.

I’ve never felt quite the combination of awe, fear, and eagerness I felt as I pushed through to Freespace 2’s endgame. There are lots of gaming experiences I wish I could relive for the first time, but playing Freespace 2 tops the list. That’s as good a way as any to judge a game as the best in its genre.

In the short term at least, Volition wasn’t rewarded very well for creating this game that Lee Hutchinson and more than a few others consider simply the best story-driven space sim ever made, the evolutionary end point of Chris Roberts’s original Wing Commander of 1990. Mike Kulas insists that Freespace 2 didn’t actually lose money for its studio or publisher, but it didn’t earn them much of anything either. Plans for a Freespace 3 were quietly shelved. Thus Freespace 2 came to mark the end of an era, not only for Volition but for computer gaming in general: while not quite the last space sim to be put out by a major publisher, it was the last that would go on to be remembered as a classic of its form.

What with there being no newer games that could compete with it, those who still loved the space sim clung all the tighter to Freespace 2 as the months since its release turned into years. They were incredibly lucky that Volition was staffed by genuinely nice, fair-minded people who felt their pain and were willing to “pay it forward,” as the saying goes. In 2002, Volition uploaded the full source code to Freespace 2 to the Internet for non-commercial use.

They couldn’t possibly have envisioned what followed. As of this writing, 23 years after that act of spontaneous generosity, the Freespace 2 engine has been improved and modernized almost beyond recognition, with support for eye-bleedingly high resolutions and all of the latest fancy graphical effects that my humble retro-gaming computers don’t even support. You can use the updated engine to play Freespace 1 and 2 and the Silent Threat expansion pack, in versions that have been polished to an even shinier gleam than the originals by the hands of hundreds of dedicated volunteers. Even more inspiringly, folks have used the technology to create a welter of new campaigns — effectively whole new space sims that run off what remains the best of all engines for this type of game.

The people who made Freespace 1 and 2 all those years ago are themselves awed by what their pair of discrete boxed computer games have been turned into. Freespace proved to be as much a new beginning as an ending. Long may the space sim fly on in the hands of those who love it most.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: Sierra On-Line’s customer newsletter InterAction of Spring 1999; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of September 20 1996 and February 14 1997; Computer Gaming World of October 1994, February 1995, July 1997, April 1998, October 1998, November 1998, February 1999, July 1999, and January 2000; Retro Gamer 204.

Online sources include interviews with Jack Nichols and Randy Littlejohn on B5 Scrolls, “Growing Up Gaming: The Five Space Sims That Defined My Youth” by Lee Hutchinson at Ars Technica, an interview with some of the core members of the Freespace 2 team by the Space Game Junkie podcast, and a Game Informer documentary about Volition’s history.

Where to Get Them: Wing Commander I and II, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, Wing Commander: Prophecy, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Descent: Freespace, and Freespace 2 are all available as digital purchases on GOG.com.

I strongly recommend that you run the Freespace games through the Freespace Open engine, even if you’re primarily looking for a retro experience. Both on native Windows 10 and running through WINE on Linux, I found the original Freespace to be subtly broken: I was given only a fraction of the time I ought to have been given to complete the last training mission. (This was not good at all, considering I’m rubbish at the game anyway.) Freespace Open is quite painless to install and maintain using a utility called Knossos. It will walk you through the setup process and then deliver a glitch-free game, whilst letting you select as many or as few modern niceties as you prefer.

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Posted by Jimmy Maher on November 7, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: chris roberts, freespace, holland, lucasarts, origin, space-sim, star wars, tie fighter, volition, wing commander, x-wing

The Rise of POMG, Part 4: A World for the Taking

01 Mar

Just as the Ultima Online beta test was beginning, Electronic Arts was initiating the final phase of its slow-motion takeover of Origin Systems. In June of 1997, the mother ship in California sent down two Vice Presidents to take over completely in Texas, integrate Origin well and truly into the EA machine, and end once and for all any semblance of independence for the studio. Neil Young became Origin’s new General Manager on behalf of EA, while Chris Yates became Chief Technical Officer. Both men were industry veterans.

Appropriately enough given that he was about to become the last word on virtual Britannia, Neil Young was himself British. He attributes his career choice to the infamously awful English weather. “There are a lot of people in the games industry that come from the UK,” he says. “I think it’s because the weather is so bad that you don’t have a lot to do, so you either go into a band or teach yourself to program.” He chose the latter course at a time when computer games in Britain were still being sold on cassette tape for a couple of quid. After deciding to forgo university in favor of a programming job at a tiny studio called Imagitec Design in 1988, he “quickly realized there were more gifted engineers,” as he puts it, and “moved into producing.” Having made a name for himself in that role, he was lured to the United States by Virgin Interactive in 1992, then moved on to EA five years later, which organization had hand-picked him for the task of whipping its sometimes wayward and lackadaisical stepchild Origin into fighting shape.

Chris Yates had grown up amidst the opposite of English rain, hailing as he did from the desert gambler’s paradise Las Vegas. He was hired by the hometown studio Westwood Associates in 1988, where he worked as a programmer on games like Eye of the Beholder, Dune II, and Lands of Lore. In 1994, two years after Virgin acquired Westwood, he moved to Los Angeles to join the parent company. There he and Young became close friends as well as colleagues, such that they chose to go to EA together as a unit.

The two were so attractive to EA thanks not least to an unusual project which had occupied some of their time during their last year and a half or so at Virgin. Inspired by Air Warrior, the pioneering massively-multiplayer online flight simulator that had been running on the GEnie commercial online service since the late 1980s, a Virgin programmer named Rod Humble proposed in 1995 that his company invest in something similar, but also a bit simpler and more accessible: a massively-multiplayer version of Asteroids, the 1979 arcade classic whose roots stretched all the way back to Spacewar!, that urtext of videogaming. Neil Young and his friend Chris Yates went to bat for the project: Young making the business case for it as an important experiment that could lead to big windfalls later on, Yates pitching in to offer his exceptional technical expertise whenever necessary. Humble and a colleague named Jeff Paterson completed an alpha version of the game they called SubSpace in time to put it up on the Internet for an invitation-only testing round in December of 1995. Three months later, the server was opened to anyone who cared to download the client — still officially described as a beta version — and have at it.

SubSpace was obviously a very different proposition from the likes of Ultima Online, but it fits in perfectly with this series’s broader interest in persistent online multiplayer gaming (or POMG as I’ve perhaps not so helpfully shortened it). For, make no mistake, the quality of persistence was as key to its appeal as it was to that of such earlier featured players in this series as Kali or Battle.net. SubSpace spawned squads and leagues and zones; it became an entire subculture unto itself, one that lived in and around the actual battles in space. The distinction between it and the games of Kali and Battle.net was that SubSpace was massively — or at least bigly — multiplayer. Whereas an online Diablo session was limited to four participants, SubSpace supported battles involving up to 250 players, sometimes indulging in crazy free-for-alls, more often sorted into two or more teams, each of them flying and fighting in close coordination. It thus quickly transcended Asteroids in its tactical dimensions as well as its social aspects — transcended even other deceptively complex games with the same roots, such as Toys for Bobs’s cult classic Star Control. That it was playable at all over dial-up modem connections was remarkable; that it was so much fun to play and then to hang out in afterward, talking shop and taking stock, struck many of the thousands of players who stumbled across it as miraculous; that it was completely free for a good long time was the icing on the cake.

It remained that way because Virgin didn’t really know what else to do with it. When the few months that had been allocated to the beta test were about to run out, the fans raised such a hue and cry that Virgin gave in and left it up. And so the alleged beta test continued for more than a year, the happy beneficiary of corporate indecision. In one of his last acts before leaving Virgin, Neil Young managed to broker a sponsorship deal with Pepsi Cola, which gave SubSpace some actual advertising and another lease on life as a free-to-play game. During that memorable summer of the Ultima Online beta test, SubSpace was enjoying what one fan history calls its “greatest days” of all: “The population tripled in three months, and now there were easily 1500-plus people playing during peak times.”

With the Pepsi deal about to run out, Virgin finally took SubSpace fully commercial in October of 1997, again just as Ultima Online was doing the same. Alas, it didn’t go so well for SubSpace. Virgin released it as a boxed retail game, with the promise that, once customers had plunked down the cash to buy it, access would be free in perpetuity. This didn’t prevent half or more of the existing user base from leaving the community, even as nowhere near enough new players joined to replace them. Virgin shut down the server in November of 1998; “in perpetuity” had turned out to be a much shorter span of time than anyone had anticipated.

As we’ve seen before in this series, however, the remaining hardcore SubSpace fans simply refused to let their community die. They put up their own servers — Virgin had made the mistake of putting all the code you needed to do so on the same disc as the client — and kept right on space-warring. You can still play SubSpace today, just as you can Meridian 59 and The Realm. A website dedicated to tracking the game’s “population statistics” estimated in 2015 that the community still had between 2000 and 3000 active members, of whom around 300 might be online at any given time; assuming these numbers are to be trusted, a bit of math reveals that those who like the game must really like it, spending 10 percent or more of their lives in it. That same year, fans put their latest version of the game, now known as Subspace Continuum, onto Steam for free. Meanwhile its original father Rod Humble has gone on to a long and fruitful career in POMG, working on Everquest, The Sims Online, and Second Life among other projects.

But we should return now to the summer of 1997 and to Origin Systems, to which Neil Young and Chris Yates came as some of the few people in existence who could boast not only of ideas about POMG but of genuine commercial experience in the field, thanks to SubSpace. EA hoped this experience would serve them well when it came to Ultima Online.

Which isn’t to say that the latter was the only thing they had on their plates: the sheer diversity of Young’s portfolio as an EA general manager reflects the confusion about what Origin’s identity as a studio should be going forward. There were of course the two perennials, Ultima — meaning for the moment at least Ultima Online — and Wing Commander, which was, as Young says today, “a little lost as a product.” Wing Commander, the franchise in computer gaming during the years immediately prior to DOOM, was becoming a monstrous anachronism by 1997. Shortly after the arrival of Young and Yates, Origin would release Wing Commander: Prophecy, whose lack of the Roman numeral “V” that one expected to see in its name reflected a desire for a fresh start on a more sustainable model in this post-Chris Roberts era, with a more modest budget to go along with more modest cinematic ambitions. But instead of heralding the dawn of a new era, it would prove the franchise’s swan song; it and its 1998 expansion pack would be the last new Wing Commander computer games ever. Their intended follow-up, a third game in the Wing Commander: Privateer spinoff series of more free-form outer-space adventures, would be cancelled.

In addition to Ultima and Wing Commander, EA had chosen to bring under the Origin umbrella two product lines that were nothing like the games for which the studio had always been known. One was a line of military simulations that bore the imprimatur of “Jane’s,” a print publisher which had been the source since the turn of the twentieth century of the definitive encyclopedias of military hardware of all types. The Jane’s simulations were overseen by one Andy Hollis, who had begun making games of this type for MicroProse back in the early 1980s. The other line involved another MicroProse alum — in fact, none other than Sid Meier, whose name had entered the lexicon of many a gaming household by serving as the prefix before such titles as Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, and Colonization. Meier and two other MicroProse veterans had just set up a studio of their own, known as Firaxis Games, with a substantial investment from EA, who planned to release their products under the Origin Systems label. Origin was becoming, in other words, EA’s home for all of its games that were made first and usually exclusively for computers rather than for the consoles that now provided the large majority of EA’s revenues; the studio had, it seemed, more value in the eyes of the EA executive suite as a brand than as a working collective.

Still, this final stage of the transition from independent subsidiary to branch office certainly could have been even more painful than it was. Neil Young and Chris Yates were fully aware of how their arrival would be seen down in Austin, and did everything they could to be good sports and fit into the office culture. Brit-in-Texas Young was the first to come with the fish-out-of-water jokes at his own expense — “I was expecting a flat terrain with lots of cowboys, cacti, and horses, so I was pleasantly surprised,” he said of Austin — and both men rolled up their sleeves alongside Richard Garriott to serve the rest of the company a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, a longtime Origin tradition.

Neil Young and Chris Yates on the Thanksgiving chow line.

Young and Yates had received instructions from above that Ultima Online absolutely had to ship by the end of September. Rather than cracking the whip, they tried to cajole and josh their way to that milestone as much as possible. They agreed to attend the release party in drag if the deadline was met; then Young went one step farther, promising Starr Long a kiss on the lips. Yates didn’t go that far, but he did agree to grow a beard to commemorate the occasion, even as Richard Garriott, whose upper lip hadn’t seen the sun since he’d graduated from high school, agreed to shave his.

Young and Yates got it done, earning for themselves the status of, if not the unsung heroes of Ultima Online, two among a larger group of same. The core group of ex-MUDders whose dream and love Ultima Online had always been could probably have kept running beta tests for years to come, had not these outsiders stepped in to set the technical agenda. “That meant trading off features with technology choices and decisions every minute of the day,” says Young. He brought in one Rich Vogel, who had set up and run the server infrastructure for Meridian 59 at The 3DO Company, to do the same for Ultima Online. In transforming Origin Systems into a maintainer of servers and a seller of subscriptions, he foreshadowed a transition that would eventually come to the games industry in general, from games as boxed products to gaming as a service. These tasks did not involve the sexy, philosophically stimulating ideas about virtual worlds and societies with which Raph Koster and his closest colleagues spent their time and which will always capture the lion’s share of the attention in articles like this one, but the work was no less essential for all that, and no less of a paradigm shift in its way.

So, the big day came and the deadline was met: Ultima Online shipped on September 24, 1997, three days before Meridian 59 would celebrate its first anniversary. The sleek black box was an end and a beginning at the same time. Young and Yates did their drag show, Starr Long got his kiss, and, most shockingly of all, Richard Garriott revealed his naked upper lip to all and sundry. (Opinions were divided as to whether the mangy stubble which Chris Yates deigned to grow before picking up his razor again really qualified as a beard or not.) And then everyone waited to see what would happen next.

A (semi-)bearded Chris Yates and a rare sight indeed: a clean-shaven Richard Garriott.

EA made and shipped to stores all over the country 50,000 copies of Ultima Online, accompanying it with a marketing campaign that was, as Wired magazine described it, of “Hollywood proportions.” The virtual world garnered attention everywhere, from CNN to The New York Times. These mainstream organs covered it breathlessly as the latest harbinger of humanity’s inevitable cyber-future, simultaneously bracing and unnerving. Flailing about for a way to convey some sense of the virtual world’s scope, The New York Times noted that it would take 38,000 computer monitors — enough to fill a football field — to display it in its entirety at one time. Needless to say, the William Gibson quotes, all “collective hallucinations” and the like, flew thick and fast, as they always did to mark events like this one.

Three weeks after the launch, 38,000 copies of Ultima Online had been sold and EA was spooling up the production line again to make another 65,000. Sales would hit the 100,000 mark within three months of the release. Such numbers were more than gratifying. EA knew that 100,000 copies sold of this game ought to be worth far more to its bottom line than 100,000 copies of any other game would have been, given that each retail sale hopefully represented only the down payment on a long-running subscription at $10 per month. For its publisher, Ultima Online would be the gift that kept on giving.

In another sense, however, the sales figures were a problem. When Ultima Online went officially live, it did so on just three shards: the Atlantic and Pacific shards from the beta test, plus a new Great Lakes one to handle the middle of the country. Origin was left scrambling to open more to meet the deluge of subscribers. Lake Superior came up on October 3, Baja on October 10, Chesapeake on October 16, Napa Valley on November 14, Sonoma on December 13, Catskills on December 22. And still it wasn’t enough.

Origin’s estimates of how many players a single server could reliably support proved predictably overoptimistic. But rather than dial back on the number of players they allowed inside, thereby ensuring that each of them who did get in could have a reasonably enjoyable experience, they kept trying to cover the gap between technical theory and reality by hacking their code on the fly. As a result, Ultima Online became simultaneously the most loved and most hated game in the country. When it all came together, it was magic for many of its players. But truth be told, that didn’t happen anywhere near as often as one might have wished in that first year or so. Extreme lag, inexplicable glitches, dropped connections, and even total server crashes were the more typical order of the day. Of course, with almost everyone who surfed the Web still relying on dial-up modems running over wires that had been designed to carry voices rather than computer data, slowdowns and dropped connections were a reality of daily online life even for those who weren’t attempting to log onto virtual worlds. This created a veneer of plausible deniability, which Origin’s tech-support people, for lack of any other suggestions or excuses to offer, leaned on perhaps a bit too heavily. After all, who could say for sure that the problem any individual player might be having wasn’t downstream from Origin’s poor overtaxed server?

Weaselly excuses like these led to the first great act of civil disobedience by the residents of Britannia, just a few weeks after the launch, when hundreds of players gathered outside Lord British’s castle, stripped themselves naked, broke into the throne room, drank gallons of wine, and proceeded to disgorge all of it onto Richard Garriott’s virtual furniture, whilst chanting in unison their demands for a better, stabler virtual world. The world’s makers were appalled, but also weirdly gratified. What better sign of a budding civic life could there be than a full-on political protest? “We were all watching and thinking it was a grand statement about the project,” says Richard Garriott. “As unhappy as they were about the game, they voiced their unhappiness in the context of the game.” Much of what happened inside Ultima Online during the first year especially had the same quality of being amazing for philosophers of virtual worlds to witness, but stressful for the practical administrators who were trying to turn this one into a sustainable money tree. The rub was that the two categories were combined in the very same people, who were left feeling conflicted to say the least.

The journals of hardcore gaming, hardly known for their stoicism in the face of hype on most days, were ironically more reserved and skeptical than the mainstream press on the subject of Ultima Online, perchance because they were viewing the virtual world less as a harbinger of some collective cyber-future and more as a game that their readers might wish to, you know, actually play. Computer Gaming World wittily titled its scathing review, buried on page 162 and completely unmentioned on the cover of the issue in question, simply “Uh-Oh.” Among the litany of complaints were “numerous and never-ending bugs, horrible lag time, design issues [that] lead to repetitive and time-consuming activities, and [an] unbalanced economy.” The magazine did admit that “Ultima Online could become a truly great game. But we can’t review potential, we can only review concrete product.” Editor-in-chief Johnny L. Wilson, for his part, held out little hope for improvement. “Ultima Online begins with hubris and ends in Greek tragedy,” he said. “The hubris is a result of being unwilling to learn from others’ mistakes. The tragedy is that it could have been so much more.” Randy Farmer, co-creator of the earlier would-be virtual world Habitat, expressed a similar sentiment, saying that “Origin seems to have ignored many of the lessons that our industry has learned in the last ten years of building online worlds. They’re making the same mistakes that first-time virtual-world builders always make.”

The constant crashes and long periods of unexplained down time associated with a service for which people were paying good money constituted a corporate lawyer’s worst nightmare — or a different sort of lawyer’s wet dream. One of these latter named George Schultz began collecting signatures from Origin’s most disgruntled customers within weeks, filing a class-action lawsuit in San Diego at the beginning of March of 1998. Exhibit A was the copy right there on the back of the box, promising “a living, growing world where thousands of real people discover real fantasy and adventure, 24 hours a day, every day of the year,” with all of it taking place “in real time.” This was, claimed Schultz, a blatant case of false advertising. “We’re not trying to tell anyone how to design a good or a bad game,” he said. “What it’s about is holding Origin and EA to the promises they made on the box, in their advertising, and [in] the manual. It’s about the misrepresentations they’ve made. A big problem with the gaming industry is that they think there are some special rules that only apply to them.”

Whatever the truth of that last claim, there was no denying that just about half of the learning curve of Ultima Online was learning to navigate around the countless bugs and technical quirks. For example, Origin took down each shard once per day for a backup and a “therapeutic” reboot that was itself a testament to just what a shaky edifice the software and hardware were. When the server came back up again, it restored the state of the world from the last backup. But said state was a snapshot in time from one hour before the server went down. There was, in other words, an hour every day during which everything you did in virtual Britannia was doomed to be lost; this was obviously not a time to go on any epic, treasure- and experience-point-rich adventures. Yet such things were documented nowhere; one learned them only through the proverbial school of hard knocks.

In their defense, Origin was sailing into completely uncharted waters with Ultima Online. Although there had been online virtual worlds before, dating all the way back to that first MUD of 1978 or 1979, none of them — no, not even Meridian 59 and The Realm — had been as expansive, sophisticated, and most of all popular as these shards of Britannia. Most of the hardware technologies that would give rise to the era of Web 2.0, from DSL in homes to VPS’s in data centers, existed only as blueprints; ditto most of the software. No one had ever made a computer game before that required this much care and feeding after the initial sale. And it wasn’t as if the group entrusted with maintaining the beast was a large one. Almost the entirety of the Ultima IX team which had been parachuted in six months before the launch to just get the world done already was pulled out just as abruptly as soon as it started accepting paying subscribers, leaving behind a crew of maintainers that was little bigger than the original team of ex-MUDders who had labored in obscurity for so long before catching the eye of EA’s management. The idea that maintaining a virtual world might require almost as much manpower and ongoing creative effort as making it in the first place was too high a mental hurdle for even otherwise clever folks like Neil Young and Chris Yates to clear at this point.

Overwhelmed as they were, the maintainers began to rely heavily on unpaid volunteers from the community of players to do much of the day-to-day work of administrating the world, just as was the practice on MUDs. But Ultima Online ran on a vastly larger scale than even the most elaborate MUDs, making it hard to keep tabs on these volunteer overseers. While some were godsends, putting in hours of labor every week to make Britannia a better place for their fellow players, others were corrupted by their powers, manipulating the levers they had to hand to benefit their friends and punish their enemies. Then, too, the volunteer system was another legal quagmire, one that would doubtless have sent EA’s lawyers running screaming from the room if anyone had bothered to ask them about it before it was rolled out; sure enough, it would eventually lead to another lawsuit, this one more extended, serious, and damaging than the first.

In the meanwhile, though, most players did not rally behind the first lawsuit to anything like the degree that George Schultz might have been hoping. The fact was that even the ones who had vomited all over Lord British’s throne had done so because they loved their virtual Britannia and wanted to see it fixed rather than destroyed, as it would likely be if Schultz won the day. The suit concluded in a settlement at the end of 1998. The biggest concession on the part of the defendants was a rather weird one that gave no recompense to any individual inhabitant of virtual Britannia: EA agreed to donate $15,000 to the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Perhaps Schultz thought that it would be able to innovate up a more reliable virtual world.

While many of the technical problems that beset Ultima Online were only to be expected in the context of the times, some of the other obstacles to enjoying the virtual world were more puzzling. First and foremost among these was the ever-present issue of players killing other players, which created so much frustration that George Schultz felt compelled to explicitly wall it off from the breach-of-trust claims that were the basis of his lawsuit: “We’re not getting into whether there should be player-killing.” Given that it had been such a constant theme of life (and death) in virtual Britannia going all the way back to the alpha-testing phase, the MUDders might have taken more steps to address it before the launch. As it was, though, one senses that, having seen so many of their ideas about a virtual ecology and the like not survive contact with real players, having been forced to give up in so many ways on virtual Britannia as a truly self-sustaining, living world, they were determined to make this the scene of their last stand, the hill that they would either hold onto or die trying.

Their great white hope was still the one that Richard Garriott had been voicing in interviews since well before the world’s commercial debut: that purely social pressures would act as a constraint on player-killing — that, in short, their world would learn to police itself. In fact, the presence of player-killing might act as a spur to civilization — for, as Raph Koster said, “cultures define and refine themselves through conflict.” They kept trying to implement systems that would nudge this particular culture in the right direction. They decided that, after committing murder five times, a player would be branded with literal scarlet letters: the color of his onscreen name would change from blue to red. Hopefully this would make him a pariah among his peers, while also making it very dangerous for him to enter a town, whose invulnerable computer-controlled guards would attack him on sight. The designers didn’t reckon with the fact that a virtual life is, no matter how much they might wish otherwise, simply not the same as a real life. Some percentage of players, presumably perfectly mild-mannered and law-abiding in the real world, reveled in the role of murderous outlaws online, taking the red letters of their name as a badge of honor rather than shame, the dangers of the cities as a challenge rather than a deterrent. To sneak past the city gates, creep up behind an unsuspecting newbie and stab her in the back, then get out of Dodge before the city watch appeared… now, that was good times. The most-wanted rolls posted outside the guard stations of Britannia became, says Raph Koster, “a high-score table for player killers.”

The MUDders’ stubborn inflexibility on this issue — an issue that was by all indications soon costing Ultima Online large numbers of customers — was made all the more inexplicable in the opinion of many players by the fact that it was, in marked contrast to so many of the other problems, almost trivial to address in programming terms. An “invulnerability” flag had long existed, to be applied not only to computer-controlled city guards but to special human-controlled personages such as Lord British to whom the normal laws of virtual time and space did not apply. All Origin had to do was add a few lines of code to automatically turn the flag on when a player walked into designated “safe” spaces. That way, you could have places where those who had signed up mostly in order to socialize could hang out without having to constantly look over their backs, along with other places where the hardcore pugilists could pummel one another to their heart’s content. Everyone would be catered to. Problem solved.

But Raph Koster and company refused to take this blindingly obvious step, having gotten it into their heads that to do so would be to betray their most cherished ideals. They kept tinkering around the edges of the problem, looking for a subtler solution that would preserve their world’s simulational autonomy. For example, they implemented a sort of karmic justice system, which dictated that players who had been evil during life would be resurrected after death only after losing a portion of their stats and skills. Inevitably, the player killers just took this as another challenge. Just don’t get killed, and you would never have to worry about it.

The end result was to leave the experience of tens of thousands of players in the unworthy hands of a relatively small minority of “griefers,” people who thrived on causing others pain and distress. Like all bullies, they preyed on the weak; their typical victims were the newbies, unschooled in the ways of defense, guiding characters with underwhelming statistics and no arms or armor to speak of. Such new players were, of course, the ones whose level of engagement with the game was most tentative, who were the mostly likely to just throw up their hands and go find something else to play after they’d been victimized once or twice, depriving Origin of potentially hundreds of dollars in future subscription revenue.

In light of this, it’s strange that no one from EA or Origin overrode the MUDders on this point. For his part, Richard Garriott was adamantly on their side, insisting that Ultima Online simply had to allow player-killing if it wasn’t to become a mockery of itself. It was up to the dissatisfied and victimized residents themselves to band together and turn Britannia into the type of world they wanted to live in; it wasn’t up to Origin to step in and fix their problems for them with a deus ex machina. “When we first launched Ultima Online, we set out to create a world that supported the evil player as a legitimate role,” said Garriott in his rather high-handed way. “Those who have truly learned the lessons of the [single-player] Ultima games should cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be.” He liked to tell a story on this subject. (Knowing Garriott’s penchant for embellishment, it probably didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen quite like this. But that’s not relevant to its importance as allegory.)

One evening, he was wandering the streets of the capital in his Lord British persona, when he heard a woman screaming. Rushing over to her, he was told that a thief had stolen all of her possessions. His spirit of chivalry was awoken; he told her that he would get her things back for her. Together they tracked down the thief and cornered him in a back alley. Lord British demanded that the thief return the stolen goods, and the thief complied. They all went their separate ways. A moment later, the woman cried out again; the thief had done it again.

This time, Lord British froze the thief with a spell before he could leave the scene of the crime. “I told you not to do that,” he scolded. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I won’t do it again,” said the thief as he turned over the goods for a second time.

“If you do that again, I’m going to ban you from the game,” said Lord British.

You might be able to guess what happened next: the thief did it yet again. “I said I was going to ban you, and now I have to,” shouted Lord British, now well and truly incensed. “What’s wrong with you? I told you not to steal from this woman!”

The thief’s answer stopped Garriott in his tracks. “Listen. You created this world, and I’m a thief,” he said, breaking character for the first time. “I steal. That’s what I do. And now you’re going to ban me from the game for playing the role I’m supposed to play? I lied to you before because I’m a thief. The king caught me and told me not to steal. What am I going to do, tell you that as soon as you turn around I’m going to steal again? No! I’m going to lie.”

And Garriott realized that the thief was right. Garriott could do whatever he wished to him as Lord British, the reigning monarch of this world. But if he wished to stay true to all the things he had said in the past about what virtual Britannia was and ought to be, he couldn’t go outside the world to punish him as Richard Garriott, the god of the server looking down from on-high.

Some of the questions with which Origin was wrestling resonate all too well today: questions involving the appropriate limits of online free speech — or rather free action, in this case. They are questions with which everyone who has ever opened an Internet discussion up to the public, myself included, have had to engage. When does strongly felt disagreement spill over into bad faith, counterpoint into disruption for the sake of it? And what should we do about it when it does? In Origin’s case, the pivotal philosophical question at hand was where the boundary lay between playing an evil character in good faith in a fantasy world and purposely, willfully trying to cause real pain to other real people sitting behind other real computers. Origin had chosen to embrace a position close to the ground staked out by our self-described “free-speech maximalists” of today. And like them, Origin was learning that the issue is more dangerously nuanced than they had wished to believe.

But there were others sorts of disconnect at play here as well. Garriott’s stern commandment that his world’s inhabitants should “cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be” becomes more than a bit rich when we remember that it was being directed toward Origin’s paying customers. Many of them might have replied that it was up to Origin rather than they themselves to make Britannia a place they wanted to be, lest they choose to spend their $10 per month on something else. The living-world dynamic held “as long as everyone is playing the same game,” wrote Amy Jo Kim in an article about Ultima Online and its increasingly vocalized discontents that appeared in Wired magazine in the spring of 1998. “But what happens when players who think they’re attending an online Renaissance Faire find themselves at the mercy of a violent, abusive gang of thugs? In today’s Britannia, it’s not uncommon to stumble across groups of evil players who talk like Snoop Doggy Dogg, dress like gangstas, and act like rampaging punks.” To be sure, some players were fully onboard with the “living-world” policy of (non-)administration. Others, however, had thought, reasonably enough given what they had read on the back of the game’s box, that they were just buying an entertainment product, a place to hang out in a few hours per day or week and have fun, chatting and exploring and killing monsters. They hadn’t signed up to organize police forces or lead political rallies. Nor had they signed up to be the guinea pigs in some highfalutin social experiment. No; they had signed up to play a game.

As it was, Ultima Online was all but impossible to play casually, thanks not only to the murderers skulking in its every nook and cranny but to core systems of the simulation itself. For example, if you saved up until you could afford to build yourself a nice little house, made it just like you wanted it, then failed to log on for a few days, when you did return you’d find that your home had disappeared, razed to make room for some other, more active player to build something. Systems like these pushed players to spend more time online as a prerequisite to having fun when they were there. Some left when the demands of the game conflicted with those of real life, which was certainly the wisest choice. But some others began to spend far more time in virtual Britannia than was really good for them, raising the specter of gaming addiction, a psychological and sociological problem that would only become more prevalent in the post-millennial age.

Origin estimated that the median hardcore player spent a stunning if not vaguely horrifying total of six hours per day in the virtual world. And if the truth be told, many of the non-murderous things with which they were expected to fill those hours do seem kind of boring on the face of it. This is the flip side of making a virtual world that is more “realistic”: most people play games to escape from reality for a while, not to reenact it. With all due respect to our dedicated and talented real-world tailors and bakers, most people don’t dream of spending their free time doing such jobs online. Small wonder so many became player killers instead; at least doing that was exciting and, for some people at any rate, fun. From Amy Jo Kim’s article:

There’s no shortage of realism in this game — the trouble is, many of the nonviolent activities in Ultima Online are realistic to the point of numbingly lifelike boredom. If you choose to be a tailor, you can make a passable living at it, but only after untold hours of repetitive sewing. And there’s no moral incentive for choosing tailoring — or any honorable, upstanding vocation, for that matter. So why be a tailor? In fact, why not prey on the tailors?

True, Ultima Online is many things to many people. Habitués of online salons come looking for intellectual sparring and verbal repartee. Some other people log on in search of intimate but anonymous social relationships. Still others play the game with cunning yet also a discernible amount of self-restraint, getting rich while staying pretty honest. But there’s no avoiding where the real action is: an ever-growing number are playing Ultima Online to kill everything that moves.

All of this had an effect: all signs are that, after the first rush of sales and subscriptions, Ultima Online began to stagnate, mired in bad reviews, ongoing technical problems, and a growing disenchantment with the player-killing and the other barriers to casual fun. Raph Koster admits that “our subscriber numbers, while stratospheric for the day, weren’t keeping up” with sales of the boxed game, because “the losses [of frustrated newbies] were so high.”

Although Origin and EA never published official sales or subscriber numbers, I have found one useful data point from the early days of Ultima Online, in an internal Origin newsletter dated October 30, 1998. As of this date, just after its first anniversary, the game had 90,000 registered users, of whom approximately half logged on on any given day. These numbers are depicted in the article in question as very impressive, as indeed they were in comparison to the likes of Meridian 59 and The Realm. Still, a bit of context never hurts. Ultima Online had sold 100,000 boxed copies in its first three months, yet it didn’t have even that many subscribers after thirteen months, when its total boxed sales were rounding the 200,000 mark. The subscriber-retention rate, in other words, was not great; a lot of those purchased CDs had become coasters in fairly short order.

Nine shards were up in North America at this time, a number that had stayed the same since the previous December. And it’s this number that may be the most telling one of all. It’s true that, since demand was concentrated at certain times of day, Ultima Online was hosting just about all the players it could handle with its current server infrastructure as of October of 1998. But then again, this was by no means all the players it should be able to handle in the abstract: new shards were generally brought into being in response to increasing numbers of subscribers rather than vice versa. The fact that no new North American shards had been opened since December of 1997 becomes very interesting in this light.

I don’t want to overstate my case here: Ultima Online was extremely successful on its own, somewhat experimental terms. We just need to be sure that we understand what those terms were. By no means were its numbers up there with the industry’s biggest hits. As a point of comparison, let’s take Riven, the long-awaited sequel to the mega-hit adventure game Myst. It was released two months after Ultima Online and went on to sell 1 million units in its first year — at least five times the number of boxed entrées to Origin’s virtual world over the same time period, despite being in a genre that was in marked decline in commercial terms. Another, arguably more pertinent point of comparison is Age of Empires, a new entry in the red-hot real-time-strategy genre. Released just one month after Ultima Online, it outsold Origin’s virtual world by more than ten to one over its first year. Judged as a boxed retail game, Ultima Online was a middling performer at best.

Of course, Ultima Online was not just another boxed retail game; the unique thing about it was that each of the 90,000 subscribers it had retained was paying $10 every month, yielding a steady revenue of almost $11 million per year, with none of it having to be shared with any distributor or retailer. That was really, really nice — nice enough to keep Origin’s head above water at a time when the studio didn’t have a whole lot else to point to by way of justifying its ongoing existence to EA. And yet the reality remained that Ultima Online was a niche obsession rather than a mass-market sensation. As so often happens in life, taking the next step forward in commercial terms, not to mention fending off the competition that was soon to appear with budgets and publisher support of which Meridian 59 and The Realm couldn’t have dreamed, would require a degree of compromise with its founding ideals.

Be that as it may, however, one thing at least was now clear: there was real money to be made in the MMORPG space. Shared virtual worlds would soon learn to prioritize entertainment over experimentation. Going forward, there would be less talk about virtual ecologies and societies, and more focus on delivering slickly packaged fun, of the sort that would keep all kinds of players coming back for more — and, most importantly of all, get those subscriber counts rising once more.

I’ll continue to follow the evolution of PMOG, MMORPGs, and Ultima Online in future articles, and maybe see if I can’t invent some more confusing acronyms while I’m at it. But not right away… other subjects beg for attention in the more immediate future.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: the books Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online by Wes Locher, Postmortems: Selected Essays, Volume One by Raph Koster, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, Through the Moongate, Part II by Andrea Contato, Explore/Create by Richard Garriott, and MMOs from the Inside Out by Richard Bartle, and Dungeons and Dreamers by Bard King and John Borland. Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 20 1998 and October 30 1998; Computer Gaming World of February 1998 and November 1998; New York Times of October 20 1997; Wired of May 1998.

Web sources include a 2018 Game Developers Conference talk by some of the Ultima Online principals, an Ultima Online timeline at UOGuide, and GameSpot‘s vintage reviews of Ultima Online and its first expansion, The Second Age. On the subject of SubSpace, we have histories by Rod Humble and Epinephrine, another vintage GameSpot review, and a Vice article by Emanuel Maiberg.

21 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on March 1, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: chris roberts, electronic arts, garriott, meridian 59, mmorpgs, origin, subspace, ultima, ultima online, virgin, wing commander

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