The Ultima Collection was a bit of a triumph of mine in the seriously Machiavellian trenches of OSI QA. People were commonly heard saying that QA was more political that the development groups at Origin and it was hard to deny. Heaven was so close for the guys in QA. Every day they (potentially) interacted with the people making Wing Commander games, Ultima games, most importantly, ORIGIN games.
The primary motivation for being a Project Leader, Assistant Project Leader or Translation Liaison (the "executive" elements of the QA team) was direct developer interaction. If you were a PL assigned to a game, you got to play it early, attend development meetings, and in the final stretch, essentially "interview" for a place on that team. If you weren't one of those big three, the closest you got to Warren Spector was ambushing him at Christmas parties. If you were, you could possibly spend a few hours a day with him.
So a guy like me being thrust into this environment, I had a lot of fires going at once, around 1998-ish. Sid Meier's Gettyburg! was being tested at OSI because of Andy Hollis' involvement in bringing Firaxis to EA. About a year prior, when Firaxis' formation was originally announced, on a long shot I started buttering up the department lead for me being PL on any Firaxis games in Origin QA. Looking at existing civil war games gave me the vernacular to sound like I knew what I was talking about (Limbered artillery, formations, etc). It didn't hurt that a lot of my competitor's had little interest in the American civil war, but for whatever reasons, I got the slot. From there, using the exact same tactics QA guys have been using to get OUT of QA for a decade, I got a job at Firaxis.
Before being offered the job though, I was assigned as QA PL on Jane's F-15, out of the short lived EA Baltimore. Once moved to Baltimore for Firaxis, I'd get to know these guys pretty well, and it was even more bizarre because the F-15 QA team was on site in Baltimore when I was starting at Firaxis. When worlds collide.
AND on top of this, I had started the Ultima Collection. The original idea was to do a collection of old pre-MS-Dos games, like Moebius, Autoduel, Knights of Legend, and Ultima 1-5. I wanted to do a real number on the documentation, digitizing "everything but the registration card". I can't remember when or to whom I pitched this, but it must have been either Chris Plummer or Alex Carloss. They weren't too interested in the pre-Dos stuff, but what they did care about was promotional opportunities for the looming Ultima 9. I never saw anything too detailed about the finances, but as long as we hella pimped U9, we could do a pretty solid collection.
This was pretty cool for some dork in QA to pull off at Origin. Even cooler was the decision to create this video interview with Lord British functionality for the autorun. While it really wasn't very deep (about 15 minutes total), it's was shot at Richard's insane-o house. The set was his “dungeon" was where he kept all this oddball shit, like a real shrunken head, an authentic vampire killing kit, etc. They shot it there, but I had a nasty cough so they ejected me from the room and made me wait out on the lawn. Oh well.
UC sold 50k in the US by the around 2000, which blew my mind. It even became an "EA Classic" which sold more and kept it on store shelves for years.
This is about 2/3rds of the Richard Garriott interview video.
