Portalarium

» see portalarium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I played Ultima Online on Turkish private servers, on shards somebody in this country was running out of a rented box for people who could not or would not pay a monthly fee in dollars. Sylveria and Overdone, among others. That is the relationship I have with Richard Garriott's work, and it is the reason Portalarium reads differently to me than it does to the people who backed it.

Portalarium was founded in Austin in september 2009 by Garriott with Dallas Snell and Fred Schmidt. Garriott had just come off Tabula Rasa, which NCsoft closed in february of that year, and he was in the middle of suing NCsoft over how his departure from it had been characterized. The new company started small and slightly beneath him: Port Casino Poker in a browser, and in 2012 a game called Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale, made with Zynga, about picking through other people's junk for something worth keeping.

The real thing arrived in march 2013. Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues went to Kickstarter with a one million dollar goal and closed on 7 april at $1,919,275 from 22,322 backers. With pledges taken directly on the game's own site the campaign total was around two million. The pitch was not subtle and did not need to be, because the man asking had made Ultima, and a large number of people in their thirties and forties wanted that specific feeling back badly enough to pay in advance for it.

Here is the part I cannot get around. What Portalarium spent a decade and eleven million dollars trying to manufacture, a handful of Turkish teenagers were running for free on a rented server in 2001, badly, with a broken economy and a house-deed system that made no sense. The feeling was not in the budget. It was in being a teenager on a dial-up line and finding a world that did not seem to know it was supposed to be a product.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

Shroud of the Avatar promised a return to the design values of Ultima, meaning a virtue system and player-built towns, in a world that reacted to you instead of handing you a queue for content. Garriott put himself at the center of the marketing, which was the correct call commercially, since the product being sold was continuity with 1985 more than it was a game anybody had played yet.

Crowdfunding did not stop when the Kickstarter did. Portalarium kept selling pledge tiers on its own site for years, and the good ones came with property inside the game. By 2017 the total taken in had passed eleven million dollars and Garriott was writing public reassurances to backers about where their money had gone, which is not a letter you write when things are going well.

~ the fall ~

The game was in the open for a very long time, which is the honest failure mode of crowdfunded development. Every backer watched every build. What they saw was an MMO carrying twenty years of accumulated expectation on an indie budget, with an art style nobody defended and a player count that never grew past the people who had already paid.

Selling land inside an unfinished world made it worse. Once a meaningful part of your funding comes from housing plots, the design has a landlord problem, and every decision about how many plots exist is also a decision about what your earliest backers own. Shroud of the Avatar came out of early access on 27 march 2018 to reviews that were not cruel so much as tired.

~ what replaced it ~

On 9 october 2019 the forums carried a post from executive producer Starr Long saying that as of that month, Catnip Games had acquired the operating assets of Portalarium, primary among them Shroud of the Avatar. Catnip belonged to Chris Spears, who had been Portalarium's CTO for over six years and had been made president of the company earlier that year. Garriott thanked the community and said he would stay involved. Terms were not disclosed.

Read plainly, the company sold itself to its own executive so the game could keep running without the overhead attached to it, and Portalarium quietly stopped being anything by 2020. The game is still there under Catnip. Garriott has spent the years since going to places rather than building them, which suits him. Ultima Online, meanwhile, is technically still running twenty-eight years on, long past the era anyone means when they say the name, and the shards I actually played on have been gone for two decades.

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