Ultima creator and Explorer Club President Richard Garriott has issued an official statement mourning the death of the Titan passengers. Two members of the ill-fated expedition to visit the undersea ruins of the Titanic, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Narjollet, were part of the nearly 120-year-old group of experts.

In a statement, Garriott thanked the U.S. Coast Guard for its rescue efforts and recalled his personal friendship with Harding and Narjollet's expertise on the wreck of the Titanic. Garriott also called Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush a friend of the Explorers Club and praised Shazada and Suleman Dawood's "desire to explore."

The Explorers Club was founded in 1904 by a coalition of scholars, journalists, and expedition leaders. The club was founded at the same time as the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, giving it a distinctly "Victorian Gentleman" feel, but it would later become associated with many of the triumphs of exploration in the 20th century and beyond. Immortal expedition leader Ernest Shackleton and Everest climber Edmund Hillary were both members, and several Apollo missions carried miniature Explorer's Club flags.

Richard Garriott is the common ancestor of modern CRPGs, JRPGs (cited by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Hori as an inspiration), immersive sims (through Ultima Underworld), and MMOs (through Ultima Online) He is best known to gamers as the creator of the Ultima series. He is also the son of astronaut Owen Garriott, for whom space travel and other explorations were a passion late in the developer's career. Garriott famously went to the International Space Station (where he smuggled the ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan) and to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Garriott was elected president of the Explorer Club in 2021.

Unlike Garriott, another member of the association, James Cameron, director of "Avatar" and "Titanic," has not refrained from criticizing the late Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush. In addition to making movies, Cameron was a bona fide deep-sea explorer, having completed 33 dives into the remains of the Titanic and the Challenger Abyss at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. 'Cameron told the BBC. 'I wouldn't get on that submarine,' Cameron told the BBC."

"We now have another wreck on the same principle that unfortunately did not heed the warning. Ocean Gate was warned.

Off-the-shelf video game controllers are often repurposed to operate deep-sea and aerospace vehicles (such as drones) because of their intuitive and familiar layout, but the $30 Logitech F710 that Stockton Rush used to pilot Ocean Gate's submersible Images of the gamepad being demonstrated have drawn ridicule on social media.

The proverbial "your friend's weird Player 2 Mad Cat controller" used to pilot Ocean Gate's submersible becomes a convenient and absurd shorthand for the company's alleged more serious cutting of corners. Some in the deep-sea exploration industry were critical of Rush's refusal to obtain independent certification.

"We have heard the baseless cries of 'they're going to kill someone' far too often," Rush wrote in an e-mail to Rob McCallum, the owner of another submarine exploration company. I take this as a serious personal insult."

The Ocean Gate catastrophe is full of surreal connections to gaming, and Dusk and Iron Lung developer David Szymansky has expressed disbelief and dismay at the increased interest in his sci-fi submarine horror game as the Titan disaster makes top news. He expressed disbelief and discomfort.