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Richard Garriott

Abstract

Richard Garriott (born 1961), the son of a Skylab astronaut, wrote his first role-playing game on an Apple II in 1979 while working at a ComputerLand in Houston, sold it in Ziploc bags, and made about $150,000 from it before his second year at university. The nine Ultima games that followed, published from 1983 by the company he founded with his brother, gave the computer role-playing game its shape, and Ultima IV (1985) asked the player to be virtuous rather than merely to win, which nobody had tried. He coined the word “avatar” for a player’s character, produced Ultima Online (1997) and coined “MMORPG” to describe it, sold Origin to Electronic Arts for $30 to $35 million in stock, was fired by his next employer and won $28 million in court, and in 2008 paid about $30 million to spend twelve days on the International Space Station. He goes by Lord British, and has since school.

Richard Garriott
Richard Garriott, 2008, in training for his Soyuz flight. Image: NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nassau Bay

Richard Allen Garriott was born in Cambridge, England, on July 4, 1961, where his father Owen Garriott was doing research; the family moved to Nassau Bay, Texas, beside the Johnson Space Center, when he was two months old. Owen flew on Skylab in 1973 and on the Space Shuttle in 1983. Richard’s eyesight ruled him out of the astronaut corps at thirteen, and the same year he found computers: he persuaded Clear Creek High School to let him run a self-directed programming course on a teletype connected to a mainframe, and wrote dungeon games on it for four years. At a computer camp at the University of Oklahoma in the summer of 1977 the other boys, hearing him answer “hello” rather than “hi”, called him British; the “Lord” came later, when he ran Dungeons & Dragons games, and the name stuck to him and, later, to the ruler of his fictional world.

Ziploc Bags

In the summer of 1979 he was working at a ComputerLand store in Houston, where the manager saw Akalabeth: World of Doom, a dungeon game Garriott had written for the Apple II, and offered to sell it. Garriott’s mother drew the cover; he photocopied the manual, put disk and manual in a Ziploc bag, and sold about a dozen. One reached California Pacific Computer, which licensed it and sold more than 30,000 copies at $5 a copy to Garriott, who was then a first-year student at the University of Texas at Austin. Ultima, released by California Pacific in 1981 with Ken Arnold, added a world map, towns, a story, and, in its last third, spaceships. Ultima II (1982) went to Sierra On-Line, and a dispute over royalties on its PC port persuaded Garriott to publish for himself.

Origin

Origin Systems was founded in 1983 in Houston by Richard, his brother Robert, their father, and Chuck Bueche, and moved to Austin. Ultima III (1983) was its first release. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) is the one that matters: after players and parents’ groups had complained that his games rewarded theft and murder, Garriott built one in which the goal was to embody eight virtues, in which the game watched whether you lied to shopkeepers or fled from combat, and in which the villain was absent and the quest was moral. He called the player’s character the avatar, the Hindu word for a god’s earthly form, and the word passed from his game into the whole of online life. Ultima V through IX followed at intervals to 1999, alongside Origin’s Wing Commander, and Electronic Arts bought the company in September 1992 for between $30 and $35 million in stock (accounts differ).

Ultima Online, produced by Garriott and Starr Long with Raph Koster as lead designer, was released on September 24, 1997. Electronic Arts had approved it reluctantly and expected 15,000 subscribers; it passed 100,000 in six months. Garriott coined “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” for it, and Lord British, his avatar in the world, was killed by a player during a beta event on August 9, 1997, when a server reset dropped his invulnerability. The genre and its consequences are in MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds. After EA cancelled his next projects he resigned from Origin in 2000.

Tabula Rasa and the Lawsuit

With Robert and Starr Long he founded Destination Games, which the Korean publisher NCsoft absorbed in 2001. The result, after seven years and one complete restart, was Tabula Rasa, a science-fiction MMO released in November 2007 that did not find an audience; its closure was announced a year later. In November 2008 NCsoft removed Garriott while announcing that he had chosen to leave, and the timing forced him to exercise stock options at a loss. He sued, and in July 2010 a jury in Austin awarded him $28 million; the Fifth Circuit upheld the verdict in 2011. Portalarium, founded in 2009, made Shroud of the Avatar, an Ultima successor funded on Kickstarter in 2013 and released in 2018 to mixed reviews; in October 2019 Portalarium transferred the game to Catnip Games.

Orbit

The father’s career had one more effect. Garriott put money into Space Adventures, the company that brokered seats on Russian Soyuz flights, and in 1993 bought the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover, still on the Moon, at Sotheby’s for $68,500, on the theory that he could claim the ground it had surveyed. On October 12, 2008, he flew to the International Space Station on Soyuz TMA-13 at a reported cost of about $30 million, the first American child of an astronaut to fly in space; Sergei Volkov, son of the cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov, had arrived on the station that April, so the two second-generation space travellers met in orbit. He was in space for just under twelve days, filmed a short science-fiction film, ran an amateur-radio schedule, and, as he revealed in 2020, carried a small quantity of the ashes of James Doohan, Star Trek’s Scotty, which are still aboard. In February 2021 he dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and in January 2021 he was elected president of the Explorers Club. He co-founded the Challenger Center for Space Science Education in 1986 with the widow of the Challenger’s commander, and for years ran a free haunted house at his Austin home, Britannia Manor. His memoir, Explore/Create (2017), makes no claim to modesty and is accurate about the dates.

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