“It just felt really good, when this all started, to have the sexy sports celebrity from Boston who seemed to like Rhode Island and showed up in Rhode Island, and who built this exotic new business, even though no one knew what it was,” says the historian Ted Widmer, who grew up in Providence and works at Brown. “It seemed like the digital economy, or biotech, or whatever. But then it turned out that it wasn’t the new digital economy. It was some 13-year-old’s medieval fantasy.”

That’s not really an accurate assessment of Mr. Schilling’s start-up, but neither is it entirely off base. (Mr. Schilling declined to talk to me about 38 Studios, citing the continuing litigation; in an e-mail, he called the state’s case against him “wholly without merit and literally 100 percent baseless.”) An avid gamer when he wasn’t on a mound, Mr. Schilling dreamed up 38 Studios near the end of his playing days back in 2006, according to a Harvard Business School case study written in 2009.

From the start, his goal was to build what gamers call an MMORPG — for a massively multiplayer online role-playing game — along the lines of the crazily popular “World of Warcraft,” and to get what he called “Bill Gates-rich” in the process.

By the time Mr. Schilling pitched Mr. Carcieri on his company, one of the world’s leading video game publishers, Electronic Arts, had agreed to underwrite and publish a scaled-down, console version of the game, titled Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. (A console game is the kind you can put into a system like an Xbox.) But Mr. Schilling estimated that he would need an additional $100 million and a couple of years to finish his multiplayer masterpiece.

He had been unable to get it from any of the venture capital firms in Boston, probably because these types of online role-playing games are notoriously expensive and hard to produce — even now, none have approached the commercial heights of Warcraft — and, according to the Harvard Business School study, Mr. Schilling wasn’t willing to hand over even half the company’s equity to prospective investors. He had little patience for their skepticism.

“Sitting across from people at investor meetings, I wonder, How can you not understand this?” Mr. Schilling told the study’s authors. “How do you not see what we are doing? And if you do see it, why aren’t you writing a check?”

As it happened, Rhode Island had decided to start writing its own checks in an effort to modernize its economy. Mr. Carcieri had overhauled the Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-public agency chaired by the governor and responsible for attracting new jobs. Its 13-member board included the respected chiefs of some of Rhode Island’s leading businesses, including the chairman and former C.E.O. of Hasbro Toys and the vice chairman of Gilbane, an international real estate developer.