Hi, all. I’m interviewing two awesome people tomorrow: Brenda Romero and Richard Garriott. Brenda (formerly Brenda Brathwaite) is probably best known for her work on the Wizardry series, though she’s also done some work on sex in games (yeah, thought that might get your attention). She’s also the wife of the most popular Matt Chat guest of all time, Mr. John Romero.
I interviewed Richard (aka Lord British) for Matt Chat already, but now I’m chatting with him for an upcoming issue of Retro magazine. I don’t want to rehash the same old stories, so let me know what thoughts you have for questions.
If I could, I would like to ask Brenda Romero on what she thought about the stereo types plaguing not only games but the entire entertainment industry in women and men. Women in games aren’t exactly realistic in them.
The trick with Garriott is getting him off script. When he can get away from the polished canned answers he’s used to he really opens up and can be exciting to watch. It becomes easy to see why his stuff is compelling to so many people.
Garriott:
Ask him about his haunted houses, his move to New England early in Origin’s History, most interesting letters from fans, his desire to kill children in games, that the Ultima Companions were based on real people and talk about them… or the guy who broke into his house.
Ask him about the preservation of old games, histories, and their importance in our culture, up to and including his keeping old Apple machines around for parts to keep his Akalabeth machine running.
Or how his games don’t usually have bad guys to beat.
Off the top of my head, those are things he likes to talk about that might get something new, or at least of SotA script.
If you want to hit a little harder ask about the sale to EA, or even more NC Soft, or the partnership temporarily with Zynga and Ultimate Collector.
If you need/want to talk about SotA ask about what he’s excited about, let him get into that, and if you want to make him squirm a little, bring up combat and mention that you’ve heard some people seem nervous to upset about it, and what he’s doing to help with that. I suspect that question will go over poorly, so it’s really just more for me to voice it than for you to ask it.
I could probably go into more, but that’s all I got off the top of my head. He’s definitely my specialty computer history wise as hes’ the role-model I looked up to when deciding what to do with my life career wise. The real question is how hard or soft do you want to go on him. If you want some more ideas, help fleshing out a direction, etc with him I’m certainly willing to come up with more ideas.
Brenda:
What does she think of how Wizardry took off in Japan while it faded here in the states? And anything about Jagged Alliance. The people I know of who know the originals love them, so it would just be nice to hear how they came to be,
Just noticed I’m a day late… doh!