Richard Garriott, creator of the long-running Ultima game series, is banking on the growing social gaming market.
Garriott's new venture is a company called Portalarium. The firm, founded with longtime collaborators Dallas Snell and Fred Schmidt, aims to return to Garriott's roots in the game business, GamesIndustry.biz reports. That means working with "small development teams, low barriers to entry [and] affordable budgets for quality projects," Garriott says.
That's a far cry from Garriott's last project, Tabula Rasa. The ambitious MMO ultimately failed, resulting in bad blood between Garriott and his former employer, NCsoft.
Portalarium's first offering is Sweet @$! Poker, a Facebook app for playing the Texas Hold'em variety of poker online.
While it's nice to see Lord British coming back down to earth and getting his hands dirty with games, what I really want from Garriott is something that recaptures that old Ultima Online magic. If Civilization can work on Facebook, there's no reason Garriott's old-school dungeon mastery can't find a second life on social networks.
Image courtesy NCsoft
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