How Richard Garriott Took on the Games

Richard Garriot took it for granted that the parents of any child of his age were flying into outer space. It was common for him. “It was like that until I went to the University of Texas, where I met people who I can now describe as“ residents of Sesame Street , ”he says.

“I never really thought about the people who looked at Sesame Street as my neighbors until we had to move to Austin. Then I realized:“ Wait a minute. My childhood at NASA was fantastic, and Sesame Street fantasy was actually a reality. "For me, it was quite a strong cultural shock."

Although Garriot was born in 1961 in Cambridge (England), the main stage in the formation of a personality came to life in Houston, Texas. His residential area was practically a continuation of the Lyndon Johnson Space Center, NASA's Houston base. The majority of its neighbors were astronauts, contractors and engineers from NASA. Among them was Joe Angle, one of the first astronauts to join the Space Shuttle launch program, and Robert Gibson, better known to friends under the name Huth. He was on the STS-27 astronaut team, which in just four days made 68 orbits around the Earth.


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Of all the space travelers that Garriott had to meet, not one inspired him with more reverence than his father. In 1973, NASA chose Owen to participate in Skylab 3, the second manned flight to the first US space station Skylab. He was absent for 60 days. Down on earth, his wife Helen and his four children watched him through a loudspeaker of a one-way communication system. In the speakers, Helen and the children could listen to communication sessions transmitted from outer space. “We even hosted government meetings, so we were not shocked when we heard about malfunctions,” recalls Richard.

In other homes, kitchen tables were overwhelmed with bills, magazines, and textbooks. In the house of the Garriots, space artifacts and equipment were randomly scattered in the rooms. “In my childhood there were things that in retrospect seem to be simply amazing. But at that time they seemed ordinary, not only for our family, but also for most of the families in the neighborhood. ”

Helen Garriott's strength was not only enough to cope with the whole economy while her husband worked on the earth (and above the Earth). When her children needed help with their projects — for example, building a tree house or building an Indian tipi — Helen rolled up her sleeves. In addition to owning many other talents, Helen was a professional artist and a jack of all trades in various forms of art. Every summer she taught Richard a new form of art: in one year drawing, in the second - pottery, and went so far as to teach him to assemble fountains and showed the basics of a silver case.

From eleven years on, Richard wore a silver serpent around his neck — the result of his summer pursuits. “It was inseparable because it was my first job and I didn’t know how to make the fastener,” he says. “In fact, the clasp is quite a complex element. I still haven't managed to do it. ”

Magic cars

Shortly before Richard went to high school, NASA gave Owen a new task. Before responding to a NASA invitation in the 1960s, Owen studied electrical engineering at Stanford. Now his employer wished him to return to graduate school for a year. The family packed their bags and moved to Palo Alto (California), a major city near the university.

Enrolling in Gunn High School, Garriott discovered that many of her students were descendants of people from the Stanford faculty. Therefore, the school had access to samples of equipment still unknown to the rest of the world. Thanks to her connections, Ganna School had a progress miracle — a simple teletype remotely connected to the CDC Cyber ​​mainframe, located somewhere else.

“It's hard for me to remember how often they used it,” says Garriot. “It seems that it was used in the lessons of linguistics: if a student studied a foreign language, part of the testing was carried out on this teletype. But in my eyes, he instantly turned into a magic car. Even at that time, there were no lessons on programming such machines, but I had to linger after school or between lessons to sit at a computer and write code for it. ”

At the end of the school year, Garriott Sr.'s training came to an end and the family returned to Houston. Garriot was expecting a whole summer of boredom. He had just begun to get used to working at the terminal, and now he had to go to a school in which there was nothing like that. Owen and Helen noticed their son’s interest and arranged him at a seven-week computer camp, held in 1974 by their alma mater at the University of Oklahoma. “This was my first serious departure from home,” he says. Nervous on his first day, Garriott occupied himself with unpacking things. There was a knock at the door. Opening it, he saw a crowd of children who greeted him: "Hello." He responded with a more formal "Hello." Laughing, the boys said that he spoke like a Brit. From that day on, they started calling him British.


Richard Garriot

“As they found out later, I was actually born in Cambridge and I had a British passport,” says Garriott. “That is, in fact, I am a British. But I lived there only one or two months and I did not have a British accent. I grew up in Houston, near NASA, and all my neighbors came from different countries from around the world, so none of us had a local southern accent. My southern accent for southerners seemed to be a real British one. Therefore, they called me that, but the nickname became attached to me precisely for this reason. ”

That summer, Garriot and his friends were learning more than computers. Like many other teenagers who grew up in the mid-to-late 1970s, they were sucked into the desperate world of Dungeons & Dragons TSR. “In D & D games, Lord British became my character,” says Richard. "We played all night, and during the day we studied computers and mathematics."

Garriott's training ended in romance. “That summer has become important for me in so many ways,” he says. “For the first time I lived far away from home, and for the first time I lived in a hostel for boys and girls. You can imagine what could have happened in seven weeks of a mixed education program with a bunch of high school students living separately from their parents. ”

Two months later, Garriott entered the second year of Clear Creek High School and learned the good news. The school had a simple teletype. Summer classes in programming and role-playing games filled him with dedication. He was ready to study, but did not succeed in most subjects, interrupting from the “troika” to the “four”. The exceptions were science fairs. From kindergarten and throughout his studies, he participated in competitions with projects that surprised even the judges. Growing up, he began to participate in fairs of the district, state and international level, reaching even more.

Upon entering the Clear Creek administration office, Garriot made a proposal, backing him up with his proven ability to conduct independent projects. “After returning to Houston, I said at the faculty that I want to continue working with the machine. The curriculum did not have [computer programming]. Therefore, I asked permission to learn BASIC as a foreign language. ”

The faculty blessed him. In high school and high school, Garriot and other students who were allowed to adjust the learning process to their strengths began their own journey. Finally, Garriott managed to find a great way to fulfill his love for fantasy adventures and computers. “At this point, my computer training turned from the admiration of the machine directly to the implementation of computer games. Shortly before, my brother's wife gave me the Lord of the Rings to read. I played Dungeons & Dragons . I started to learn an unusual teletype, the same one I used at the University of Oklahoma. So I decided to create games. ”

In the last three years of studying in high school, Garriott embarked on his own expedition to the world of game programming. “If at the end of the semester, I showed the teachers what I promised to do at the beginning of the semester, they would say 'It sounds great, here is your top five'. That's what I did. He studied independently.

Dungeons and Dragons

Garriot had no choice but to become both a teacher and a student in his own programming lessons. No teacher knew what to do with a teletype, except how to turn it on and download programs. To replenish the knowledge gained in the camp, he searched the windows of kiosks in search of Byte magazines ! and Creative Computing , and then carefully studied the program texts listed there. Each contained a nugget of information that could be added to a growing knowledge bag, for example, data sorting algorithms by specific parameters.

Even despite the fact that the texts often met typos, their debugging has become another way of learning. “When you drive a program into a computer and some commands work incorrectly or there are typos in them,” he says. "You have to debug them yourself, that is, to understand them."

Along with self-learning, Garriot created the design of DND1 , his first role-playing game. Inspired by the "Dungeons and Dragons" DND1 was a simple walk through the dungeons: we enter the dungeon, kill monsters, collect treasures. Teletypes could not print images, so instead of graphics, he used text characters: asterisks were walls, spaces — floor tiles, dollar signs — treasures, and capital letters designated monsters, for example, “A” was a huge ant.

DND1 received teams of players and printed the results on a roll of paper. In the center of the dungeon grid, a tiny dot was printed - a player character. The text of the tooltip read "What do you want to do next?". Players could move in one of four directions, attack or view inventory. “After entering the command, the printer reprinted this small 10 by 10 grid,” recalls Garriot. "It seems that one move took about ten seconds."

The main reason for this waiting between moves was the time required for updating and printing dungeon schemes. Teletypes contacted the off-campus minicomputer, and since several terminals could be connected to it simultaneously, each of them had to wait for the machine to process its commands and send new data back. The process was so slow that Garriott decided to turn to a more primitive, but fast, coding method.

“I wrote [the games] in notebooks. I still have all these notebooks, signed as DND1 , DND2 , DND3, and so on, ”Richard says. “Often I wrote down ten or twenty pages of the program, and only then thought:“ There is something deeply erroneous in such a decision. I thought that I would solve one big problem, and as a result I came to new ones, and I would have to start all over again. ”

Before the start of the last academic year, Garriot bought a new notebook and wrote on his cover “DND28” . Approximately when he added the final touches, he had the opportunity to change for a new computer. “Once I was in the office of the school’s president, and there was an Apple II. I asked: "what is it"? He explained that this is a new computer that has just been released. ”

Startled, Garriot asked for permission to use the computer and got it. His one-hour language lesson moved to the office where he sat, entering DND28 on AppleSoft BASIC. Floppy disks were a rare and valuable resource, so he saved the code on a cassette tape.

That same summer, Garriot graduated and got a job at ComputerLand retail stores, specializing in the new PC market. When he didn’t tell customers about the benefits of owning a PC, he sat down at the free Apple II and continued to work on the DND28 .

Limited access to the Apple II exacerbated the complexity of the Garriott. He worked for one at school and another day in his spare time at ComputerLand. He really needed his own Apple II. He discussed this issue with his father. Owen listened to what his son managed to achieve at the terminals and on the Apple II. He widened his eyes a little in surprise when Richard spoke about his latest version of DND consisting of 1,500 lines of code. Judging by what he knew about computers, it was more than most commercial software. When Richard concluded his speech, Owen processed the information and issued a response.

“My father said,“ Richard, you know, you took on a monumental task. I'm not sure that you can handle this volume. " I answered: “Why do you underestimate me? I will not only cope, my program will work right away! ”


Akalabeth

Owen accepted the challenge and gave his son space to maneuver. If Richard manages to make a new and improved version of the game with a minimum amount of debugging, Owen will share with him the cost of the Apple II in half. Richard succeeded, and Owen was true to his word. Having collected salary checks, Richard combined his money with his father’s share and bought the Apple IIe, the most modern and powerful in this line of computers. “The first remark in the code was DND28b ,” says Richard, explaining that the REM construction (short for “remark”) in BASIC means a comment for people reading the code and being ignored by the computer.

“This is how Akalabeth appeared. That is, there is a direct continuity from DND1 to Akalabeth , and to the rest of the Ultima games. There is a direct link between all of my work from the 1970s. ”

The game has greatly evolved from its initial form, changing text characters to color graphics - a new way to improve immersion in the game. "I took the DND28 and decided to change its text graphics from the top to the perspective view from the corridors." “It turned into a DND28b . DND28b is literally Akalabeth , which for me remains Ultima 0. ”

Garriot planned to collect dungeons from line-based graphics. Walls, floors, doors, and also enemies were drawn as monochromatic outlines. Creating architecture and wire-frame characters required much more thought than the simple arrangement of XY coordinates for drawing ceilings and floors. He wanted to create a realistic perspective depending on the distance: the door near the player’s location should have been bigger than the long-distance one. Still remembering the concepts of sine and cosine in high school, he pondered the problem and wrote trigonometric functions to solve it.


Garriot would draw each image on graph paper to know exactly where to store the image in the memory of the Apple II.

To double-check his work, he turned to his favorite artist for help. "First of all, I went to my mother and said:" Mom, I want to draw a dungeon, as if I was inside, how would you paint it on a canvas? "And my mother showed me the geometric techniques she used." Helen drew a line on a piece of paper and asked Richard to imagine that it was a horizon. Then she drew several vertical lines that were supposed to mark telephone poles, but Garriot's brain interpreted them as doors along the corridor, and explained to him the math needed to calculate the exact distance between the pillars and draw them on the screen.

Helen's geometrical calculations corresponded to what he was able to obtain using trigonometry. To be fully convinced that he was right, Richard turned to Owen. “He used the analysis,” says Richard. “He took the same picture drawn by mom, and derived a series of equations that gave the same results as mine. So I was convinced of the correctness of my trigonometric formulas. Using these equations, I needed to manually calculate and place the pixels on the screen. ”

Each pixel had to be placed on the screen exactly where required. It was necessary to calculate the sets of intersecting lines, such as the convergence of walls and ceilings. “This equipment was created by Steve Wozniak,” says Garriot. “When you create equipment, your goal is to minimize its price, and not to simplify writing programs. Even though I used very clever ways to effectively use the hardware, [drawing] graphics on the Apple II was terribly complicated. ”

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This excerpt is taken from the book “Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution” by Schiffer Publishing, sold on Amazon . The book presents a chronicle of the creation of more than a dozen revolutionary PC games, gives interviews with developers and details of how these games influenced their followers.