Before Silicon Hills became shorthand for Austin’s tech dominance, before Dell moved its headquarters to Round Rock and before Indeed planted its flag downtown, Austin had Origin Systems — a PC game developer that built two of the most influential franchises in the history of the medium. The Ultima series and Wing Commander did not emerge from Silicon Valley or a Boston suburb. They came out of Texas, shaped by a kid from Houston who taught himself to code on a school mainframe and a filmmaker-turned-programmer who wanted to put players in the cockpit of a starfighter. Origin Systems wrote the first chapter of Austin’s identity as a technology city, and the gaming industry has spent thirty years building on that foundation.
Richard Garriott: From Houston High School to the Ultima Series
Richard Garriott grew up in the Houston suburb of Nassau Bay, the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott who flew on Skylab 3 and STS-9. The family lived blocks from the Johnson Space Center, and Richard spent his adolescence surrounded by engineers and scientists. He attended Clear Creek High School in League City and taught himself to code on a Teletype terminal connected to a school mainframe, writing a game he called Akalabeth: World of Doom in 1979. That game became the commercial precursor to Ultima, one of the defining role-playing game series of the PC era.
Akalabeth sold roughly 30,000 copies after California Pacific Computer Company published it, which was an extraordinary number for a hand-copied floppy distributed in zip-lock bags. Garriott used the money to fund Ultima I, released in 1981, which introduced the open-world structure and moral depth that would define the series. By the time Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar arrived in 1985, the franchise had abandoned traditional good-versus-evil plotting entirely and asked the player to become a spiritual exemplar of eight virtues. No other RPG had done anything like it. Garriott built that vision in Texas, working under the name Lord British, a handle that started as a joke among friends at Clear Creek and stuck for four decades.
The commercial success of the early Ultima games gave Garriott and his brother Robert the capital to formalize their operation. Richard’s mother helped run the business side while the brothers assembled a team of developers. The Austin game development scene that exists today — companies like BioWare Austin, Certain Affinity, and Retro Studios — traces its professional DNA directly back to the Garriott family’s decision to build Origin Systems in Central Texas rather than relocate to the coasts.
Origin Systems in Austin: How It Started
Origin Systems incorporated in 1983, initially operating out of New Hampshire before Richard Garriott relocated the studio to Austin, Texas in 1987. The move was partly personal — Garriott wanted to return to the state where he grew up — and partly practical, since Austin offered lower overhead than San Jose or Seattle and a growing pool of university talent from UT Austin. The studio set up operations on West Braker Lane in northwest Austin, a stretch of road that would later fill with the semiconductor and software companies that define the modern tech corridor.
The Ultima series continued to evolve at the Austin studio. Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny arrived in 1988, followed by Ultima VI: The False Prophet in 1990. Each installment pushed the technical envelope — Ultima VI used a single coherent game world rather than separate overworld and town maps, a seamless design that impressed players who had grown up on the grid-based dungeons of earlier RPGs. The game ran on the Apple II, Atari ST, Amiga, and DOS PC, requiring the small Austin team to maintain multiple codebases simultaneously. The studio’s technical discipline during this period established coding standards that influenced how the broader game industry approached multiplatform development.
Origin also published games from external developers during this period, acting as a Texas-based publisher at a time when most distribution deals ran through California houses. The studio developed a reputation for ambitious design and technical rigor that attracted developers who wanted to push PC hardware to its limits. Garriott himself occupied a custom-built mansion outside Austin called Britannia Manor — named after the fictional kingdom of Ultima — where he hosted elaborate Halloween parties that became legendary in the local tech community. If you want to understand the character of Austin’s tech scene, its willingness to blur the line between work and elaborate play, Britannia Manor is a useful early data point. You can read more about Austin’s creative culture in our Austin Geek Guide.
Wing Commander and Sierra On-Line’s Texas Roots
Chris Roberts joined Origin Systems as a teenager, hired after Garriott played his early games and recognized the talent. Roberts had grown up in England and moved to Austin in his youth, and at Origin he found the resources to realize an idea that had been forming for years: a space combat simulator with the cinematic production values of a Hollywood film. Wing Commander shipped in 1990, running on DOS PCs, and it sold over 400,000 copies in its first year. The game used a 3D engine that Roberts wrote largely himself, combined with branching mission structures and character death that made player choices feel permanent and consequential.
Wing Commander’s success was a shock to the industry. The game was reviewed in mainstream publications that rarely covered software — The New York Times included it in holiday gift guides, and PC Magazine named it game of the year. Origin shipped Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi in 1991, and Roberts began developing a vision for full-motion video sequences that would make the series feel like an interactive film. Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, released in 1994, starred Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and John Rhys-Davies. It cost $4 million to produce, a budget that the games industry had never seen before, and it was made in Austin, Texas.
Sierra On-Line, though headquartered in Oakhurst, California, had significant Texas connections during this era. Ken Williams and Roberta Williams built King’s Quest and the Sierra adventure game catalog with a development philosophy that paralleled what Origin was doing in Austin — narrative-driven PC games that treated players as adults capable of engaging with complex systems. Several Sierra alumni moved to Austin during the 1990s and contributed to the talent ecosystem that Origin and later studios drew from. The Texas game development community owes debts to both companies. Our Local Creator Hub documents how that legacy continues in Austin’s independent developer scene today.
The space combat genre that Wing Commander established produced a generation of competitors — LucasArts’ X-Wing series, Activision’s Mechwarrior, and Microprose’s various simulations all owed something to what Roberts built at Origin. Roberts left Origin in 1996 to form Digital Anvil, another Austin studio, before eventually founding Cloud Imperium Games, whose Star Citizen project has raised over $700 million in crowdfunding. The throughline from Clear Creek High School to the most funded crowdfunding project in history runs directly through the offices Origin Systems kept on West Braker Lane.
Electronic Arts Acquisition and the End of an Era
Electronic Arts acquired Origin Systems in September 1992 for a reported $35 million. The deal gave EA control of the Ultima and Wing Commander franchises at the moment both properties were reaching their commercial peak — Wing Commander III and Ultima Underworld were both in development, and Origin’s pipeline looked extraordinarily valuable. EA’s founder Trip Hawkins had built his company by acquiring successful studios and centralizing their distribution and marketing infrastructure, and Origin fit the template perfectly.
The acquisition changed Origin’s operating culture immediately. Richard Garriott has spoken publicly about the friction between Origin’s design-first philosophy and EA’s metrics-driven management approach. The studio retained its Austin location and continued shipping major titles — Ultima VII: The Black Gate in 1992, Ultima VIII: Pagan in 1994, Ultima IX: Ascension in 1999, and the massively multiplayer Ultima Online in 1997 — but the internal creative autonomy that had produced the series’ best work eroded steadily. Ultima Online became a massive commercial success, essentially inventing the subscription-based MMORPG model that World of Warcraft would later perfect, but the development process was chaotic and the launch was riddled with server problems that damaged the studio’s reputation.
EA shut down Origin Systems in 2004, citing the declining market for traditional PC RPGs and the difficulty of competing with emerging console-focused developers. The closure ended twenty-one years of continuous game development from Austin. Garriott, who had left Origin in 1999 after a dispute with EA management, went on to found Destination Games, which merged with NCSoft to become NCSoft Austin. He later founded Portalarium and released Shroud of the Avatar, a spiritual successor to the Ultima series, in 2018. The Dallas gaming community has followed similar patterns of studio closures and revivals — see our Dallas Geek Guide for context on the broader Texas game industry.
The loss of Origin Systems as an independent studio marked the end of the first era of Texas game development. But the people who worked there did not leave the industry. They founded studios, joined new companies, and taught at UT Austin and Texas State. The studio’s legacy is not preserved in a museum exhibit — it lives in the professional practice of hundreds of developers still working in Central Texas.
What Origin Systems Left Behind in Austin’s Tech DNA
Austin’s technology economy in 2026 runs on a logic that Origin Systems helped establish: talent clusters around creative work, creative work attracts more talent, and the resulting density produces innovation that could not happen in isolation. The Austin Game Developers Association, founded by veterans of Origin and related studios, has connected hundreds of developers over the years. Companies like Retro Studios in Austin, which developed the Metroid Prime series for Nintendo, drew their early staff from the pool of trained developers that Origin created.
The MMO industry has a particularly deep Austin footprint that traces back to Ultima Online. BioWare Austin, the studio responsible for Star Wars: The Old Republic, relocated to the city specifically because of its concentration of MMO-experienced developers. Certain Affinity, which provides development support for Halo and Call of Duty, is headquartered in Austin and was founded by former Bungie employees who chose Austin partly for the existing game development community. id Software, the studio behind Doom and Quake, operates out of Richardson in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but its founders had significant relationships with Austin developers during the 1990s shareware era.
Richard Garriott’s personal legacy in Austin extends beyond game development. He has invested in local technology ventures, participated in civic initiatives, and in 2008 became the sixth private citizen in history to travel to space — following his father’s footsteps in the most literal way imaginable. He flew to the International Space Station on a Soyuz TMA-13 mission, photographing Earth from orbit while his games were still being played by millions of subscribers in Ultima Online. That dual identity — Houston-raised, Austin-based, space-traveling game designer — captures something essential about the ambition that Origin Systems brought to Texas technology.
The physical spaces where Origin Systems operated are now occupied by other tech companies. West Braker Lane in northwest Austin is dense with semiconductor firms, software consultancies, and startup offices. Britannia Manor was demolished and replaced with a new structure. But the institutional knowledge that Origin built — about narrative game design, about managing large-scale online communities, about the commercial potential of games that take their players seriously — that knowledge is embedded in Austin’s tech culture in ways that show up in every pitch deck and design document that comes out of the city today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where was Origin Systems located?
Origin Systems was headquartered in Austin, Texas, operating primarily from offices on West Braker Lane in northwest Austin. The studio incorporated in New Hampshire in 1983 but relocated to Austin in 1987, where it remained until Electronic Arts shut it down in 2004. Richard Garriott chose Austin partly to return to his home state and partly because the city offered UT Austin talent and lower operational costs than coastal tech hubs.
Who created the Ultima series?
Richard Garriott created the Ultima series, beginning with Akalabeth: World of Doom in 1979 and the first Ultima title in 1981. Garriott developed the early games while still a teenager in the Houston area, teaching himself to program on a school mainframe at Clear Creek High School in League City. He published and developed the series through Origin Systems, the studio he co-founded with his brother Robert Garriott, until Electronic Arts acquired the company in 1992.
Is Richard Garriott from Texas?
Richard Garriott grew up in Texas, spending his childhood and adolescence in Nassau Bay, a Houston suburb adjacent to the Johnson Space Center. His father, astronaut Owen Garriott, worked at NASA, and Richard attended Clear Creek High School in League City, Texas. Though born in Cambridge, England, during a period when his father was studying there, Garriott considers Texas his home and chose Austin as the permanent base for Origin Systems.
What happened to Origin Systems?
Electronic Arts acquired Origin Systems in September 1992 for approximately $35 million. The studio continued operating under EA management, releasing Ultima VII, Ultima VIII, Wing Commander III and IV, Ultima Online, and Ultima IX before EA closed it in 2004. Richard Garriott departed Origin in 1999 following creative and management disputes with EA, founding subsequent studios including Destination Games, NCSoft Austin, Portalarium, and most recently Shroud of the Avatar LLC.
What other game studios are based in Austin, Texas today?
Austin hosts a substantial game development community built on the foundation Origin Systems established. Major studios include BioWare Austin, which developed Star Wars: The Old Republic; Certain Affinity, which provides Halo and Call of Duty development support; Retro Studios, the Nintendo-owned developer behind Metroid Prime; and numerous independent developers. The city also hosts multiple esports organizations and game technology companies, making it one of the top five game development markets in the United States.
Leave a Reply