Discover how Raph’s unconventional upbringing and university experience with online MUDs influenced his work on the pioneering MMORPGs Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies – both of which involved some truly terrifying crunch

Words by Lewis Packwood

How did you get into games?

My mom brought home a Sears Pong console, from when Pong was first available in stores. We got an Atari not too long after that. I remember my dad was pretty good at Space Invaders in the arcade, and I got a home computer given to me by my great uncle in maybe 82, 83.

My mother worked for UNICEF, so I was actually living overseas – I was down in Peru at that point. My parents were divorced: I’d spend summers with my dad in the States, and that meant I was learning to program and playing D&D and all of that kind of thing down in Peru, and then coming back to the States where I would be seeing the latest arcade games.

Before I knew how to program, I started making board game versions of the videogames that I would see in the States. And so I ported Q*bert and Pengo and lots of others to tabletop, and actually made them out of paper and cardboard. That started around fourth or fifth grade.

So you started game design really early on?

Yes. I actually still have most of those tabletop games I made. In hindsight, it was amazing training for game design. This all culminated when myself and a couple of friends formed a little ‘company’ that we called Protocom, short for Prototype Computing, and we started trying to make games and sell them to classmates who had computers, of which there weren’t that many in Peru. And we did succeed at selling one copy of one game in a Ziplock baggie. So that was my very first game sale – I was probably 13 or 14.

You had quite an unconventional upbringing: didn’t your father live in a commune at the time?

He did live in a commune for a bunch of my childhood. So, of course, that was all very granola and organic, and not computery at all. But my dad was – and is still – very forward thinking. He has worked as a futurist pretty much his entire career. He was organising solar energy fairs as early as 1974.

How do you think your upbringing influenced your career?

Oh, a lot. Living in a lot of countries really gave me a very different feeling about almost everything. I’d spent more time outside the US than in it by the time I finished high school, and I’d visited a bunch of countries and lived in three others by then. You get a very different perspective on humanity, on society, on everything. Not being immersed in aspects of American culture gave me very different impressions of race, patriotism, capitalism, you name it.

You didn’t pursue games initially, did you?

No, when I was a kid, everybody told me, “You’re going to be a writer or a teacher.” I learned to read extremely young: my grandmother was a school teacher, and she taught me how to read when I was two. I was reading Robert Ludlum when I was in preschool. I just read voraciously.

I was always telling stories, and it was just sort of assumed I was going to turn into a writer. I edited the high-school literary magazine, and I ended up double majoring in English and Spanish at college, then went straight to graduate school for creative writing and got a master of fine arts. During that same time, I had gotten back into games in the form of MUDs [multi-user dungeons], which were text-based predecessors to MMOs. So I ended up not using that MFA for anything, and instead got into the games industry.