The humble plastic zip-top bag is nice for storing a sandwich, however what does it must do with old skool gaming? Quite a bit, actually! Back in 1979, a younger man programmed a online game that was distributed in a zip-top bag, which might come to spawn a trilogy of trilogies, numerous spin-offs and ports, and one of many world’s first commercially profitable graphical MMORPGs. This sequence nonetheless offers inspiration to sport builders all around the globe, even at present. But, I’m getting forward of myself! Let’s concentrate on the start:

At the tail finish of the Seventies, highschool pupil Richard Garriott labored an element time job at ComputerLand, a well-known and profitable chain of pc shops. In his spare time all through highschool he had been programming a sport on his faculty’s DEC PDP-11 minicomputer that he known as DND. This sport produced printed output on a teletype, very similar to many early video games of that period. However, when Richard Garriott obtained his first residence pc from his father, an Apple ][+, he converted his game to a graphical adventure which he named Akalabeth.

After showing the game to friends and co-workers, his boss at ComputerLand suggested that Richard package the game up and sell it at the front counter of their store. While Richard had never intended the game to be published and sold, he decided to give it a try. After spending about $200 dollars to gather materials, quite a large sum back in 1979 for a high school student, he set to work. With cover art drawn by his mother Helen Garriott and a homemade, stapled manual, everything was ready. These would go, along with the 5.25″ floppy disk that contained the game, into a plastic zip-top bag. Roughly twelve of these were sold, before one of them made its way into the hands of California Pacific Computer Company, which at the time was a successful computer game publisher. They saw the potential for great commercial success in Akalabeth and offered Richard a publishing deal where he would receive $5 for each copy they sold. After a plane trip to California, the deal was struck, although Richard chose to use the alias Lord British as the author of the game, rather than his own name.

California Pacific had new cover art and a new manual professionally designed, but as was standard at the time, still sold the game in a plastic zip-top bag. The venture was highly successful, as 30,000 copies of Akalabeth were sold by the end of 1981. This brought Richard Garriott $150,000 in profit, which at the time was even more than the salary of Richard’s famous SpaceLab astronaut father, Owen Garriott. The then 20 year old Richard had a decision to make. Program another game, or head to college?

Richard discussed his options with his family and collectively they decided that he should give a shot to programming another game while still attending college. Richard himself was quoted as saying, “Gee, if what I’m doing for fun can make money, it’s logical to write a much better game intended for publication.” (1)

Richard’s next programming project would be known as Ultima, the first of a series which would launch dozens of games over two decades, and spawn hundreds of similar titles that are still being produced today!

-Jarrod Kailef
https://www.kailef.com

(1) The Official Book Of Ultima by Shay Addams

JarrodKailef (1 Posts)

Jarrod Kailef does too much stuff, including voice overs and narration, computer network engineering, running a radio station, writing music, playing percussion, retro computing software development, and teaching martial arts. On rare occasions he might even get a few hours of sleep! In between all this, he still manages to write for Old School Gamer.

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