Episode Details

In August 1997, during the Ultima Online beta test, a random player assassinated Lord British, the supposedly invincible in-game alter ego of creator Richard Garriott, in front of a crowd. This episode uses that moment, and the Lord British Postulate it inspired, to trace Garriott's evolution from a teenage dungeon master with a stiff way of saying hello to a philosophical pioneer of morality in digital spaces. Starting with Akalabeth in 1979, Garriott rejected the Ziploc-bag software model and demanded that Ultima II ship in a sturdy box with a glossy manual and a cloth map, a physical workaround for the 48 kilobytes of RAM in an Apple II.

When Ultima III let players steal and murder townsfolk freely, angry letters from parents during the satanic panic made Garriott realize his system was training sociopaths. His answer was Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985), a game with no villain, where the goal is enlightenment through eight virtues derived from Hindu concepts and The Wizard of Oz, tracked by hidden behavioral variables. The hosts follow the Age of Armageddon trilogy, the Scientology-inspired Fellowship, the Electronic Arts acquisition of Origin Systems, the technical details of the fire field spell that killed Lord British after a server reset, the Kickstarter-funded Shroud of the Avatar, and Garriott's current effort to reclaim early Ultima games under Section 203 of the Copyright Act.

• How the nickname British came from a computer camp and Lord from Dungeons and Dragons
• Why a cloth map was a hardware workaround that offloaded world-building into the player's imagination
• Honesty, compassion, valor, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, humility, and how the code watched unprompted actions
• The Boolean invulnerability flag that defaulted off and the area-of-effect spell that bypassed the guards
• What the 35-year reversion right could mean for video games as authored art