Origin Systems Inc company

Was a video game developer based in Austin, Texas, which was active from 1983 to 2004. It is most famous for the Ultima and Wing Commander series. Started by Richard Garriott AKA Lord British.

Origin Systems was founded in 1983 by brothers Robert and Richard Garriott, their father Owen Garriott, as well as Chuck Bueche. Bueche and Richard Garriott had previously made Ultima 1 and Ultima 2 with Sierra online, but terminated their contract while in the middle of negotiations regarding the release of Ultima III and founded Origin Systems. The motto of Origin Systems was "We Create Worlds". Its games were well recognized for well written plots and attention to detail. They went on to publishing several more Ultima games as well as the MMORPG Ultima Online. Other notable franchises created by Origin are the Wing Commanderseries as well as the Crusader games. With the publication of Ultima Online they attracted the attention of EA games, who saw potential in the game, going on to buy Origin Systems. Electronic Arts disbanded the studio after cancelling some of the upcoming games being developed by Origin.

Origin Systems had a special branch called Origin Skunkworks which created flight sims. The branch eventually split off to continue creating flight sims. Richard Garriott later founded Destination Games, which was then bought out by NCsoft, where he has also found great success in the position of Executive producer for MMO titles City of Heroes and City of Villains, as well as releasing a MMO of his own design, Tabula Rasa in 2007, but to no great success.

Many other employees of Origin Games have gone on to bigger and better things.
The Ultima series still enjoys a cult following, with hobbyists creating a program that will run some of the games, such as Ultima 7, in Windows XP, as it is a DOS game. The program also allows users to create their own worlds with ultima engines.

EA changed the name of the studio to simply Origin. Luckily Richard Garriott being the man with a plan, went on to found Portalarium and are working on their next title, Shroud of the Avatar, a successor to the Ultima series.