We’re not talking about Richard Garriott, also known as Lord British, but rather his brother Robert!
The Ultima series was such a huge success in the 1980s and 1990s that its creator, Richard Garriott, earned enough money to travel to the bottom of the ocean and even to the International Space Station. Part of the success of his game studio, Origin Systems, was due to his brother Robert Garriott, who later became a vice president at Electronic Arts and then headed the American branch of NCsoft, known for Guild Wars, when it was launching MMOs such as City of Heroes. Before all that, however, Robert Garriott appeared at the 1989 Computer Game Developers Conference as the business brain of Origin Systems to talk about a problem that feels very 2026: there are simply too many computer games!
Thanks to the Videogame History Foundation, which digitized nearly the entire cassette archive of the 1989 conference, we can hear Garriott speaking on a panel alongside publishers representing other major names of the time, including Electronic Arts, which bought Origin Systems a few years later, as well as Broderbund and Accolade. Garriott addressed the industry slump that everyone was talking about, as PC game sales were clearly going through a rough patch.
Garriott claimed that arcade games, as well as entry-level role-playing and strategy games, were being affected by the explosive rise in popularity of the NES, which was raising alarm bells throughout the PC industry at the time. However, he argued that deeper PC role-playing and strategy games were not really feasible on a game console, so why were their sales falling too? He blamed declining PC hardware sales from Apple, Commodore, and Dell, but also product proliferation. In 1989 business language, that simply meant there were too many videogames.
Garriott was refreshingly honest when he said he was embarrassed to admit that he did not believe software publishers truly understood the relative weight of those factors, though he remained confident that game sales would eventually rebound. Of course, he had no idea then just how massive PC gaming would become in the years ahead, or that one day more games would be released on Steam in a single day than people saw in an entire month back in 1989. His closing advice, however, remains just as relevant today as it was 37 years ago…
“The question everyone seems to be asking right now is why? Why did this happen? Everyone’s saying Nintendo, Nintendo’s the obvious reason. I view Nintendo as something of a scapegoat. The computer game industry has seen sales increase 15-25% every year for the last three years, which is a pretty healthy increase for any normal industry in America, but unfortunately the number of new titles in the US market probably increased by 25-50%, so what that means is the sales per title have necessarily decreased. If everything else was the same, the sales per title has to be going down. I think that’s also a factor in this issue.
The consumer is being very confused, they don’t really know what to buy for their computer, and they’re being basically lost from the entertainment market. We have to develop products that cannot be duplicated on gaming consoles. We’re worried about Nintendo. We need to develop long-playing, in-depth, high-graphic, memory-intensive products. And finally we need to increase our quality. Quality always has, and always will, sell itself”, Garriott said.
And he was right: if something is high quality, there will be demand for it.
