Zynga competition

Feb 23, 2010 08:49 GMT  ·  By

Richard Garriott, the videogames industry veteran who is best known for being the mastermind behind the Ultima series, has announced that he is creating a new company called Portalarium, which will focus on the development of premium Facebook gaming experiences.

Garriott told Venturebeat that “I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been born at the right time to start the wave of game development in the 1970s. I felt I had a second once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a significant figure in the emergence of massively multiplayer gaming. It was the fastest growing piece of the game industry in the last 10 years.”

Richard Garriott believes that current social games, delivered mainly through Facebook, with Zynga being the most important company behind them, are limited in scope and suffer from quality issues. According to the developer, even more casual players are seeing those problems and are interested in getting more polished and complex games.

Portalarium plans to first work on a browser plug in, which will allow the company to then quickly deploy their titles to the browser. Garriott is not saying what kind of games he is thinking of creating in the next months but he does not have the option of using the Ultima name, which is currently owned by Electronic Arts and has been recently used to power a free online game called Lord of Ultima, still in beta stage.

Richard Garriott has worked on Ultima at Origin Systems and then saw the company being bought by Electronic Arts. Ultima Online was one of the first MMOs to spark a craze among players and Garriott aimed to again revolutionize the medium with Tabula Rasa, a MMO published by NCsoft, which failed to attract a wide audience and closed down in 2009. Garriott then chose to take flight into space, going to the International Space Station for the price of 30 million dollars.