Origin Systems

Origin Systems, Inc. was an American computer game developer and publisher active from 1983 to 2004, best known for the Ultima and Wing Commander series that helped define the fantasy role-playing and space-combat-simulation genres on home computers.¹³ Founded to capitalize on the popularity of Richard Garriott’s Ultima games, the company operated as one of the emerging computer-game market’s rising stars through the 1980s before it was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1992.³⁵ Its motto, “We create worlds,” summarized an emphasis on richly realized settings, elaborate packaging, and player immersion that distinguished its output from that of its competitors.¹³¹⁸

Founding

Origin grew directly out of Garriott’s disputes with earlier publishers of his Ultima games.¹ Garriott had self-published Akalabeth: World of Doom in 1979 — famously packaging its floppy disks in Ziploc bags — before being picked up by the California Pacific Computer Company and later by Sierra Online?.³¹³ After releasing Ultima II under Sierra’s imprint, his relationship with the company disintegrated over royalty disputes tied to the PC port of the game, and Garriott, who had retained the rights to the Ultima name, resolved to publish the third installment himself.¹³¹⁵ His older brother Robert, then finishing a second master’s degree at MIT with a thesis titled “Cross Elasticity Demand for Computer Games,” proposed that they start their own publisher, with Robert managing the business side.¹⁵

The company was founded in 1983 by Richard and Robert Garriott, their father — the astronaut Owen Garriott — and Garriott’s friend, the programmer Chuck “Chuckles” Bueche.¹³¹⁵ Garriott recalled that the company was formed in his parents’ garage in Houston, and it initially operated out of the Garriott house and its attached three-car garage.¹¹⁵ It was founded with roughly $70,000 in family money.⁴ Its first order of business was to collect royalties on Ultima I–II and Akalabeth, after which a team was assembled to develop Ultima III: Exodus.³ The company name likely owed something to the Origins Game Fair?, a prominent North American tabletop gaming convention, reflecting Garriott’s deep roots in the Dungeons & Dragons culture he had played obsessively since high school.¹⁵

Games and growth

Origin moved to New Hampshire in 1984 to take advantage of the region’s large pool of young computer programmers, and did not return to Austin, Texas, until 1989.¹³ By that year it employed roughly 50 people across its New Hampshire and Texas offices, and its motto had shifted from “The fantasy begins with Origin Systems… and never ends” to “Others write software… We create worlds”.³ The Ultima series became a cornerstone of the fantasy computer role-playing game, establishing party-based combat, the use of time travel as a plot device, and an overarching narrative that contextualized play.¹ Later entries pursued narrative complexity: after Ultima IV there was no traditional evil antagonist, but rather a morality system in which the player had to follow a strict virtue code to become the Avatar — a novel approach that soon became widespread.³

The company brought aboard Warren Spector?, who joined in 1989 as a producer on Ultima VI and Wing Commander and worked at Origin until 1996.³⁹ Garriott, who was not the strongest at organizing an interactive story, credited Spector’s Ultima titles as the high points of the series.¹ Chris Roberts joined and directed the RPGs Times of Lore and Bad Blood before creating Wing Commander in 1990, the space-combat simulation that defined the company’s identity as much as Ultima and raised industry standards for production values.³ Origin developed a wide catalog beyond its two flagships, including Strike Commander, the Crusader action games, BioForge, and the Jane’s combat flight simulators.¹³¹⁶¹⁷

Origin was known for the elaborate materials packed with its games; the original Wing Commander, for instance, shipped with a booklet purporting to be a shipboard magazine called Claw Marks, ghost-written by Aaron Allston, that mixed lore, ship statistics, and irrelevancies to heighten immersion.¹³ Garriott made it a point of pride to begin each new Ultima entirely from scratch, carrying over not a line of code — even the map editors and tools were coded anew.⁹ Project director Stephen Beeman recalled the studio’s cardinal virtue as a commitment to ship the director’s vision at any cost, captured in the motto “A game’s only late until it ships, but it sucks forever,” and marathon crunches were a fact of life long before EA’s ownership.⁹

Origin fostered close ties with several figures who went on to shape the industry. Paul Neurath?, described by Garriott as one of Origin’s “first great authors,” led design on the science-fiction role-playing game Space Rogue before founding Blue Sky Productions, later renamed Looking Glass Studios?.¹¹⁶ Together, Neurath and Spector created Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a first-person action-RPG with continuous-motion 3D technology now regarded as the first “immersive sim?”.³ John Romero? worked at Origin for about a year before leaving to co-found id Software? with John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack.³ J. Allen Brack, later president of Blizzard Entertainment?, began his career at Origin as a quality-assurance tester on the Wing Commander series.⁷

Acquisition and decline

By the summer of 1992 Origin faced serious financial difficulties.¹³ The market for home-computer ports vanished abruptly, leaving the company with unsold stock, while re-tooling its distribution pipeline for the IBM PC consumed resources and a Texas banking crisis made loans unavailable.¹³ Its lack of product diversification compounded the risk: with essentially only two viable product lines and little presence on game consoles, the failure of a single major release in either franchise could threaten the whole company.¹⁸ Ultima VII: The Black Gate, released that year, drew a more muted response than Origin had hoped, plagued by bugs, high system requirements, and the difficulty of configuring it under MS-DOS.¹⁸

On September 10, 1992, Electronic Arts and Origin announced a definitive agreement for EA to acquire the Austin company, exchanging approximately 1.3 million shares in a deal valued at about $35 million and accounted for as a pooling of interests.⁵ Origin had completed its fiscal year ending February 28, 1992, with net revenues of $13 million and pre-tax profits of $3.2 million, and the 160-person company had developed and published over 30 titles.⁵ By that point the Ultima series had sold more than 1.5 million units worldwide and Wing Commander more than 500,000.⁵ Robert Garriott, president and CEO, continued in his role and became a vice president of EA, while Richard Garriott remained creative director and became an executive producer.⁵ Origin was operated as a wholly owned subsidiary.⁵

The acquisition carried heavy irony given the two companies’ antagonistic history. EA had earlier filed what Origin executives regarded as a frivolous lawsuit that forced a costly out-of-court settlement, and Garriott’s resentment ran deep.⁹¹⁸ He built a mausoleum at his Austin mansion for “Pirt Snikwah” — EA founder Trip Hawkins’s name spelled backward — and treated the phrase “Electronic Arts” as a curse word in Ultima V’s parser.¹⁸ In Ultima VII he worked in a set of infernal generators whose shapes together formed the former EA logo — a cube, a sphere, and a tetrahedron — and named two murderous villains Elizabeth and Abraham, working for a “Destroyer of Worlds” in inversion of Origin’s own tagline.⁴¹⁸

Under EA’s ownership the studio was streamlined for profit and given deadlines its staff often found impossible, which stripped plot elements from Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle and Ultima VIII: Pagan and left Ultima IX: Ascension bug-ridden and hastily plotted.¹³ In 1997 Origin released Ultima Online, one of the earliest and most successful graphical MMORPGs.¹³ After completing Ultima IX in 1999, EA decided Origin would become an online-only company, but within a year cancelled all of its new development projects, including Ultima Online 2, Privateer Online, and Harry Potter Online.¹³ Richard Garriott left shortly afterward to found Destination Games in 2000.¹³ In its later years Origin existed mainly to support and expand Ultima Online; Electronic Arts disbanded the studio in February 2004.¹³

Legacy

Origin has been described as a cradle of modern game design, credited with bringing the character-building elements of tabletop and pen-and-paper games like Dungeons & Dragons into video games.¹⁹ The talent it gathered dispersed into influential careers: Spector moved to Looking Glass and then Ion Storm, where his work on Deus Ex reshaped player choice in action games, while Garriott went on to co-found Destination Games and later Portalarium, whose Shroud of the Avatar was conceived as a spiritual successor to Ultima.¹¹⁹ FromSoftware’s first game, King’s Field (1994), was directly influenced by Ultima Underworld and became a spiritual predecessor of that studio’s later work.²²