What was your driving motivation to get into game development?
I worked on some little games in college with some friends, and so I was sort of inter-
ested in gaming then. I fell in with some friends and started writing some online games
on the side, nothing too sophisticated, but it was fun to do little three- to four-person
creative projects. My first gig wasn’t games, though, it was network simulations. But
then when I heard that a friend of a friend was starting a games group, I thought, “Well
sure, that sounds like more fun.” I don’t know, driving motivation might be a little
strong, but I was definitely into it. And I definitely had been looking for opportunities to
do games.
What about game development attracted you to it?
I had always played games. The whole idea of being in an interactive experience is
really compelling and the idea to author that and let people try things was always some-
thing that seemed cool. I’ve always enjoyed reading fiction, and games just seemed like
a natural step in some ways. Different in other ways too.
What were the origins of theUltima Underworldproject?
Paul Neurath and Ned
Lerner had gone to Wes-
leyan together, and
afterward they did a game
calledDeep Spacefor Sir
Tech. Then Paul went off
and didSpace Roguefor
Origin and Ned went off
and did an early Chuck
Yeagerfor EA, and then he
didCar & Driver.Space
Rogue had already been
half RPG but with a very,
very low polygon count
3D flight engine. And so in
that same vein he had this idea of doing a dungeon simulator. And so he assembled a lit-
tle team of four of us in May of 1990, and using some of the assembly code fromCar &
Driver, some of Paul’s old math code, plus a bunch of code we hacked together, we wrote
a demo in May, which he then took to CES in June of 1990 to show to Origin. And he said
to them, “Hey look, we’ll do a 3D dungeon simulator; it’ll be great.” And they basically
said, “Sure, whatever, tell us when it’s done.”
So then we kind of worked on it for a year, getting the basic tech going, and then
pitched them a couple story concepts. And then the one that one of the other guys and I
wrote caught enough that they were comfortable with it as anUltima, and so we then
just went ahead and built that, basically. We only went to Texas twice on that project,
once at the ten-month point and once at the sixteen-month point. Warren [Spector] was
the third producer on the project, but he was the one who stuck to it. He came in about
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 501
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss