SyndCon 2010 keynote
This short talk was given to SyndCon, the annual convention for The Syndicate, in 2010.
Video
Coming soon!
Transcript
Wow.
[“Put on the speaking hat!” “You gotta wear it!”]
Now, if I put this on, will I melt or explode?
[“Yeah!”]
[I put on the hat. It is blue and green and fuzzy, with a wide brim. I have trouble seeing. There are applause and hoots. I take it off. “Awwww…”]
So… I gotta tell ya, this is kind of a weird experience for me, and not just because of the hat.
[Laughter.]
I am pretty sure there are people in this room that weren’t even born when I got into making MMOs. How many of you folks started playing with UO? How many of you started playing before UO?
Text muds, anybody? That’s right. Awesome.
So, UO, and probably some of the stuff from back then, like Asheron’s Call? How about stuff like Underlight? Rubies of Eventide? Illusia?
Original Neverwinter Nights! Any Kesmai players? Wow.
So you know, I remember when you guys got founded.
[laughter]
I remember having to come in and crunch over a weekend to write a guild system, because of you all.
[laughter]
I thought I’d come in and take you down a little trip down memory lane that for the other two-thirds of you will be baffling. For all of those who got started with the Johnny-come-latelies, like… Everquest!
[laughter]
I got started with text muds. I got started playing online games in … probably 1992, 93? And I was considered a Johnny-come-lately by the MUD dinos at that time. Because you know, virtual worlds, they’ve bee going since 1978. And there are still people who will tell you, “oh, I was playing online games on PLATO, on amber monitors with plasma screens, in the 70’s.” Are there any of those people in here? One or two… ‘cause they can be real snobs about it.
[laughter]
I was only 23 when I started at Origin, and that was in 1995. My wife and I were hired out of text muds because Lord British had logged into our text mud and decided maybe it wasn’t too bad and maybe we could be designers on this new “Multima” thing they were talking about.
There were a few of us from a bunch of different muds. There was one of us who worked on a Star Wars LP Mud. There was a guy who worked on NarniaMUSH and TooMUSH. Any of you ever MUSH people? None of you.
[laughter]
These were the roleplaying-only, no combat games. There were a couple of people on UO from that. There were people who came from the classic kind of Diku world, that’s the same kind of gameplay that today dominates everything.
And back then, my wife and I actually brought our newborn daughter to the office in her baby carrier, and she was the third person occupying our office. She’s thirteen now, and I see at least one kid in the audience who is younger than my daughter. And that, honestly, just freaks me the heck out.
[laughter]
For a while there we had folding chairs on folding tables, and were crammed six to an office. It was total skunkworks. I mean, there was a period there on UO that they had no idea what to do with us. Right? So, the fifth floor of the Origin building used to have in it some ad agency or something weird like that, and they kicked them out even though origin made more money off real estate and rentals than they actually ever did off of games. But they kicked out this profit center, this ad agency, and were doing remodeling. Remodeling then, the fifth floor of this building that’s on a hillside. They knocked out all of the windows and all of the walls.
So this elevator surfaced onto bare concrete, and if you walked you could just walk right off the edge of the building.
I’m surprised the insurance people let them keep an office up there, because if you avoided falling off the building, one corner of that floor still had drywall, and there was a “Multima” sign, an arrow, printed on a color printer, which back then was a really. Big. Deal.
[laughter]
They actually let us print this in color. It was just an arrow that said “Multima.” And you went in that door and it was freakin’ freezing up there. ‘Cause this was – granted, Austin, but it was winter, and it actually had iced over that year, and snowed, in Austin. We didn’t have heat in that little corner of drywall, in that floor that was gone. And unfortunately, the prototype server for UO, the machine for it sat directly under the thermostat. So all the heat from the machine went and hit the thermostat. So it ran the air conditioning up there, all the time.
[laughter]
So we all worked in jackets and wore fingerless gloves so that we could type. So it was pretty skunkworks. We had, let’s see, one two three four offices… and the hallway that was still enclosed. And in that we held about fourteen or fifteen people. And every once in a while someone from downstairs would surface from the Elevator of Doom, risk walking across the bare concrete and falling off the building, and visit us.
And then they’d tell us something like “Well, gosh, we hate to tell you this, but we just cancelled Warren Spector’s project and fired a fifth of the company.” And we said “who?” Because we didn’t know anybody. We were up there, we were total skunkworks. Every few months we got to see Richard Garriott. It was a big deal.
The artists got to sit in the hallway [inaudible]…
This is also how we got to launch a beta site without telling marketing.
[laughter]
You know, we just set up a site, and we put up a FAQ, and because we were who we were, the original branding for Ultima Online consisted of two llamas. Two llamas, and Ultima Online, because there was no name so that’s what we called ourselves. “Well, it’s Ultima. Online. Llamas!” You know.
And then this FAQ in which we promised you guys the moon. Any of you remember the FAQ? Any of you old schools enough to remember the FAQ? Oh, come on, this is the one where you go out and you kill the deer, and then the dragons would notice the deer aren’t there, so they attack the city and you could fight them off the city and they’d reward you? Yeah, that never came true.
[laughter]
We tried! And it never came true.
There was also a thing, you remember, at the bottom. A little sun. It was just a little circle, with some lines around it, in yellow. That was actually called “a happy butthole.”
[laughter]
It came from an epic series of practical jokes that Richard was playing on his girl friend and vice versa, where they would do things like sneak into each other’s house and put happy butthole stickers over absolutely everything, like inside cabinets, or make confetti blow out of the air conditioning system in their car, blow out confetti and each piece would have a tiny little happy butthole drawn on the piece of paper, or come into origin and find it spray-painted on the parking deck when you drove in. It just kept escalating until finally one day it made the news that there was a giant banner hanging over Mopac Expressway off of one of the overpasses.
[laughter]
So it was a little in-joke for us, that was there on the FAQ.
Surprisingly, marketing made us remove no only the happy butthole, but even the llamas, and I till resent that.
[laughter]
The funny thing is that at the time, we were the invasion of the big budgets. For all of that – I mean, happy buttholes for crissake! And we were the big companies!? Coming in and destroying the online game culture of the day.
“Oh, it’ll be completely ruined!” This is what the old-timers were saying. “It’s going to get completely ruined by the fact there’s these big companies coming in and they are going to destroy everything that is awesome about the online game community that existed then. Things like… people who would get together with their friends to come to online gaming conventions. That would be lost!
[gestures at the audience.]
[laughter]
Cause you know, you’re part of a long tradition here. My gosh, Kesmai guys, Air Warrior used to run conventions back in the 80s. Right?
So there was this fear from people. “Oh, it’s all going to change.” And they were right, they were right. It did change. I mean, for one thing, you people came along. And you changed stuff. We knew we would NEED a guild system, but we cut it for time, because most of UO was built in nine months.
Something most people don’t know… most of UO was built in nine months. We launched it after nine months, because we built this whole demo for E3, and then we made an alpha and then we said “well, that’s nice but it’ll never work,” so we threw it away, and we started over. And we launched something after nine months.
[“So that’s what happened!”]
That is what happened… and there went the dragons, they were on that chopping block too, the cool dragons with their AI that ate people.
So yeah, stuff was changing. It was big budgets. UO cost something like eight million dollars. Which is probably like, three minutes of WoW development time.
[laughter]
And we weren’t the only skunkworksy thing at the time. I mean, we were the big budget, but right at the same time, and we all started right at the same time: Everquest was starting at the same time that UO was, Asheron’s Call was starting at the same time that UO was, over In Korea, Lineage was start8ing at the same that UO was, and Dark Ages was. And all of these projects that didn’t get [inaudible], like Rubies of Eventide and the Realm, you know, all of these games all got going right around 1994-95. We just took different amounts of time to finish.
And all of those games, that came out clear up through 1999, they were all like that. Little skunkwork things on folding tables. Because the big companies were all like “online gaming? Whaaa?”
You said 65,000? 65,000 is double what EA originally estimated that UO would have as lifetime subscribers.
So the big companies had no idea that meteor was about to hit and completely blow up everything that people knew about the games business.
So we had all these big dreams about long lasting online communities where people from different walks of life would come together and get to be friends, and immerse themselves in these fantasy virtual worlds that would serve as both an escape and a new kind of society. I mean we were crazy optimistic nutsos, there’s no way around it.
[“And so were we!”]
Well, actually, and here you are! It kinda came true. When you guys first started showing up, you guys and other early guilds – and it’s probably against the rules to do this, but to give shout-outs to other folks like Shadowclan and other folks who got going at the same time that you guys did – and showed the kind of commitment that just blew our minds. You had to delete your character, and start over, with a name that had LLTS in it, in order to join the guild. Try doing that today! “Well, I know that you raided, and got epics, and whatevers, but you’re gonna have to reroll.”
[“That’s my announcement at the end of the meeting.”]
[laughter]
So old school! It drives loyalty. That’s how you get to 99.07, so…
[laughter]
Then of course because of that, I had to go write a guild system. Which by the way, I personally wrote the guild system in UO, so you can blame me for that, the paging through people, yeah.
[laughter]
I only had a weekend!
[laughter]
Which then made you all reroll! Again! Which lots of you did, because you didn’t want LLTS in your name, because you’d rather be able to show it through your guild heraldry, such as it was (I only had so much time)…
Thing is, I was a punk kid of 23. I am going to turn 39 in a couple of weeks…
[“Whoo hoo!” “For the first time?”]
For the first time, yeah, and you know what? There’s a whole lot of game companies right now that are going “oh crap, there’s a meteor coming?” There’s a whole lot of people going “What’s happened? Are core gamers getting abandoned?” There’s a whole lot of people saying, “what’s happening to our longstanding online gaming communities, are they getting shredded by all this Facebook crap?” And it’s like, oh boy, here comes another meteor.
Are any of you freaked out by the number of games about clicking on cows?
[laughter]
It’s OK! It’s OK to say so! How many of you play games about clicking on cows?
[laughter]
Guess I am here to tell you that we have been here before. I mean, there are those among you who actually dared to admit that they played on PLATO or on Kesmai, or that they actually did pay six dollars an hour to play on GEnie…
[“Ooof”]
Yes, yes, yes. Online gaming… if you think that microtransactions are bad NOW? You have no idea! Yeah, you used to haver to pay by the minute. And people like you? You were the prime target for the thousand-dollar day. I’m not joking, thousand-dollar day. So as you can see, the State of Virginia is missing out on a hell of a lot of taxes.
[laughter]
Here’s the way I look at it. Facebook is just another new console, is just another hand-helds. And just like the GameBoy it has pretty bad graphics, and the games are pretty simple. But it’s going to lead up to having 3d in your hand, and even 3d glasses. It’s gonna work its way up. But in the meantime, it’s absolutely true, the games are fairly simple.
But on the other hand, that means a lot of people are getting to play. A huge amount of people., And it’s true that these games are not getting dragons to eat the villagers because you killed the deer, and it’s true that as of yet there aren’t really raids, and there aren’t conventions for people who are playing these games.
But you guys came in because of one of these shifts. And that means that there’s a whole bunch of people who are coming in now that are going to discover over time, the kind of community and the kind of family and friendship that you guys have. Because what’s happening is, this, this stuff that has occupied you guys for fourteen years, the lifespan of my daughter, is now going to be occupying twenty times, a hundred times, as many people.
And it can be really scary to have that kind of volume suddenly come in. Partly, because honestly, the amount of money that is getting spent on the things that those fourteen-year-olds among you grew up with, and up to the twenty-four year olds, that’s changing. The companies are making less, and in some ways they are dreaming a little bit less, because it’s the big companies now. You guys are big business.
I mean, you guys are now an LLC. YOU GUYS are now corporate.
[applause]
You know, the nice thing about this, along with the shift, the folding tables came back. The little offices with twelve people and no air conditioning or too much, came back. It’s back to working off a surface of stuff purchased at Ikea. And along with it comes the crazy dreaming again.
GameBoy didn’t stay black and white forever. And even though it’s been a long and crazy road, and it kind of looks like the game industry is veering off a cliff in a couple of ways… I couldn’t tell if consoles are gonna be around… I don’t know! Is PC gaming outside of online going to be around? I don’t know. If somebody had said that the only publisher worth looking at would be Steam, four years ago I think most people in the room would have laughed. But instead all the publishers have signed over the life to Steam and now they’re going “Oh crap!”
[laughter]
“What do we do?”
But I actually believe that what’s going to happen now is that the new generation of games that are coming, that are now starting from the premise of this kind of community, this kind of online society, bvut for everybody, for the kind of people who ask you guys “you’re going to a WHAT convention?”
[laughter]
That stuff, it is going to kind of like hit the reset button. We are going to get a whole new kind of online gaming, a whole new kind of virtual world, a whole new world of online community, and this time maybe some of these dreams are going to come back. Because it’s not going to stay clicking on cows. It’s just a new console. It’s just the Space Invaders of today happens to be Cow clicking. But it’s all going to start rebuilding.
So I actually think that even though it’s kind of a freaky moment for you guys, the elder statesmen of online gaming… my kid’s thirteen, you guys are going to be introducing all kinds of new folks, folks who never heard of UO, never heard of EQ, never heard of any of those games, folks who think that “oh WoW is that old game that came out years ago.” It already is.
They are going to be listening to music that you don’t like or understand. And a lot of them will be playing games that you don’t like or understand. But it’s in traditions like this one, traditions like the Syndicate, traditions like you guys coming back year after year, training these folks up, that the torch gets passed on.
So even if we are at this moment of transition, even big huge worlds are kind of fading away – they’ll be back, because nothing ever dies. As long as somebody is still willing to stick LLTS at the end of a signature, you guys will be able to keep carrying on, able to keep marching forward, and keep the torch going.
