Richard Garriott

Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux (born July 4, 1961) is a British-born American computer-game developer, entrepreneur, and private astronaut, best known for creating the Ultima series of role-playing games and for becoming the sixth private citizen to fly to the International Space Station?.¹⁴¹⁷ Born in Cambridge, England, and raised near Houston, Texas, he is the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott? and the painter Helen Mary Walker, and became the first second-generation American to reach space.⁶¹⁴ Within the games industry he is widely known by his in-game alter ego, “Lord British”.¹⁵¹³

Early life and the birth of Ultima

Garriott grew up in League City, Texas, blocks from NASA’s front gate, among neighbors who were themselves astronauts and engineers.¹²¹³ At Clear Creek High School he took up computer programming through self-directed coursework, writing fantasy games; older students gave him the nickname “Lord British” because they thought he spoke with a British accent.¹³¹⁵ He wrote 28 different games in high school before turning professional.¹²

In the summer of 1980, while working at a ComputerLand store, Garriott produced his first published game, Akalabeth: World of Doom, a fantasy role-playing title for the Apple II?.¹³¹⁵ He self-published an initial run in Ziploc bags before the California firm California Pacific acquired the publishing rights and sold some 30,000 units.¹⁵¹³ Akalabeth, which Garriott has described as essentially “Ultima 0,” translated the experience of Dungeons & Dragons into a computer game, and its dungeon code carried directly into his next work.¹⁵²³

That fall Garriott entered the University of Texas at Austin, where he joined the fencing team and the Society for Creative Anachronism?, and expanded the dungeon-crawling model of Akalabeth into Ultima I.¹³¹⁴ Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress was published in 1982 by Sierra?, a collaboration with which he was dissatisfied.¹⁵²⁰

Origin Systems and the Ultima series

In 1983 Garriott, his brother Robert, and their father founded Origin Systems?, Inc., a video-game company based in Austin, Texas.¹⁵⁶ Ultima III: Exodus was the first title published under the Origin label.¹⁵ Over the following decade Garriott continued the Ultima saga, building one of the longest-running series in entertainment-software history; his in-game avatar, Lord British, ruled the kingdom of Britannia, and players undertook quests to defeat a sequence of evils.¹⁴²⁰

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) marked a turning point in his design philosophy, introducing the eight virtues and the figure of the Avatar, a role-model hero who must pass tests of morality, so that players faced ethical dilemmas as well as challenges of might and magic.¹⁵¹⁴ Nonplayer characters could converse more realistically, and Britannia became a fully realized world with shifting winds and a predictable lunar cycle.¹⁴ The series ran through Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992) and onward, across platforms from the Apple II to DOS and console systems.¹³¹⁵

Origin was acquired by Electronic Arts? in September 1992, after which Garriott continued to develop Ultima titles within the company.¹³²⁰ In 1997 Garriott and his team created Ultima Online, the first commercially successful online role-playing game and a pioneer of the genre, whose success was followed by an explosion of online games.²⁰⁸ He is credited with popularizing the now-ubiquitous use of the term “avatar” for a player’s virtual self and with helping establish the category of massively multiplayer games.¹⁶¹⁹

Garriott resigned from Origin in March 2000, when management suspended his costly secret project, and in April 2000 founded Destination Games with his brother Robert and Starr Long, the producer of Ultima Online.¹⁵¹³ In 2001 Destination became the United States headquarters of the South Korean publisher NCsoft?, renamed NCsoft Austin, where Garriott served as executive producer until November 2008 and oversaw the MMORPG Tabula Rasa, launched in November 2007.¹⁵¹⁴

Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa - Video Game trailer. (2006)barbarianbros

He was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 2006, its ninth inductee, and received the IGDA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.¹³⁶ He and Robert had earlier been named “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Inc. Magazine.²⁰⁶ After Origin and NCsoft, Garriott went on to lead the studio Portalarium, developer of the spiritual successor Shroud of the Avatar, on which he held the title of Creative Director after his CEO title was eliminated in 2018.⁹¹⁷

Spaceflight

Garriott had dreamed of spaceflight since childhood, but in 1974, at age 13, a NASA doctor told him that because he would now need glasses he was no longer eligible to be a NASA astronaut.¹² He instead pursued the goal commercially, co-founding the Zero Gravity Corporation and helping to start Space Adventures, the firm that brokered flights for the first private citizens to reach the ISS.¹²¹⁶

After building and selling companies, Garriott contracted with Space Adventures and Russia’s Federal Space Agency to fly to the station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, paying at least $30 million of his own money.¹² During preparations the Russian medical team discovered a hemangioma — a lobe of his liver fed by an artery with no draining vein — which required corrective surgery before he was cleared to fly.¹²¹⁷

On October 12, 2008, Garriott launched aboard Soyuz TMA-13 alongside NASA astronaut Mike Fincke and cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov, spending about 12 days in space, primarily aboard the ISS.¹² He completed medical and commercial experiments on visual acuity, bone loss, immune suppression, and protein crystal growth, along with work for the firms Seiko and DHL.¹² As the first person to fly in space after vision-correcting surgery, he became a subject of NASA study, and the agency subsequently began accepting astronauts who had undergone the procedure.¹²

While aboard the station Garriott carried a copy of the British newspaper Metro and shot an eight-minute science-fiction film, “Apogee of Fear,” which he has called the first such movie made in space, with acting by Fincke, Greg Chamitoff, and Lonchakov.¹⁸² NASA declined to authorize the film’s public release, on the grounds that it was filmed aboard NASA hardware and used NASA astronauts as actors, though the Smithsonian Institution asked to add it to its permanent archives.² Garriott prefers the term “private astronaut” to “space tourist,” noting that he passed the same training and certifications as career astronauts and performed crew duties in the Soyuz.¹⁷¹²

Exploration and later activities

Beyond games and spaceflight, Garriott is an explorer who has taken part in two Antarctic expeditions in search of meteorites, traveled to deep-sea hydrothermal vents, visited the wreck of the Titanic by submersible, observed mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and reached Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean.¹⁷¹⁶ He describes himself as the first explorer to have reached pole to pole, orbited the Earth, and reached the ocean’s deepest point.¹⁶²¹ He has served as President of the Explorers Club.¹⁶¹⁹

In Austin he built an estate known as Britannia Manor, noted for secret doors, dungeons, and elaborate biennial haunted-house Halloween parties.¹³¹⁵ In 2009 he received the Sir Arthur C. Clarke Award for individual achievement, and on July 21, 2011, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science by Queen Mary, University of London, for promoting science, mathematics, and space exploration.¹⁷¹³ He married Laetitia Pichot de Cayeux on July 1, 2011, and the couple have two children.¹³¹⁶