The Garriott Brothers Q&A
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Q: Richard, you'll be inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame during the awards ceremony. What do you think about it?
A: Well, it's one of the rewards of being one of the perpetually the oldest developers in the business. At the age of nineteen when I wrote my first game, there were no other developers, right? Effectively none. When I was twenty, some new kids got in who were nineteen. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Every new person had to be younger than me. That's kind of a funny thing to point out. But it also has some practical advantages. For the first five of ten years of this business you did these games by yourself. And so I was the audio engineer. I made the simple little sound effects that went into the game. I wrote all the code in assembly language, or basic, or whatever those languages might have been. I drew all the art, stick-figures though it may have been. I wrote all the text, though it may have been horribly misspelled. But by doing all those parts and working on a machine that had a limited amount of clock speed and memory, I personally had to make the trade-offs of "Gee, if I spend it on audio, here's what I'm going to lose in art, and if I spend it on art, here's what I lose in feature functionality." I had to balance those factors against each other, from the get go, all by myself. The problem is now, if you go forward in time to contemporary people trying to get into this business, even those people who consider themselves generalists, there are so many incredibly difficult sub-specialties, it's amazing anyone can do this work, but especially the general purpose work, like being the lead designer, or director or producer. Those jobs, where you need the mastery that I luckily developed at an early age are not possible to develop in the same way that I did. That's allowed me, in my later era, to make the following statement: For example, every artist in this building is a thousand times better than ever I was. Every programmer in this building is a thousand times better at programming than I ever was. Every writer in this building is a better writer than I ever was.
