Formula one: expensive movie and simulator based games that offer the player a large expanse of virtual "territory" and within them, a large number of characters to interact with. The "Ultima" series.
Formula two: flight games which start with a motion picture 3D action sequence - a briefing before you start, you fly a mission, a debriefing, and a story advancement sequence. The "Wing Commander" series.
These have sustained Origin games for fifteen years. The company continues to follow the basic formulas, only with ever increasing levels of technical complexity and ever higher budgets. Richard "Lord British" Garriot gave me a tour of Origin at the company's Austin building in Texas. A company employing over 250 people, Origin is housed within an otherwise non descript office building. Over 200 of the staff work on project development, the rest on customer support and publishing.
The 3 story 2 year old building is organised into "producer group" areas where individual games are developed almost like sub companies within the main organisation. This deliberately follows a movie production model, where specialists collaborate in close proximity to each other under the overall Origin umbrella. The publisher and developer giant Electronic Arts took Origin into its empire not long ago, and although staff could just as easily work on standard Electronic Arts titles, such as sports games, Origin sticks to its known formula of interactive, very cinematic games like Wing Commander 3 which cost 4.5 million dollars and starred Mark Hamill of "Star Wars" fame. The initial orders for the game are currently a quarter of a million units.
Origin is already building a second office building to handle its exponential growth. An in-house recording facility enables voice over for German, Japanese and French versions of the games. The custom building has no parallel walls, to shield staff from sounds for games, which emanate from keyboard filled rooms where sound engineer / musicians work. We pass a gymnasium, where Origin staffers can work out. Gleaming pec-decks and weights fill the area. "This is the largest Novell network in the entire State of Texas" Richard proudly tells me. Before us are two sets of shelf racks filled with PCs and hard drives which total at least 20. "We have half a terrabyte of storage here and it is going to go up. Video takes up to ten to a hundred times more storage than anything done before. "All the versions of the games are kept here, and these fire boxes store the data in case of a fire...".
Exiting the elevator Richard shows me the videoconferencing rooms. "We have leased lines for video conferences, so if ever you want to contact me, use our facility in Sydney for a face to face conversation". Next is the Quality Assurance department. Twenty or so staff sit amid various blow up toys and movie posters. One tester is using a virtual reality headset on a 3D adventure game. Right next door is customer support, where ten or so busy youngsters fitted with Madonna headsets are talking to confused players of the games feeding instructions over the phone.
Garriot has plans for Australia. He hopes to set up an Origin facility down under to do a project cycle in coming months. Garriot says that Origin will need to take every part of its infrastructure with it to Australia for the project. U.S. capital, hardware, and know how would form the basis for what would amount to a colonisation of the local industry. Electronic Arts would play a pivotal role, especially in terms of its network, of which the video conferencing system described above is a central part. The abundance of high quality media, especially television such as shows like "Beyond 2000" and "The Big Byte" which show on the "Discovery Channel" here have convinced Garriot that the technical and creative talent required for an Origin production already are in place.
According to Garriot, Australia's talent base would be need to be "brought up to speed" by Origin for its present level of game production. Garriot was unaware of the "Creative Nation" announcement made by Canberra not long after the AIMIA conference at which the pivotal Cutler and Co report was released. Strategic alliances with local games firms would facilitate a passing on of expertise in both directions. Garriot: "Living in the same city with other experts is usually beneficial because the information can be absorbed by association ... having the opportunity to communicate on a daily basis will help the local developers as well"
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