Richard Garriott

Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux (né Garriott; born 4 July 1961) is a British-born American video game developer, entrepreneur and space tourist.

Garriott, who is the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, was originally a game designer and programmer, and is now involved in a number of aspects of computer-game development.

Richard Allen Garriott was born in Cambridge, England on 4 July 1961, to Helen Mary (Walker) Garriott (1930–2017 ) and Owen Garriott, one of NASA's first scientist-astronauts (selected in NASA Astronaut Group 4), who flew on Skylab 3 and Space Shuttle mission STS-9.

His parents had been high school sweethearts growing up in Enid, Oklahoma.

Although both his parents were Americans, Garriott claims dual citizenship for both the United States and the United Kingdom by birth.

Garriott was raised in Nassau Bay, Texas from the age of about two months.

Since his childhood, he had dreamed of becoming a NASA astronaut like his father.

Eyesight problems discovered at the age of 13 blocked his ambition, however, so he instead came to focus on computer game development.

Garriott began writing computer games in 1974.

His first games were created on teletype terminals.

The code was stored on paper tape spools, and the game was displayed as an ongoing print-out.

Garriott's "first real exposure to computers" occurred in 1975, during his freshman year at Clear Creek High School.

In search of more experience than the single one-semester BASIC class the school offered, and as a fan of The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons, Garriott convinced the school to let him create a self-directed course in programming.

He used the course to create fantasy computer games on the school's teletype machine.

Garriott later estimated that he wrote 28 computer fantasy games during high school.

One of Garriott's game pseudonyms is "British", a name he still uses for various gaming characters, including Ultima character Lord British and Tabula Rasa character General British.

The name was given to him by his first Dungeons and Dragons friends because he was born in the UK.

The creator of the Ultima game series, Garriott was involved in all games in the series, and directly supervised all eleven main installments, starting with 1979's Akalabeth: World of Doom and concluding with 1999's Ultima IX: Ascension.

Within the context of Ultima, Garriot presented himself as the fictional persona of Lord British.

The series is considered influential, notably helping with establishing the computer role-playing game genre.

In summer 1979, Garriott worked at a ComputerLand store where he first encountered Apple computers.

Inspired by their video monitors with color graphics, he began to add perspective view to his own games.

After he created Akalabeth for fun, the owner of the store convinced Garriott it might sell.

Garriott spent $200 printing copies of a manual and cover sheet that his mother had drawn, then put copies of the game in Ziploc bags, a common way to sell software at the time.

Although Garriott sold fewer than a dozen copies at the store, one copy made it to California Pacific Computer Company, which signed a deal with him.

The game sold over 30,000 copies, and Garriott received five dollars for each copy sold.

The US$150,000 1979 he earned was three times his father's astronaut salary.

Akalabeth is considered the first published computer role playing game.

Later that year, Garriott entered the University of Texas at Austin (UT).

He joined the school's fencing team, and later, the Society for Creative Anachronism.

He lived at home with his parents while attending university, and from there created Ultima I with his friend Ken Arnold.

Its cover, and those of several subsequently Garriott games, were painted by Denis Loubet, whose art Garriott discovered during a visit to Steve Jackson Games.

Garriott continued to develop the Ultima series of computer games in the early 1980s, eventually leaving UT to work on them full time.

Originally programmed for the Apple II, the Ultima series later became available on several platforms.

Ultima II was published by Sierra On-Line, as they were the only company that would agree to publish it in a box together with a printed cloth map.

On October 12, 2008, Garriott flew aboard the Soyuz TMA-13 mission to the International Space Station as a private astronaut, returning 12 days later aboard Soyuz TMA-12.

He became the second space traveler, and first from the United States, to have a parent who was also a space traveler.

During his ISS flight, he filmed a science fiction movie Apogee of Fear.

He founded the video game development company Portalarium in 2009.

He was CEO of Portalarium and creative director of Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues until 2018 when he shed the title, later relinquishing all Shroud of the Avatar assets to Catnip Games in 2019.