An Online-Gaming Pioneer Is Back, and This Time He’s Banking on Sci-Fi

AUSTIN, Tex. — At the age of 46, Richard Garriott is an old man by video game standards. In fact, when it comes to games on personal computers, he could be fairly described as the old man.

Mr. Garriott has been one of the world’s most famous game designers longer than almost anyone else. Starting in 1980 with Akalabeth and Ultima I, his early work defined home computer games as thoroughly as Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong defined the arcade experience.

The original Ultima series provided players with an expansive swords-and-sorcery fantasy world presided over by the majestic Lord British, a nickname for Mr. Garriott himself. But as with most early games, only one person could play at a time.

So in the mid-1990s Mr. Garriott had an idea that seemed ludicrous to most people in the game business: What if he could build a game world that thousands of people could inhabit at once, using their computers and a newly popular contraption known as a modem? The result in 1997 was Ultima Online, the first true “massively multiplayer” game and the progenitor of what is now the multibillion-dollar online game industry.

But Mr. Garriott has produced no hits since. The final title in the Ultima series, Ultima IX, produced in an atmosphere of corporate chaos in 1999 as Mr. Garriott severed ties with the giant publisher Electronic Arts, was an unqualified debacle of incoherent design and game-crashing bugs.

So while he remains a famous figure, an entire mini-generation of players has come along over the last decade who have never seen a new game by Mr. Garriott.

Now they can. After six years and at least $20 million in development, Lord British plans to introduce a new game on Friday bearing a title that may be as apt for its creator as it is for its players: Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa.

Tabula Rasa is a massively multiplayer online game, or M.M.O., like Ultima Online, EverQuest or World of Warcraft. But in making Tabula Rasa the first major science-fiction online game in years, Mr. Garriott has traded in spells for shotguns. While many online games feature complicated controls that may require 30 seconds or more to defeat a single foe, Tabula Rasa is based on hectic combat against legions of slavering aliens.

“I’ve been doing medieval fantasy for 25 years in a row, and it was just time to do something new,” Mr. Garriott, in his customary uniform of denim shirt, jeans, white tube socks and sneakers, said here at the offices of NCsoft, the South Korean company publishing the game. “The first element we wanted to focus on was fast-paced tactical combat. No. 2 was creating a dynamic battlefield where the player feels there is action going on around them all the time. And third was creating a story line that includes ethical parables and problems.”

Mr. Garriott said Tabula Rasa’s emphasis on quick action and tactical awareness — using cover and maneuvering around enemies — was a more realistic and immersive style than what he sees as most games’ emphasis on simply piling on the most powerful weapons and armor. In that sense he sees himself as putting the role back into role-playing games. And he is not above taking shots at the competition.

“As many kudos as I would like to give World of Warcraft, it’s basically a remake of EverQuest, just incredibly polished and refined,” he said. “There are harbingers of failure in that model. Everyone in these games is obsessed with the concept of how much damage-per-second they are inflicting and maximizing their D.P.S. When you do that, you are no longer playing a role; you are playing an inventory-management game.”

He added, “With Tabula Rasa we wanted the player to spend as much time as possible actually looking at the environment and what they’re shooting at.”

But for all the emphasis on beautiful laser beams and big explosions, Mr. Garriott has also tried to infuse the game with some emotional and ethical depth.

In fairly typical science-fiction fashion, Tabula Rasa’s story line revolves around the conflict between humanity and an alien race called the Bane. But there are twists.

“In most games you are simply the great hero and you save the day by defeating the great evil,” he said. “But in the real world many people can agree on a goal but disagree wildly about how to achieve it. In some areas we present the player with dilemmas akin to the global war on terror: How far are you prepared to go to do what you think is right? To defeat the Bane, are you prepared to poison a river that your peaceful allies depend on? Or to destroy large swaths of your allies’ forest home? Are your allies expendable in the sense that you’re fighting over there, so you don’t have to fight over here?”

It remains to be seen whether such elements will be embraced by or lost upon the gamers who have taken over the hobby since Lord British sold his first game in a Ziploc bag 27 years ago.

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