Origin Systems

Origin Systems was founded in 1983 in Houston, Texas, by Richard Garriott, Robert Garriott, Owen Garriott and Chuck Bueche. The company was created partly to give Richard Garriott more direct control over the publication of his games after difficulties with other publishers. Its first released title was Ultima III: Exodus, which followed the early success of the Ultima series and immediately gave the new company a strong position in the computer role-playing market. Origin soon moved increasingly toward Austin, the city that would become the center of its identity.

The motto “We create worlds” was not only marketing. With Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, Ultima V, Ultima VI and especially Ultima VII, Origin turned the computer role-playing game into a living, moral and systemic space. Richard Garriott, through the public persona of Lord British, built Britannia as a recognizable world, not only as a collection of maps and statistics. Virtues, dialogue, interactive objects, character routines, cities, religion, politics and player freedom gave Ultima a weight different from many contemporary RPGs. Origin also published and developed games outside Ultima, but this saga defined its deepest identity.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s came the studio’s other great creative side: Wing Commander. Created by Chris Roberts and released in 1990, it combined space combat, narrative structure, characters, cutscenes and cinematic presentation. On PC, Wing Commander was a demonstration of technical power and spectacular ambition. It required serious hardware, but gave players the feeling of being inside a large serial space war. Wing Commander II, Privateer and later entries strengthened Origin’s reputation as a studio able to work both with RPG depth and technologically advanced action storytelling.

In 1992 Electronic Arts acquired Origin Systems for around $35 million in stock. At first the deal gave the studio resources and stability, but in the following years the relationship between Origin’s culture and EA’s structure became more difficult. Origin had grown around autonomous teams, strong authors and expensive projects; Electronic Arts wanted greater control, planning and commercial return. Even so, in 1997 Origin released Ultima Online, one of the first major graphical MMORPGs and a crucial step in the history of online games. Its importance was enormous: it proved that a persistent world could exist commercially and culturally before the genre’s later explosion.

The success of Ultima Online was also the beginning of the end for the old Origin. After Ultima IX: Ascension received a troubled response in 1999, EA pushed the studio almost entirely toward online development and cancelled several projects, including Ultima Online 2 and Privateer Online. Richard Garriott left Origin in 2000 and founded Destination Games, while the studio mainly remained in support of Ultima Online and new projects that were later cancelled. In February 2004, Electronic Arts finally closed Origin Systems.

Origin Systems’ legacy is one of the most important in computer gaming. Ultima helped define the Western role-playing game, Wing Commander pushed the PC toward cinematic storytelling, and Ultima Online opened the path for mass persistent worlds. For Retro-Gamers, Origin is one of the companies that best represents the computer as a creative platform: not only levels or missions, but worlds, systems, characters and communities. Its story ended inside Electronic Arts, but its influence continues in every open RPG, every interactive space opera and every online world that tries to feel alive.