Editing Update of the Avatar/Update 245 (section)

===<span id="6">In The News: Richard Garriott and Starr Long Dual Dragon Con Interviews</span>===
[[Image:promo-sqaure-dragon-con.png|200px|right|link=http://operationrainfall.com/2017/09/14/dragoncon-2017-shroud-of-the-avatar-part-one/]]

Listen in on the Sci-Fi2K’s Dragon Con podcast episode with Richard Garriott and Starr Long with Kristin Avery [https://twitter.com/theitparadenow/status/907647785561980928 @theitparadenow].

Also have a read below through the great stories told between Richard and Starr in this in-depth interview while they were at [http://www.dragoncon.org/ Dragon Con]!

:'''''OperationRainfall:''' How did you – real quickly before we dive into Shroud of the Avatar- how did y’all acquire the nicknames of Lord British and Dark Starr?<br><br>'''Richard Garriott:''' It’s funny – when I was in my sophomore year in high school, I was exposed to computers, Dungeons & Dragons, and Lord of the Rings all at the same time. And I was at a seven-week summer program, and these kids that where there ahead of me – they were the core of the group that I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons from – They were giving everyone nicknames as they arrived. And so when I arrived and threw my bags on the dormroom bed, they came and knocked on the door. They said ‘hi’, I said ‘hello’, and for some reason, they thought the way I said ‘hello’ did not sound ‘Southern’, as they all were – even though I was also growing up in the South. They thought my ‘hello’ sounded British. So that was my nickname immediately – ‘British’. And interestingly, I was born in Cambridge, England. So it has a logic – even though I only lived in England a month, so I did not pick up any accent, but I grew up in Houston, right across from NASA – which was a manufactured international community – so I don’t really have a Southern accent.<br><br>So my D&D character started as ‘British’, and then as I leveled up, I chose to add the ‘Lord British’ to my higher level “British” character. And when I started writing computer games, I actually started to author them – again I was never intending to be published, I was just doing it for my D&D friends- so ‘Lord British’ and my other alter ego, ‘Shamino’, and ‘Richard Garriott’ were interchangeably used as characters in the game or as the author of the game. And my first real publisher asked me this story that you just asked. And they were, ‘You know, ‘Richard Garriott’ is a good name, but it’s perfectly generic kind of sounding. But ‘Lord British’? People would remember that.’ So the ‘Richard Garriott’ name came off my first published titles, and ‘Lord British’ became the nom de plume.<br><br>'''Starr Long:''' When I was at Origin and started working on Ultima Online, all the main characters are named after real people that are friends of Richard – like ‘Dupre’ or they were alter-egos of Richard like ‘Samino’. So those are real people. When we were working on Ultima Online, I was all “I’m going to be a character in the game.” So versus us making up a character, there was a character in Ultima that was not named after [one of Richard’s friends] that had been a villain in the linear-Ultimas, but in the parallel universe that Ultima Online was going to take place in. We decided that [this character] was not going to be evil, but was going to be chaotic. Chaos is its own sort of ‘thing’. And so [came] ‘Blackthorn’.<br><br>Which was fine while I was still employed by Origin, and we were all working for Electronic Arts. But when I left there, unlike ‘Lord British’, which Richard retained ownership when EA acquired Origin, ‘Blackthorn’ remained the property of Electronic Arts. So I couldn’t take that name with me when I left. But I wanted people to know that it was me. And so I needed some equivalent of ‘Black’ – something dark. And then I was like, ‘Well, ‘Starr’ is unique enough.’ So ‘DarkStarr’ is an homage to ‘Blackthorn’, and using my own name.<br><br>'''Richard Garriott:''' And what’s interesting is that I now see them as inseparable. It’s funny that it’s – if you think of ‘Iolo’, for example – the character ‘Iolo’, his real name is David Watson – he wrote Stones, which is the primary piece of music people think of when they think of Ultima Online. He also wrote a piece for us – Baron of Eastmarch– for Shroud of the Avatar. His real-life job is that he makes crossbows. His job in Ultima and Shroud of the Avatar as a separate character would be making crossbows. The point is that the reality of these people – the characters they play in the games- are the same. And I think that it lends an interesting sense of truth to the words we’ve created.''

Read the complete interview at [http://operationrainfall.com/2017/09/14/dragoncon-2017-shroud-of-the-avatar-part-one/ OperationRainfall.com]! Part 2 coming soon…

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