After months of rejection, James decided to email Garriott personally and ask a very simple favor: 'Tell us what you would like.' 'The first time we had people attempt to give us stuff in any of those areas, it wasn't good,' Garriott said, explaining that everything players were showing him didn't fit his vision-it was either too modern, too orchestrated, or too atmospheric. The only problem being that what James and the other artists tried to contribute wasn't much better. Fans began reaching out to Garriott, sending him their compositions to be considered for Shroud of the Avatar. Without the money afford a proper musical score, Portalarium began buying generic 'clipart' music from various online libraries.īut Portalarium's transparent process of development inspired people like James to donate more than just their money-they wanted to donate their talent too.

Two million dollars is far from pocket change, but compared to the average budget for an MMO, it kind of was. 'They had music, but they didn't have a music director so it wasn't cohesive.'Ĭonsidering that Ultima V's ' Stones,' a song penned by bowyer and real-life bard David 'Iolo' Watson and Kathleen 'Gwenno' Jones, became the anthem for a generation of Ultima fans, Shroud of the Avatar's lack of musical direction was disappointing. As the months went by and that single room expanded to become New Britannia, one thing stuck out to James and his guild: the music kind of sucked. To that end, the first pre-alpha release was a single room with a chicken in it. If they failed, Garriott hoped that at least the journey would be an interesting one. That conviction led Garriott and Portalarium, Shroud of the Avatar's developer, to pull back the curtain on development and be as transparent as possible. You want to make sure that no one thinks you're wasting their money and you want to provide people as much entertainment along the way just in case it all falls apart.' You then also realize that there's some chance that this won't work-there's lots of ways this could go wrong. 'You feel this much deeper beholding to the backers. 'It makes you really not want to screw it up,' he said. Earlier this year, I spoke with Richard Garriott about the stress of designing what would become a massive MMO using his fans’ money.

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