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Garriott has a "50:50 hit/miss ratio"

Still "pleased" with Tabula Rasa, though.

Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa creator Richard Garriott has explained that his hit-to-miss ratio is about 50:50.

"Just for the record with Tabula Rasa and other games: I have about a 50:50 hit/miss ratio with the publication of all my games," the developer-cum-space-explorer told GamesIndustry.biz.

"And by the way I think 50:50 is mighty good - so although Tabula Rasa didn't find a sufficiently big audience for NCsoft to wish to continue it, I'm actually still very pleased with a lot of the innovations we brought to bear on the game, and I think there's a lot of ways in which it succeeded to at least the design vision we were attempting.

"In hindsight, even I would be critical of a wide swathe of things in Tabula Rasa, but that's no different to any others games I've done," he added.

Tabula Rasa - reviewed and re-reviewed on Eurogamer - was released in November 2007. Sales didn't meet expectations and in February 2009 the pug was pulled.

Ultima Online, meanwhile, is still a "very healthy" MMO - one that's doing better than many new virtual worlds, according to lead designer Tim Cotten.

Having left NCsoft, Richard Garriott's turned his attention to small-scale social games and created new company Portalarium. He's happy, and excited.