I've mentioned Richard Garriott before. He's the video game developer that went to the International Space Station a few weeks ago. Garriott is an “old school” video game developer, and he's been developing role playing games since the early 1980's. But lately he's been in the news, when it was announced that Tabula Rasa would be free in January, only to permanently shut down in February, scant days after it was was announced that Garriott would be leaving NCsoft the publisher of Tabula Rasa.

Tabula Rasa is a sci-fi massively multiplayer online role playing game or mmorpg. Tabula Rasa is a sci-fi mmorpg that takes place in a the near feature of earth. An alien race, called the Eloh, controls power to convert matter to energy and vice versa and seeks to help lesser races with this power, unfortunately one race called the Thrax turns on them which led to a war. This leads to a division and later war within the Eloh, one side seeks to dominate other races and the original Eloh seek still to help others.

The game was released in November 2, 2007 for PC, and while it was noted for its innovative combat system, it just didn't hit that number of subscribers that it had hoped for.

Bottom Line: Its a sad day for fans of Tabula Rasa, but good thing WoW: Wrath of the Lich King is here to comfort them, and with the departure of famed gamer, Richard Gariott, what will NCsoft do?