Starr Long

Life

Starr McAuley Long was born on March 12, 1970, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up there as an only child; his parents ran an antique store. He graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in 1988 and from Louisiana State University in 1992 with a degree in theatre. For a time he built sets for local companies such as the Baton Rouge Opera, then moved with friends to Austin, Texas, where he kept working backstage at venues like the Live Oak Theatre.

Theater did not pay. On a whim, in September 1992, Long answered an advertisement for paid game testers and found himself hired by Origin Systems, the studio Richard Garriott had built around the Ultima series. Later that same month Electronic Arts acquired Origin. Long's timing was accidental but perfect: he arrived at the company that had shaped the computer RPG from Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar to Ultima VII: The Black Gate, just as it was gaining a corporate parent with the money to attempt something unprecedented.

Work

Long started in quality assurance, logging bugs on titles such as Ultima VII, Wing Commander III and ShadowCaster. He was soon a QA lead, on BioForge among others, and in 1995 was promoted to associate producer on Ultima IX. That same period saw Garriott's team begin sketching an online Ultima, and Long moved over to it. The founding group of Garriott, Long, Rick Delashmit and Scott Phillips, joined shortly afterward by lead designer Raph Koster, built what would become Ultima Online, with Long as its director and producer.

Launching a persistent world for thousands of simultaneous players had no playbook. Long's job was to hold the project together through a public beta that was itself a news event, and through the most famous moment of that beta: on August 9, 1997, during an in-game appearance, Garriott's avatar Lord British was killed by a player named Rainz, the incident this museum remembers as the Assassination of Lord British. Characters like Lord British were meant to be invulnerable, and Long publicly blamed human error; the protection had not survived a server reset. The episode, and the chaos that followed when developers retaliated in-game, became a founding parable of online-world governance.

The game itself, released on September 24, 1997, was a hit. Ultima Online passed 100,000 paying subscribers within about six months and peaked at around 250,000 in 2003; Electronic Arts called it the company's fastest-selling computer game. Players knew Long through his in-game character Lord Blackthorn, borrowed from the Ultima canon's tyrant-regent and foil to Lord British, and the name later titled the 2002 expansion Lord Blackthorn's Revenge.

In 2000 Long left Origin with Richard and Robert Garriott to found Destination Games, which Korea's NCSoft, publisher of Lineage, acquired in 2001. There he worked on Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, a science-fiction MMO that reached stores on November 2, 2007. It did not meet expectations, Long and Garriott both left NCsoft in 2008, and the game closed on February 28, 2009.

The partners then went separate ways for a time. Long moved to Los Angeles as an executive producer at the Walt Disney Company, where over four years he oversaw educational games and apps, including mini-games and a mobile version of Club Penguin, the Disney Connected Learning platform, and collaborations with education researchers from Stanford University and the University of Georgia. He also managed Disney's online worlds Toontown Online, Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Pixie Hollow, all of which closed in late 2013.

That year Long founded a consultancy, Stellar Effect, and rejoined Garriott at Portalarium as executive producer of Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a spiritual successor to Ultima announced on March 8, 2013. Its Kickstarter raised roughly $1.9 million, and the team included Tracy Hickman, co-creator of Dragonlance, as lead story designer. The game was fully released in March 2018 and went free-to-play that October. Long subsequently joined The Acceleration Agency, applying game-development practice to interactive and "digital twin" projects outside the games industry.

Legacy

Long's career traces the arc of the online world from experiment to institution. As director of Ultima Online he helped prove that a subscription fantasy world could sustain a business, a lesson absorbed by EverQuest, Asheron's Call and eventually World of Warcraft; the game's induction as the first entry in the GDC Online Awards Hall of Fame in 2010 recognized that debt. In 2007 Beckett Massive Online Gamer ranked him twelfth among the twenty most influential people in MMOs.

He is also a study in partnership. Across Origin, Destination Games, NCsoft and Portalarium, Long served as the producer who turned Richard Garriott's grand designs into shipping software, including the attempt, through crowdfunding, to give longtime Ultima players a new Britannia-like world to inhabit. For visitors following the Worlds Online path, he is the stage manager behind the curtain of the first great graphical MMO: the person responsible for the lights staying on while thousands of players improvised the show.