Ultima creator Richard Garriott issues statement on Explorer's Club members lost in Titan sub disaster
Ultima creator and Explorer's Club president Richard Garriott has issued a public statement mourning the deaths of the Titan sub passengers. Two members of the ill-fated expedition to visit the underwater remains of the Titanic, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, were part of the nearly 120-year-old professional society.
With Deepest Condolences — Loss of the Titan pic.twitter.com/Jj3KnujtV9June 22, 2023
In the statement, Gariott thanked the US Coast Guard for its rescue efforts and reminisced about his personal friendship with Harding, as well as Nargeolet's expertise on the Titanic wreck. Garriott also called OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush a friend of the Explorer's Club, and praised Shahzada and Suleman Dawood's «desire to explore.»
The Explorer's Club was chartered in 1904 by a confederation of academics, journalists, and expedition leaders. It has a distinct «Victorian gentleman» twang to its founding, contemporaneous with the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, but it would go on to be associated with many triumphs of exploration in the 20th century and beyond. Endurance expedition leader Ernest Shackleton and Mt. Everest climber Edmund Hillary were both members, and multiple Apollo missions carried miniature Explorer's Club flags onboard.
Richard Garriott is best known to gamers as the creator of the Ultima series, a common ancestor of modern CRPGs, JRPGs (Dragon Quest creator Yuji Hori cited it as an inspiration), immersive sims (through Ultima Underworld), and MMOs (through Ultima Online). He is also the son of astronaut Owen Garriott, and space tourism and other forms of exploration have been a late-career passion of the developer. Garriott famously traveled to the International Space Station (and
Read more on pcgamer.com
