Portalarium

Portalarium, Inc. is a video game developer based in Austin, Texas that was formed in September 2009 for the development and publishing of games in the emerging social media market.Portalarium marks Richard Garriott's first return to the video game industry since the release of his 2007 title Tabula Rasa. The name "Portalarium", as well as the company's motto, "We take you there," is intended as a continuity and reference to Garriott's prior two company's names and respective mottoes; Origin Systems, "We Create Worlds," and Destination Games, "We have arrived." In June of 2012, established social-media developer Zynga announced at its "Zynga Unleashed" conference a publishing partnership with various third-parties, including Portalarium.On July 10, 2012, Portalarium announced its Series A round of financing had closed with $7 million in capital, with participants including BHV Venture Capital, m8 Capital, and FF Angel.The company initially released some simplistic casino-themed games to test the backbone of the companies online infrastructure, and also has two flagship titles currently announced.The first such game, Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale, released in November 2012, is centered around virtually hunting for, collecting, repairing, displaying, and selling all variety of collectables. The game is set to be paired with a television show hosted by Garriott (himself an avid collector), the pilot for which has already been filmed. The game was featured in part of a cross-medium Easter Egg scavenger hunt contest from the book Ready Player One.Also in development, is an MMORPG tentatively titled only Ultimate RPG. Few details have been released about this project so far, but Garriott has stated it to be a spiritual successor to the Ultima series, and has additionally stated that if he were able to secure the rights to the Ultima intellectual property from Electronic Arts, that the game could literally become Ultima Online .Ultimate RPG is stated to be a cross platform title, including plans for browser based distribution via avenues such as Facebook, Google Play, and the Zynga portal, downloadable executable for PC, and mobile app stores such as iPhone and Android.