John Watson

John Watson in 1990, during the Wild Basin expedition for Ultimate Adventures.

John Watson (September 4, 1969 – September 4, 2007) was an American game designer, writer, programmer, artist, and playtester who worked at Origin Systems on more than a dozen titles from 1989 to 1996. While also a member of the Wing Commander and Wing Commander II development teams, he was particularly involved with the later Ultima series, contributing in a range of capacities to Ultima VI, The Savage Empire, Ultima VII, Ultima VII Part Two, Ultima VIII, Ultima IX, Ultima Online, and the Nintendo release of Ultima V.

Career

Origin Systems

Watson began his career in the video games industry when he joined Origin Systems in 1989, initially as a playtester for Omega, Windwalker, Space Rogue, and Knights of Legend. He was then appointed quality assurance lead on Ultima VI, which also saw him provide his likeness for the Avatar's depiction in the game's introduction sequence, as well as voice acting for its FM Towns version.

Watson would become a recurring Ultima developer throughout the early 1990s: in addition to quality assurance, he contributed art, programming, and world design for The Savage Empire before joining the Ultima VII team as a writer and designer, including for its expansion, Ultima VII: Forge of Virtue (a project he led). He contributed art for the 1993 release of Ultima V for the Nintendo Entertainment System and was retained as a writer-programmer for Ultima VII Part Two, while writing and sharing lead design duties with Andrew Morris for the concurrently-developed Ultima VIII.

Ultima IX

Main article: Development history of Ultima IX

Although most of his Ultima VIII colleagues would shift post-release to development of Crusader: No Remorse, Watson joined with project director Mike McShaffry and artist Denis Loubet to comprise the earliest Ultima IX team in 1994, which saw him once again assuming the dual role of writer and lead designer. Watson initially collaborated with McShaffry and Loubet on early story concepts utilizing a design ethic inspired by Ultima IV, Ultima V, Ultima VI, and Ultima VII. By early 1995, however, he would work with series creator Richard Garriott and returning designer Brian Martin to complete Ultima IX's first plot treatment, which was further refined with assistance from Chuck Zoch and new hire Robert "Bob" White.

Although certain aspects of the plot he co-wrote remain in some form, Watson is uncredited in the final release of Ultima IX, its development team having been mostly restaffed in 1997 and the game's story extensively rewritten the following year.

Departure

Watson left Origin in 1996, after coding the user interface and conversation systems for Ultima Online. While the circumstances of his departure are unclear, it came during a tumultuous period at the company, in which Warren Spector's production group suffered collective layoffs and Electronic Arts issued a directive that saw most of the Ultima IX team reallocated to Ultima Online to expedite its completion.

Watson was regarded by White as an Ultima "lexicon" whose extensive knowledge of the series was of great assistance throughout their time working together. Garriott, too, spoke highly of Watson's contributions to the franchise in his 1999 interview with Melissa Tyler for Prima's Official Guide to Ultima IX: Ascension:

"So creating Ultima pseudo-science — Ultima reality — is actually very difficult. As I've looked for collaborators down through the years, most people don't actually "get it." What I mean by "get it," is not "appreciate it" but rather not get it in the sense that they can't craft within it. There have only been a few people that I've collaborated with that I've felt had mastered that process. John Watson was one of those people who I feel did a really good job of it, Warren Spector was another person who did it fabulously, Andrew Morris and Bill Armintrout really did 'get it.' Brian Martin really gets it."

Post-Origin

Upon leaving Origin, Watson first joined Wicked Games before relocating to California in 1998 to work for Black Isle Studios, where he was lead technical designer on the ill-fated Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound. In 2001, Watson returned to Austin for a stint with Inevitable Entertainment (later Midway Studios Austin) as creative director on Area 51, before moving back to California to join the short-lived Tektonic Studios in 2002 and, finally, The Collective in 2004.

Watson's three years at The Collective would produce his last projects, including Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, The Da Vinci Code, Silent Hill: Homecoming, and a canceled Dirty Harry adaption. At the time of his death, he was preparing to leave The Collective and relocate back to Texas, having accepted a position at an Austin-based developer on a massively multiplayer online game.

Death

Watson died of suicide on September 4, 2007, his 38th birthday. In the weeks that followed, he was memorialized online by several dozen friends and colleagues, many from his years at Origin, via messages published on Wing Commander Combat Information Center, a long-running Wing Commander fan website.

Trivia

• The cheat room in Ultima VII where Lord British scolds the player was originally implemented as a prank at Watson's expense, in response to his surreptitiously building a cheat room containing plot-critical items for his own use as a designer. Upon the discovery of Watson's creation, Garriott, who had explicitly requested no such locations be added without his knowledge, directed other designers to covertly reconfigure the destination of its access point so an unsuspecting Watson would instead find himself reprimanded by the fourth-wall-breaking Lord British.
• In Ultima VII, Watson is among several real artists named by Candice as exhibitors at Britain's Royal Museum. A "Watson's Disease" is also mentioned in Wing Commander during the prelude to the first Dakota System mission.
• Watson was known among colleagues for wearing a segment of articulated plate armor on his ring finger (dubbed "finger armor"), which Origin artist Rob Baldwin used as a reference for producing the gauntlet cursor used in Ultima Online and Ultima IX.

External Links

• John Watson's memorial page at Wing Commander CIC
• John Watson's profile on Mobygames