He gives the usual spiel about how Ultima I was his first real commercial game, Ultima II was him learning assembly, Ultima III was him making a cohesive fantasy world and then Ultima IV was his crowning achievement when he devised a game about virtue where you don't kill the big baddie. Richard Garriott has been going around for decades talking about how the early Ultimas were almost 100% him. The virtue system, the maps of the towns, dungeon and overworld, the quests, the dialogue system, the symmetry of having 8 of everything, and virtually all aspects of the game except the actual coding was done by Roe R Adams and not Richard Garriott. The gist of the article is that Ultima IV was almost completely designed by Roe R Adams III, not Richard Garriott. I came upon a 6 part article in Japanese entitled "What Roe R Adams did." The man who wrote it claims to be an old friend of Roe's from when Roe lived in Japan.
ULTIMA III JAPAN MANUAL
In the Ultima IV manual he is thanked "for his invaluable collaboration on the plots of the great quests and for his writings contained within this manuscript." But what does that specifically mean? In Ultima III, he is credited as a playtester and "for the eloquent writings herein" the manual. Andrea Contato claims they had a falling out after Ultima IV was finished.
ULTIMA III JAPAN MANUALS
Besides being credited in the manuals of Ultima III and IV, Richard Garriott has, to my knowledge, never publicly spoken about him or acknowledged his efforts with the games. Roe R Adams III's involvement with Ultima has always been a bit of a mystery. After Wizardry IV was published, he left the game industry to start an anime distribution company called AnimEigo with Robert Woodhead and aside from a little bit of work in the 90s, has not worked on any prominent games since. He later got into game design, being credited on 3 of the biggest RPGs of that decade.
His history is that he was a gamer in the early 80s as well as a writer and reviewer for a magazine called Softalk. It's also why Skara Brae appears in Ultima IV and The Bard's Tale. Hawkwind is his alter ego which is why that character appears in Ultima IV, The Bard's Tale and Wizardry IV. He is credited in the manuals of Ultima III and IV and is also credited on The Bard's Tale as well as co-designer of Wizardry IV. You might've heard the name before, since he is one of the most influential and yet also unknown game designers of the 1980s. I was looking into a guy named Roe R Adams III. Some pretty explosive claims have come to light today regarding Richard Garriott, aka Lord British.
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