Electronic Arts needed a whole lot of convincing before Ultima creator Richard "Lord British" Garriott was given the green light to make Ultima Online.
On the latest episode of our interview show IGN Unfiltered, Garriott shared the story behind the creation of Ultima Online. He and his team wanted to make a multiplayer Ultima game—which they referred to internally as "Multima"—for quite some time, but waited until the market was ready for such a product.
When the internet started to take off, Garriott and Starr Long decided now was the time to finally pitch their "Multima" idea to EA. As part of the publisher's proposal process, Garriott said the project's lifetime sales estimate needed to justify the costs required to make the game, "but the way to determine that is with comparables," of which there were none at the time. The closest comparison they could find had 15,000 sales. So, taking into consideration the appeal of the Ultima brand, they doubled that to 30 thousand, which still wasn't nearly enough to green light the project.
from IGN Video Games http://ift.tt/2mQDr1b
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment