A Taste of Lord Garriott
Ultima IV, which sounds like a star system the Enterprise might visit, is a video game originally written for the venerable Apple ][ and ported to a host of other 8-bit computers like1 the one a somewhat stockier Captain Kirk hawked on television around 1980. It was one of the last major games developed more-or-less2 single-handedly, by one Richard Garriott, who went by the absurdly grandiose moniker Lord British. This nom-de-guerre set up certain expectations: that Garriott possessed a throne, for instance, as well as perhaps a bejeweled orb and scepter. That he was crowned with gold was a no-brainer, and in my mind’s ear I can still hear what I imagine to be his brawny declarations, robed in ermine and cast in sterling silver Received Pronunciation.
More likely Lord British slumped in a cheap office chair until his butt spread out like pancake batter, pecking monotonously at a soft-drink sticky keyboard in the B.O.-scented darkness of a suburban bedroom—much like his legions of pasty fans.
I was aware of the existence of Ultimas I-III, if only by way of extrapolation founded in the certain knowledge that no exponent of the burgeoning video game industry would be ironic enough to start the counting arbitrarily at IV. But I hadn’t played any of them. Ultima IV I played more or less obsessively throughout my late teens, having acquired it via illegal download from a computer bulletin board system, an act which presumably deprived Lord British of my meagre coin except that it wasn’t always clear where one would even purchase PC software in those pre-Internet, pre-Steam days. Dedicated game stores like Babbage’s and GameStop had not even reached the larval stage, and if you happened to find yourself in a place where software was actually sold, it was likely to be a closet-sized shop at the far end of one of those junior strip malls with like three stores. Inside: a table meekly offering up a trio of line printers, shelves full of IBM PC expansion cards with names like the ZarconX 80-Column Display Adapter II, and a couple racks of floppy disks packaged in dusty ziplock bags, all watched over by a surly thirty-something with an attitude and a Wang® t-shirt.
Not for me. Now, if you’ve never downloaded illicit software from a dial-up bulletin board system, it’s hard to convey what a strange and chrono-sociologically specific activity this was, much like operating a wax cylinder phonograph or a Hansen Writing Ball. It took multiple nights—always nights because any attempt to use the modem in the daytime would invariably be truncated when another family member picked up the extension in the kitchen to be greeted by the shrieking cacophony of an active file transfer over a sound medium, followed swiftly by a shrieking cacophony of colorful language through my bedroom door. So the nighttime was the right time to download software, and it took many nights indeed. At about 3.5 seconds per 132-byte packet, the XMODEM file-transfer protocol over a 300-baud modem could fill a 127k floppy disk in about 56 hours. And Ultima IV spanned four disks.
Playing it wasn’t a whole lot less awkward. I owned one floppy drive, so that meant frequent disk swaps. The game would pause and a message would appear telling me to insert Disk 3 or whatever. I’d unlatch the drive, eject the current disk making sure to put it back safely in its paper sleeve, then insert the requested disk, relatch the drive, and wait for it to spin up so that the game could continue. Occasionally you could go long stretches with no swaps but sometimes you’d have to do it ten or eleven times in ten minutes. Eventually I managed to scrape together enough money to buy additional drives. I’d hand a stranger a fan of twenties in a shopping center parking lot in exchange for a bulky plastic box of unknown provenance. I’m sure it looked as much like a drug deal as anything, though I never got arrested, or shot, or even scammed. In this way, after many months’ backbreaking labor3 I arrived in a no-swap Shangrila. Those were heady days, with my quartet of shoe-box sized drives stacked up like a humming ziggurat.
And yet even with the time-savings afforded by such bleeding edge tech, Ultima IV was still a bottomless hole in which I poured countless cathode-ray tube-illuminated hours. Like many video games it was a Dungeons & Dragons derivative, in which the object was to explore a fictional land on the orders of the king, who by some miraculous coincidence was named Lord British, killing monsters, amassing gold, acquiring powers and abilities until, slowly, gradually, with the agonizing tedium of watching a man devour a horse with a crab fork, some dopey final task was unlocked.
I dutifully pressed my face against Ultima’s grindstone for most of the waning days of my childhood, until one fine afternoon I reached the end. I was fully ready to finish the game. Everything was lined up perfectly—I had accomplished all of the predicate tasks; I possessed all the pieces of the solution; I wielded all the necessary powers. There was just one last quest—a tiny pro forma matter honestly.
Except it wasn’t. There was some thing I had failed to do in the proper order much, much earlier in the game—months earlier—which now returned to thwart the culmination of all my devoted work. I don’t even remember what it was now; some catch-22 that had clearly been an accidental design failure. Even a man calling himself Lord British wouldn’t have birthed something so cruel—not when his golden throne ownership prospects depended on selling Ultimas V through infinity.
Little did I know at the time that this was but a prelude to an entire lifetime’s supply of frustration at the arbitrary dictates of malfunctioning computers. It’s a feeling we all know from standing at customer service in some vast aircraft hangar full of crappy Chinese consumer products listening to an 18-year old clerk averring in a voice devoid of personal responsibility, “The computer won’t let me.” It’s like autocracy without the autocrat; the faceless bureaucracy reified for your exasperation.
This is the subject matter for this week’s episode, “A Taste of Armageddon,” in which two warring societies have turned over the execution of their hostilities to a computer simulation. The idea is that this solution avoids the horrors of war in favor of a sanitized version in which there is no mass destruction, no famine, no disease, no rape, no pillage, only people dying, quick and painlessly. Upon the completion of each simulated military strike, the computer decides who was killed and the victims dutifully make their way to the nearest liquidation chamber, and thus a kind of peace is maintained.
Of course it’s not really a peace, and the yawning flaw in this episode lies in its assumption that people would in any way be satisfied with the systematic annihilation of their friends and family, regardless of how clinical. And yet it still rings true, insofar as we’ve all made careers out of learning to live with the limitations and quirks of half-baked computer systems, though more typically in the less horrific genres of parking tickets and airline ticket confirmations.
When computers start dealing in matters of life and death we tend to stiffen up a bit. There’s talk in some countries of giving military drones the power to decide on their own whom to fire upon and when, and that makes us understandably nervous. We pretty much shrug at 30,000 road deaths each year, but when a self-driving car jumps the curb and smears a pedestrian across the concrete, it’s an occasion for Congressional hearings. Why?
I’ve thought a lot about Trek’s attitude toward computers, especially in “The Court Martial” and “The Return of the Archons.” Garden-variety fear of computers is easy enough to find but I think it’s fair to say that Star Trek was always more interested in the failures of humans than machines. The show pretty accurately shows how computers amplify and extend the foibles of their creators—the dictatorship of “Archons” extends far beyond the natural life of the dictator himself; the computer in “The Court Martial” becomes a powerful tool for fraud, same as it is in the hands of spammers and phishers. If Star Trek was philosophically or politically opposed to anything it was rigid social structures, and nothing is more rigid than a computer program; moreover the rigidity of the program preserves and promulgates whatever shortcomings might have existed in the mind of its creator, be they moral or simply logical. That’s why we don’t want bots deciding on targets, and we’re upset when a computer does something once that we do 30,000 times a year. To err is human, but to run that error in a loop is monstrous. It’s inflexibility which is the key theme in “Armageddon”—a society so calcified within a system that had been sustained over tens of generations by the virtual immortality of the machine that its members couldn’t even imagine a different basis for living, at least until Kirk shows up and throws the whole situation into chaos. It’s worth noting that for once he doesn’t destroy the computer by confusing it to death. Why resort to such sophistry when a phaser will do?
I didn’t have a phaser with which to zap my Atari 130XE. I just put the goddamn thing, along with my four floppy drives, into a box, which I exchanged with a stranger in a shopping mall parking lot for a stack of twenties.
[7/6] I kinda lost my shit in this section when this piece was originally published. It wasn’t you; it was me. I’m struggling with a lot of stuff and have been feeling goaded by Substack’s shiny promises into doing things I don’t enjoy and which run counter to the reasons I write. I am, however, doing away with the comment and share buttons. They haven’t done anything for me and I don’t like haranguing people to spread the word. If you want to spread the word, great. If you don’t want to, that’s fine too. I’ve temporarily lost access to my Paramount+ account so I reckon I won’t be writing on Trek next time—I’ll self-indulge a little bit and explain my situation in greater detail.
Strictly speaking the computer Shatner spoke for, the VIC-20, was a glorified calculator, but it’s big brother, the Commodore 64, was a staple of the 1980s home computer scene.
Some minor routines were in fact offloaded to other programmers.
Saving allowance.