开发者访谈回顾：Richard Garriott谈与游戏行业的历史渊源

本文选自一本关于Apple II的新书

原作者：David L. Craddock 译者：Willow Wu

下文选自Schiffer Publishing出版的Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution，你可以在亚马逊上购买这本书。本书收录了业内顶尖游戏开发者们的访谈内容，通过阅读你可以了解到超过12个里程碑式PC游戏的制作过程以及这些游戏给后继者带来了哪些影响。

Richard Garriott曾以为跟他年纪差不多的孩子他们的父母都是宇航员。对他来讲也确实是不足为奇。“直到我去德克萨斯大学我才看到人们现在说的‘芝麻街居民（the Sesame Street people），’”他说。

“我从没觉得看过芝麻街会成为邻居跟我之间的共同话题，直到我搬出这个小区，来到奥斯汀我才知道‘等下，原来大家的父母并不都是宇航员，但是大家真的都看过芝麻街。’我着实吓了一跳。”

Richard Garriott(from games)

虽然他1961年出生在英国剑桥，但他是在德克萨斯州休斯顿长大的。他所在的社区实际上是隶属于美国国家航空航天局（NASA）休斯顿基地的约翰逊航空中心。他的邻居大部分都是NASA的宇航员、承包商和工程师。比如Joe Engle，他是航天飞机项目（载人飞船发射活动）最早加入的宇航员之一。还有Robert Gibson，他的朋友称他为Hoot，执行过STS-27任务，这个宇航员小队在4天多的时间内就环绕地球68圈。

他认识的所有航天工作人员中，最受人尊敬的就是他的父亲。1973年，经过NASA严格筛选，Owen Garriott加入了美国天空实验室项目的第二次载人任务：天空实验室3号（Skylab 3），这是美国建立的第一个宇宙空间站。他离开了60天。安全着陆后，他的妻子Helen和四个孩子一直依靠收听squawk boxes（连接单向内部通信系统的扬声器设备）来关注他在太空的情况。通过这个设备，Helen和孩子们能够听到从外太空发回的消息。“我们甚至时刻关注着政府发出的简报，这样当我们听到宇宙空间站出现故障的时候才不会惊慌失措，” Richard回忆说。

别家的餐桌上散乱着账单、杂志和课本，但是Garriott家里的到处都是航空模型、零件。“现在回忆起来，我在成长期真的接触了很多很酷的东西。但是在那个时候，我并不觉得这有什么奇特的，因为我的邻居他们也是这种家庭环境。”

Helen Garriott是一位非常能干的妻子，在丈夫长时间在外工作的时候（不管是在地球上还是外太空），她总能料理好家里的一切。当孩子们需要帮助来完成一项大工程时，比如建个树屋、搭个美洲印第安风格的帐篷，她一定会二话不说卷起袖子。她是一位才华横溢的女士，是一位艺术家，从事过艺术交易。每年夏天她都会教Richard一种新的艺术：先是绘画，然后下一年是陶艺，她讲的内容特别深，可能一般孩子都不会知道，比如她告诉Richard喷泉是怎么建成的或者是银器的制造过程。

从11岁开始，他脖子上就挂着一条银蛇坠子——这是他的宝物，那年夏天手工课上做的。“它是固定的，这是我做的第一个手工作品，我还不会做链子扣，”他说，“链子扣是个技术含量挺高的零件。我到现在还没做过一个。”

神奇的机器

Richard即将进入高中的时候，NASA给Owen指派了新的任务。NASA在1960年代招募科学家，在那之前Owen在斯坦福大学学习电气工程，现在他的雇主想让他回到学校，并且提供一年助学金。于是他们收拾好行李，搬到加州的帕罗奥图市，这是一座离斯坦福大学很近的大都市。

进了古恩高中，Garriott发现这里的很多学生都是斯坦福大学教师的孩子或者是孙子。这所学校有个优势就是有很多在市场上买不到的硬件你都能在这里找到。古恩高中执念于尖端技术的传承，希望他们的电传打字机能够与众不同，这台机器和远方某处的另一台CDC Cyber主机连接在一起。

“我记不清那个连接有多大用处，”Garriott说，“在语言课上我们有用过：如果你用的是别的编程语言，那么有些测试你就得在电传打字机上完成。但是对我来说，那绝对是一台非常神奇的机器。在那个时候，学校里并没有正式的编程课程，但是我可以利用放学或者下课时间自己写程序，这并不难。

这一学年结束之后，老Garriott的助学金也没了，他们一家人又回到了休斯顿。等待Garriott的是一个无聊至极的暑假。他才刚刚习惯使用那台终端机，现在却不得不换到另外一个可能没有这种设备的学校。Owen和Helen注意到儿子的这个兴趣，就让他参加了一个为期7周的计算机夏令营，由夫妻俩的母校奥克拉荷马大学主办。那一年是1974年。“这是我第一次离家生活，”他说，头一天他很紧张，Garriott忙着整理行李。有人来敲他的门，他开门之后，看到的是一群孩子来跟他打招呼，说着“Hi”，他用比较正式的问候回了一句“Hello”。然后大家就笑了，男孩们说他听起来像个英国人。从那天起，他们就真的这么称呼他：英国人。

“结果呢，我确实是出生于英国剑桥，我有英国护照，” Garriott说，“所以，实际上我的确是英国人。但是我只在那边呆了一两个月，所以我说话应该是没有英国口音的。但是我是在NASA附近的休斯顿长大的，我的邻居来自世界各个国家，所以我们都没有休斯顿本土的南方口音。对于那些南方孩子来说，没有口音的我听起来就像个英国人。这就是为什么他们要用这个绰号，实际上这个绰号一直跟着我。”

Garriott和他的好友在那年夏天学到的不只是电脑知识。就像其他在1970中后期长大的少年一样，他们迷上了TSR的《龙与地下城》，沉浸在一个奇妙的冒险世界中。“我在D&D中的角色就叫英国勋爵（Lord British），”他说，“白天我们学习电脑和数学，到晚上就是玩游戏。”

Garriott还在学途结束之时还收获了一段罗曼史。“从很多方面来说，那个夏天对我有着重大意义，”他说。“我第一次离家在外生活，也是第一次住在男女混合宿舍。你可以想象一下，7周的夏令营，一群高中生离开父母居住在混合宿舍中，这样会发生什么事……”

两个月之后，Garriott进入了Clear Creek High School成为二年级生，他还得知了一个好消息：这个学校有台电传打字机，但是不像古恩高中那样有连接到另一台设备。一整个夏天他都把时间花在编程和角色扮演游戏上，现在他有了新的目标。Garriott追求的并不是成绩拔尖，他的大多数课程状态都是没有挂科的，但是成绩并不怎么样，都是B或者是C。但是跟科学有关的活动是个例外。科学竞赛他从未缺席，从幼儿园开始到高中毕业一直如此，而且他的参赛作品每次都能让评审赞叹不已。随着年纪的增长，参加的比赛规模也越来越大，从街区、地区、洲级、乃至世界级别的比赛，越来越多人见识到了他的才能。

Garriott向Clear Creek的高层提交了一份申请，并且还向他们证明自己有能力完成这些独立项目，以此来增加说服力。“我回到休斯敦的时候，我告诉那些教职工‘我想继续研究这台机器。学校里没有和计算机编程相关的课程。因此我希望你们能够考虑下把我使用的编程语言转化成另一个版本的BASIC语言，而不是继续使用另外一种语言。’”

他们欣然同意了。高中的最后两年，Garriott还有其他少数学生根据他们各自的优势对原有的课程做了一定更改，开启了自主学习模式。最后，Garriott找到了和他的兴趣最契合的领域：奇幻冒险游戏和电脑。“那个阶段我在自学电脑，从一开始被那台机器的魅力所吸引，到后来我的目标就是要在电脑上尝试运行游戏。在这之前，我的嫂子给了我一本《指环王》。我那时还在玩《龙与地下城》。我已经很熟悉那台特别的电传打字机了，就跟奥克拉荷马大学夏令营那时一样。于是我就开始做游戏了。”

高中的最后三年，Garriott慢慢把重心从自主课程转到了游戏编程。“在期末的时候，我跟教师们展示了在开学时我告诉他们我要做的那些事，然后他们就说‘听起来不错。这是你的成绩，A。’”这就是我做的事：自学。”

《龙与地下城》

Garriott在自学编程的时候，他只能别无选择地既当老师又当学生。没有老师知道怎么使用电传打字机，他们只会启动然后运行程序。为了进一步充实他在夏令营所学的知识，他经常跑去报刊亭买像是Byte!和Creative Computing这类的杂志，然后全神贯注地研究代码清单。每份清单中他都能收集到有价值的信息，成为他自用的编程小技巧。这样的东西他积累的并不少，例如根据特定参数分类数据的运算法则等等。

虽说这些代码清单很容易出现拼写错误，但是排除故障也是学习的另一种方式。“当你把这些代码输入电脑的时候，你可能会碰到一些指令运行不顺，或者它们会有拼写错误，”他说，“你只能靠自己去排除故障，搞定一切事情。”

Garriott在第一个自学课程上花了非常多的时间，他开始着手设计DND1，这是他的首个角色扮演游戏。受《龙与地下城》的启发，DND1是个纯粹的迷宫探索游戏：进入地城，跟怪兽战斗，收集财宝。由于电传打字机不能打印图像，他就用文本字符代替图像：星号（*）表示墙壁，空白格子表示地砖，美元符号（$）表示财宝，大写字母表示怪物，比如“A”就是巨蚁。

DND1就是根据玩家输入的内容把对应的结果印在卷纸上。网格代表着地下城，小小的图标代表着玩家，利用印刷一次次向网格中心移动。出现“下一步你想做什么？”的提示时，玩家可以选择东南西北四个方向中的任意一个，发起攻击或者是查看物品栏。“输入指令后，机器就会自上而下重复一遍你的指令，形成一个10×10的方阵，”Garriott说，“每个行动耗费的时间大概是10秒。”

更新、打印地城布局是需要时间的，这就是为什么玩家的行动间隔要那么久。电传打字机把信号传输给校外的小型计算机设备，它可以一次性接入多个终端。必须要等计算机依次执行指令，然后把新数据发送回去。这个过程实在是太慢了，于是Garriott就换了一种比较原始但是速度更快的方法来写代码。

“我本来打算用笔记本来写游戏。那些标着DND1, DND2, DND3等等的笔记本到现在我还留着，”他说，“在‘我写代码的方式肯定是哪里出了大问题。我以为我能解决某个大问题，结果却是让我发现了另一些问题，重头再来吧。’这种情况出现之前，我通常已经写了10页、20页的代码。”

进入高年级，Garriott买了一本新的笔记本，在封面上写了“DND28”。当他进入到最后收尾阶段的时候，他有机会可以用一台新型电脑。“我刚好在学校的校长室中看见了一台Apple II。当时我问说‘那是什么？’他说那个是新电脑，才上市不久的。”

Garriott深深地被它所吸引，请求使用那台电脑，也得到了准许。时长一个小时的语言课程转移到了校长室中，在这里他开始用AppleSoft BASIC语言写DND28。软盘驱动器在当时是罕见而又贵的商品，所以他把代码存在磁带中。

Garriott在那年夏天毕业，之后就到ComputerLand上班，这是一家连锁零售店，主攻新型电脑市场。他平时的工作就是告诉客人们拥有一台个人电脑的好处，引导他们购买，空闲的时候他就霸占店里没人用的Apple II，继续写DND28。

接触Apple II的机会并不多，这就让Garriott犯难了。他在学校用过，在ComputerLand也用过，但他真正想要、真正需要的是一台属于自己的Apple II。他跟他爸说说起了这个话题，列出了在终端、Apple II上成功实现的各种东西，Owen静静地听着。当Richard说到他最新版本的DND已经有了1500行代码，他的父亲微微睁大了眼睛。据他所知，这比市面上最畅销的软件还多。当Richard说完了这番“自我推销”，Owen消化了这些信息，然后给出了他的回答。

“我爸他说‘Richard，你在做一件意义重大的事情’”他说，“我不太确定你最终能不能完成这个大项目。’我的感觉像是‘噢！你竟然如此低估我的能力！我不仅会把它做完，我跟你打赌它还能顺利运行！”

Owen接受了这个挑战，还给他儿子留了一些余地。如果Richard能够让最新优化版本的游戏运行起来，并且运行过程中不需要过多调试，那么Owen就会跟他一同分担Apple II的费用。结果Richard成功完成任务，Owen也没有食言。Richard用自己的积蓄和他爸爸的赞助买了一台Apple IIe，这是该系列最新、配置最好的产品。“首个REM语句产物就是DND28b，”Richard说,REM(remark的缩写) 语句在BASIC语言中起着注释的作用,人们阅读代码的时候可以看到,但是计算机会忽略。

“那就是《阿卡拉贝斯（Akalabeth）》”他说，“所以从DND1开始，到《阿卡拉贝斯》，再到《创世纪（Ultimas）》，一脉相承。我在1970年代做的游戏都有着相同的核心构造。”

游戏的进化速度十分惊人，字符转换成了彩色画面，吸引玩家的方法层出不穷，跟最初的游戏相比可谓是天差地别。“我看着DND28，决定要把这种至上而下的字符画面转变成透视图，做成俯视角度，”他说，“这就变成了DND28b。DND28b就是《阿卡拉贝斯》，其实在我设想中它还是《创世纪0》。”

Garriott计划用简单的线条来构成地下城。墙壁、地板和门都是由简单的颜色线条构成，敌人也是。比起以前只用X-Y坐标制作天花板和地板，用线框图创造建筑和角色需要更多的前期筹划。他希望能够利用距离创造出一种较逼真的视角：比如说玩家附近的门看起来应该比远处的门要大些。高中学到概念，比如说正余弦他都还清楚地记得。他分析问题，然后三角学知识来解决。

为了确保他的工作不出差错，Garriott咨询了他最喜欢的艺术家。“我做的第一件事就是跟我妈妈一起坐下来，我问她说‘妈，如果我要画一个地下城然后你也在里面，你会怎么画？’然后她就跟我展示了她所用的几何学技巧。”Helen在纸上画了一条线，让Richard发挥想象，把它当做是地平线。然后她画了一排排竖线，代表着电线杆子（虽然Garriott脑中把这些想成了一条走廊和门），然后告诉他可以利用数学知识计算出每根“电线杆”之间的精确距离，这样就可以在屏幕上显得更加真实。

Helen说的几何学技巧跟Garriott应用的三角函数所产生的结果完全吻合。为了确保他的结果万无一失，Richard又去找了Owen。“他用了微积分，”Richard说，“他画的图跟我妈一样，然后运用微积分得出一堆方程式，最终算出来的结果跟我一样。因此，我对我的三角函数有了信心。我得靠自己计算这些方程式，在屏幕上手动布置像素点。”

每个像素必须非常精确地放到Garriott想到的位置上。有很多连接在一起的线条，比如说墙壁和天花板的线条，它们的连接点要设定在哪里，这些都要计算、画出来。“Steve Wozniak创造了硬件，”他说，“如果你是硬件制造商，你的目标就是最大限度地压低制造成本，增加编程难度。虽然我做了一些比较明智的工作准备，能够熟练操作硬件，但是我还是得说用Apple II画图实在是太难了。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

An excerpt from a new book on the Apple II

The following excerpt comes from Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution, available on Amazon from Schiffer Publishing. The book chronicles the making of more than a dozen groundbreaking PC games, featuring interviews with their developers and details how those games went on influence many others that followed.

Richard Garriott took it as a matter of fact that every kid his age had parents who flew to outer space. To him, that was normal. “It wasn’t until I went to school at University of Texas that I ran into what I now describe as ‘the Sesame Street people,’” he says.

“I never specifically thought of people who watched Sesame Street as a cross section of my neighborhood until I moved out of the neighborhood I grew up in and came here to Austin and realized, ‘Oh, wait. My NASA upbringing was the fantasy; the Sesame Street fantasy is, in fact, reality.’ It was quite a culture shock.”

Although born in Cambridge, England in 1961, Garriott spent most of his formative years in Houston, Texas. His neighborhood was practically an extension of Johnson Space Center, the Houston-based outpost of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Most of his neighbors were astronauts, contractors and engineers at NASA. There was Joe Engle, one of the first astronauts to join the Space Shuttle program, a manned-vehicle launch initiative; and Robert Gibson, better known to his friends as Hoot, who went on to join STS-27, a team of astronauts who orbited the earth 68 times in just over four days.

Of all the spacefarers he rubbed elbows with, none awed Garriott more than his father. In 1973, NASA handpicked Owen to join Skylab 3, the second manned mission to Skylab, America’s first space station. He was gone for 60 days. Back on terra firma, his wife, Helen, and their four children kept tabs on him by listening to squawk boxes, speakers connected to a one-way intercom system. Through the boxes, Helen and the kids were able to listen in on communications beamed down from outer space. “We even had to get government briefings so we weren’t shocked when we heard about malfunctions,” Richard recalls.

Other kitchen tables were littered with bills, magazines, and schoolbooks. In Garriott’s household, space artifacts and hardware cluttered living spaces. “While growing up, there were things that, in retrospect, were truly amazing. But at the time, it not only seemed normal for our family, but for most families in the neighborhood.”

Helen Garriott was more than capable of holding the fort while her husband worked long hours on earth or elsewhere. When her kids needed help bringing one of their projects to fruition — such as building a treehouse or erecting Native-American-style teepees — Helen rolled up her sleeves. Among her many talents, Helen was a professional artist, and a Jane of artistic trades. Every summer, she taught Richard a new form of art: painting one year, pottery the next, going so far as to guide him in assembling fountains and showing him the ins and outs of silversmithing.

Since age 11, he has worn a silver snake pendant around his neck — his prized possession from that summer’s hands-on lessons. “It is permanently attached because, since it was the first thing I ever made, I didn’t know how to make a clasp,” he says. “A clasp is actually a fairly advanced item. I’ve still never made one.”

MAGICAL MACHINES

Shortly before Richard entered high school, NASA issued Owen new marching orders. Owen had taught electrical engineering at Stanford University prior to answering NASA’s call for scientists in the 1960s; now his employer wanted him to return for a one-year fellowship. The family packed up and relocated to Palo Alto, Calif., a metropolis located near the school.

Enrolling in Gunn High School for his freshman year, Garriott discovered that many of the students were the progeny of Stanford faculty. As such, the school had the benefit of sampling hardware not yet available to the world at large. Gunn High’s propensity for inheriting cutting-edge tech through its connections made its single teletype, remotely connected to a CDC Cyber mainframe stashed somewhere offsite, stick out like a sore thumb.

“I’m hard pressed to remember if they were used very often,” Garriott says. “It was used in a language class: if you took a foreign language, some of the testing was done on this teletype, I think. But for me, it was instantaneously a magical machine. Even at that time, there weren’t really programming classes for those machines, but it was easy for me to set up after-school or between-classes time to sit down and code them on my own.”

At the end of the school year, the senior Garriott’s fellowship came to an end, and the family returned to Houston. Garriott faced a summer of boredom. He’d just started feeling comfortable sitting at the terminal, only to be forced to join a high school that might not have one. Owen and Helen picked up on their son’s interest and enrolled him in a seven-week computer camp held at University of Oklahoma, their alma mater, in 1974. “That was my first live-away-from-home event,” he says. Nervous on his first day, Garriott busied himself unpacking. A knock sounded at his door. When he answered, a pack of kids greeted him by saying, “Hi.” He responded with a more formal “Hello.” Laughing, the boys declared that he sounded British. From that day forward, that’s precisely what they called him: British.

“Now, as it turns out, I was in fact born in Cambridge, England, and I carry a British passport,” Garriott says. “So I am, in fact, British. But I only lived there for one or two months, so I had no British accent. But having grown up in Houston near NASA, all of my neighbors were people brought in from foreign countries all over the world, so none of us had the local southern accent. My non-southern accent sounded to true southerners like a British accent. That’s why they used the nickname, but the reality behind the nickname is why the nickname stuck.”

Garriott and his cadre of friends learned about more than computers that summer. Like many teens growing up in the mid to late 1970s, they got sucked into the swashbuckling world of TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons. “Lord British became my character in D&D games,” he says. “We were gaming all night and learning about computers and math by day.”

Garriott rounded out his education with private sessions in romance. “That summer was formative in oh-so-many other ways,” he says. “It was also the first time I lived away from home, and the first time I was in a dorm that was co-ed. You can use your imagination as to what things might have occurred in a co-ed, seven-week program with a bunch of high school students living independently from their parents.”

Two months later, Garriott set foot in Clear Creek High School as a sophomore and got some good news. The school had a single teletype. A summer spent programming and roleplaying filled him with renewed purpose. Readily copping to an average academic career, Garriott survived more than thrived in most classes, pulling in Bs and Cs. Science fairs were an exception. Beginning in kindergarten and continuing through graduation, he showed up to competitions with projects that dazzled judges. As he grew older, he went on to compete in district, regional, state, and international fairs, making even bigger splashes.

Entering Clear Creek’s administration office, Garriott made a request and cited his proven ability to self-govern projects as incentive for them to agree.” When I got back to Houston, I told the faculty, ‘I want to continue working on this machine. There is no curriculum [for computer programming]. What I would like is your permission to, instead of taking a foreign language, please consider BASIC my foreign language.’”

The faculty gave him its blessing. Over his junior and senior years, Garriott and a few other students with permission to tailor their curriculum to their strengths embarked on self-guided journeys. At last, Garriott had found the perfect outlet for his interests in fantasy adventures and computers. “That was the moment where teaching myself about computers switched from a fascination with the machine itself to specifically trying to implement games on computers. Just before that, my sister-in-law had given me a copy of The Lord of the Rings to read. I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I was beginning to master this unusual teletype, which was the same I used during the summer at OU. So off I went to start making games.”

For the final three years of his high school career, Garriott embarked on a self-guided foray into the world of game programming. “As long as I showed them at the end of the semester what I’d told them I’d do at the beginning of the semester, they said, “Sounds good. Here’s your ‘A.’” That’s what I did. I taught myself.”

DUNGEONS ‘N’ DRAGONS

Garriott had no choice but to fill the roles of master and pupil in his self-taught programming class. No teacher knew how to use the teletype beyond turning it on and loading programs. To round out what he’d learned at camp, he hit up newsstands for magazines like Byte! and Creative Computing and pored over their code listings. Each one contained a nugget of information he was able to roll into his growing bag of tricks, like algorithms for sorting data according to specific parameters.

Even though the listings were prone to typos, debugging them became another form of learning. “When you typed it into the computer you happened to be using, some of the commands wouldn’t work right, or maybe they’d made a typo,” he says. “You’d have to debug it on your own and therefore figure it out on your own.”

Starting day and date with his first self-taught class, Garriott kicked off the design of DND1, his first roleplaying game. Inspired by D&D, DND1 was a straight dungeon-crawl: enter a dungeon, fight monsters, loot treasure. Teletypes were incapable of printing images, so he used text characters in place of graphics: asterisks for walls, blank spaces for floor tiles, dollar signs for treasures, and capital letters to represent monsters, like ‘A’ for a giant ant.

DND1 proceeded by taking input from players and printing results on a paper roll. A tiny icon representing players was printed to the center of a grid signifying the dungeon. At the prompt, “What would you like to do next?,” players could move in the four cardinal directions, attack, or browse their inventory. “As soon as you input your command, the printer would re-print that top-down, 10-by-10 little grid,” Garriott says. “It took maybe 10 seconds to make each move.”

Time needed to refresh and print dungeon layouts was a critical reason players had to wait so long between moves. The teletypes dialed into a minicomputer located off-campus, and because minicomputers allowed multiple terminals to connect at once, each had to wait for the machine to process its commands and send back new data. The process was so slow that Garriott found himself turning to a more primitive yet faster method of coding.

“I would write [games] in notebooks. I still own all of these notebooks marked DND1, DND2, DND3, and so on,” he says. “Often I would only write 10 or 20 pages of the program out before thinking, ‘There’s something fundamentally wrong about the approach I’ve taken to writing this one. I thought I was going to solve some big problem, but it just led me to other problems, so I’ll start over.’”

Entering his senior year, Garriott purchased a new notebook and wrote “DND28” on the front. Around the time he applied finishing touches, he got an opportunity to make the jump to a new computer. “I happened to be in the office of the president of the school, and there was an Apple II. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He explained that it was a new computer that had just come out.”

Smitten, Garriott asked for permission to use the computer, and got it. His one-hour language class was moved to the office, where he set about writing DND28 in AppleSoft BASIC. Floppy drives were rare and valuable commodities, so he saved code on cassette tapes.

Garriott graduated that summer and picked up a job at ComputerLand, a chain of retail stores that specialized in the newfangled PC market. When he wasn’t educating customers about the merits of owning a PC, he commandeered a free Apple II and pecked away at DND28.

Limited access to an Apple II compounded Garriott’s difficulties. He used one at school and another during free time at ComputerLand. What he really wanted, what he really needed, was an Apple II of his own. He broached the subject with his father. Owen listened as his son outlined what he’d managed to accomplish on terminals and on the Apple II. His eyes widened slightly when Richard shared that his most recent version of DND came to 1,500 lines of code. That was more than most commercial software, based on what he knew of computers. When Richard finished his pitch, Owen processed the information and gave his answer.

“My dad said, ‘Richard, you know, you’re undertaking a monumental feat,” he says. “I’m not sure you’re going to be able to pull off something this big.’ I was like, ‘Oh! How dare you underestimate me! Not only will I pull this off, but I bet you this program will work right out of the gate!’”

Owen rose to the challenge, giving his son some wiggle room. If Richard could get a new-and-improved version of his game up and running with minimal debugging, Owen would split the cost of an Apple II with him. Richard pulled it off, and Owen stayed true to his word. Saving up paychecks, Richard pooled his money with his dad’s share and bought an Apple IIe, the latest and greatest in the family line. “The first remark statement is DND28b,” says Richard, explaining that a REM (short for remark) statement in BASIC is a comment meant for humans reading the code and ignored by the computer.

“That became Akalabeth,” he says. “So there’s a direct lineage from DND1 through to Akalabeth, through the rest of the Ultimas. There’s a direct lineage through all of my work starting in the 1970s.”

The game evolved far past its original form, trading text characters for color graphics, and a new way to maximize immersion. “I took DND28, and I decided to change the top-down, text-based graphics into perspective-view, looking down the corridor,” he says. “That became DND28b. DND28b is literally Akalabeth, which is, in my mind, Ultima 0.”

Garriott planned to assemble dungeons from line-based graphics. Walls, floors and doors would appear as single-colored outlines, as would enemies. Constructing architecture and characters from wireframes took more forethought than merely plotting X-Y coordinates to form ceilings and floors. He wanted to create a realistic perspective based on distance: A door right next to the player’s position should appear larger than a door farther down the hall. With concepts such as sine and cosine still fresh in his mind from high school, he mulled over the problem and sketched out the trig functions to get the job done.
Garriott plotted out every image on graph paper so he knew precisely where to map the image in his Apple II’s memory. Richard Garriott
To double-check his work, he consulted his favorite artist. “The first thing I did was sit down with my mother and say, ‘Mom, if I want to draw a dungeon that you’re in, how would you draw that on a canvas?’ And my mother showed me the geometry techniques that she used.” Helen drew a line on a piece of paper and asked Richard to imagine it as the horizon. Then she drew a series of vertical lines meant to represent telephone poles — although Garriott’s game-designer brain interpreted them as doors lining a corridor — and showed him the math he could use to calculate the precise distance between each “pole” and render them realistically on the screen.

Helen’s geometry matched the results he had reached using trigonometry. To make absolutely certain he was correct, Richard went to Owen. “He used calculus,” Richard says. “He took the same piece of art that my mother did and used calculus to come up with a set of equations that ultimately arrived at the same results I had. Therefore, I had confidence in my trigonometry. With those equations, I had to go hand-calculate and hand-place pixels on the screen.”

Every pixel had to be plotted on the screen precisely where he wanted it. Sets of interconnecting lines, such as points where walls and ceilings touched, had to be calculated and drawn. “Steve Wozniak created that hardware,” he says. “If you’re the hardware maker, your goal is to minimize the cost of the hardware, not make it easier to program. While I did some very clever things that made the hardware practical, [drawing] graphics using an Apple II was monstrously difficult.”（source：polygon ）