Richard Garriott Launches Poker Social Network

by Jzee

Friday, March 26, 2010 at 06:48 AM EDT

All online poker lovers have something to rejoice now. The most popular video game designer, Mr. Richard Garriott, who is also called the Lord British, has come up with a new idea that will bring a lot of fun to online poker fans. He plans to do what he always does – something extraordinary, something that others cannot think before him and something that he always gave to the online gamers. He now plans starting a poker gaming social networking site, called Portalarium.

Garriott is known for his pioneering work on Ultima and Ultima online and is popular as one of the gaming industry’s legends. He also has enough contribution to City of Heroes, Lineage, Tabula Rasa, and other such popular online games. The man after coming back from space travel for which he paid 8 figures on a Russian Rocket to the International Space Station amazed the world of online gambling again with his next venture. Perhaps his stint in space provided him this brilliant idea. He announced soon after coming that he would start up Portalarium which would make thing for Facebook poker games. Imagine the day when you can log into Facebook and play poker.

Garriott also plans to expand the areas where one would get open learning, open science and environment, open health discussion, and open government. All these would be wrapped up in the virtual world of his social networking site with poker in focus. Garriott has always been known as the eccentric video game maker, and now he would be known in the coming days as the pioneer of poker in social websites. The company announced that the first game that would be released for Facebook users would be poker.

Garriott certainly knows that there are ardent poker players like and thousands on Facebook and similar social networking site. He plans to insert two popular poker games – Texas Hold’em and Playfish. Though these two are just the beginning that the company will start, others will soon follow suit. The company will even have poker games on iPhone, Facebook, and Myspace.

Garriott noticed that the social gaming graphics significantly lagged far behind those of more experienced developers, and he decided to capitalize on this disparity. The Portalarium will work on the plugin for Facebook which will also support applications that people use other than Adobe Flash player.

This plug-in version of the game is an interesting announcement because people would now have the freedom to choose this application other than flash player to play the games. This is because Flash is not that much compatible with the iPod or iPhone.

It seems to me as if Garriott is desperate to start the game on Facebook so that millions of online poker lovers and amateurs who love to play poker for free would really love the idea and game.

This article originally appeared on Another Harvard Blog.