You know, this comment immediately makes me think of this: http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...

Specifically, "As bad as Ion Storm was internally, there was a dark secret that eventually unraveled. It wasn’t until years later, well after the 1996 E3 demo of Dominion Storm, and after StarCraft launched, that we discovered that the Dominion Storm demo was a fake."

So not having been there, I have to ask: did you have hands on the controls?

Disclaimer: I haven't seen either of these guys for 15 years. However, I was at Origin in the early 90s, followed by Digital Anvil. Not everything we did turned to gold, to put it mildly, but Chris and Erin didn't rig demos.

If they're doing that now, I'll be astonished. It wasn't in our DNA as a company -- either company -- and that ethic came from the top.

We were well accustomed to competing with the latest rigged demo from any of several companies that are either entirely forgotten now, or remembered with a snarky chuckle. Our business was basically to ship what other people were promising... eventually, anyway. :)

I loved the early 90s Origin games, they are certainly the ones I remember the most fondly. I spent days in Ultima 7 just wandering around completely aimlessly talking to random NPCs and looting dungeons.

Were you there during the development of Ultima 8 and 9? Not to be rude, but if so what the hell happened there?

Was it simply an emphasis of technology over gameplay and story?

These reviews made me chuckle.

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2011/02/01/ultima-7-the-black-ga... http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/01/31/ultima-8-pagan/ http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/05/29/ultima-9-ascension/

I left shortly before U6 came out, so couldn't speak firsthand about anything that happened afterward. A lot of nasty things have been written about the effects of the company's acquisition by Electronic Arts, and most of those things are true. The culture clash was massive.

Around the time U9 was being developed, Ultima Online was also becoming the Next Big Thing, and I imagine that splitting development resources between those two huge projects couldn't have done any good. One of them was bound to win more mindshare and attract more funding and in-house talent.

Ultima V was the very last one I played all the way through, personally, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's true for Richard as well.

That's fair.

The article smells of vaporware to me, honestly. Much as I'd love to see something like this happen, I'm really cynical about the MMO industry these days and do not really believe it will happen. If the crowdfunding thing happens, I'll probably put down some money, just to register interest if nothing else... but I'm waiting to see before I believe.

Nope. But he did demo some combat and completely failed to shoot down any enemies, crashed into his own carrier twice, and then got outrun by the enemies. I think a rigged demo would probably have gone a bit differently. :)