Richard Garriott | |
|---|---|
 Garriott in July 2008 | |
| Born | Richard Allen Garriott (1961-07-04)4 July 1961 (age 64) Cambridge, England |
| Citizenship | American,British[1] |
| Occupation | Video game developer |
| Known for | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Parents |
|
| Relatives | Robert Garriott (brother) |
| Awards | AIAS Hall of Fame Award (2006)[2] |
| Space career | |
| Space Adventures private astronaut / cast of a film in a space station | |
Time in space | 11d 20h 35m |
| Missions | Soyuz TMA-13/TMA-12 |
Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux (néGarriott; born 4 July 1961) is a British-born Americanvideo game developer,entrepreneur and private astronaut.
Garriott, who is the son ofNASA astronautOwen Garriott, was originally agame designer andprogrammer, and is now involved in a number of aspects ofcomputer-game development. On October 12, 2008, Garriott flew aboard theSoyuz TMA-13 mission to theInternational Space Station as a private astronaut,[3][4] returning 12 days later aboardSoyuz 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 movieApogee of Fear.[5]
The creator of theUltima game series, Garriott was involved in all games in the series, and directly supervised all eleven main installments, starting with 1979'sAkalabeth: World of Doom and concluding with 1999'sUltima IX: Ascension. Within the context ofUltima, Garriott presented himself as the fictional persona ofLord British. The series is considered influential, notably helping with establishing thecomputer role-playing game genre. He founded the video game development companyPortalarium in 2009.[6] He was CEO ofPortalarium and creative director ofShroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues[7] until 2018 when he shed the title,[8] later relinquishing allShroud of the Avatar assets to Catnip Games in 2019.[9]
Richard Allen Garriott was born inCambridge, England, on 4 July 1961,[10][11] to Helen Mary (née Walker) Garriott (1930–2017[12]) andOwen Garriott, one ofNASA's first scientist-astronauts (selected inNASA Astronaut Group 4), who flew onSkylab 3 andSpace Shuttle missionSTS-9.[13][14] His parents had been high schoolsweethearts growing up inEnid, Oklahoma.[15]: 61 Although both his parents were Americans, Garriott claims dual citizenship for both theUnited States and theUnited Kingdom by birth.[1]
Garriott was raised inNassau Bay, Texas from the age of about two months.[1][13] 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.[16]
Garriott's "first real exposure to computers" occurred in 1975, during his freshman year atClear Creek High School. In search of more experience than the single one-semesterBASIC class the school offered, and as a fan ofThe Lord of the Rings andDungeons & Dragons, Garriott convinced the school to let him create a self-directed course inprogramming. He used the course to create fantasy computer games on the school'steletype machine.[17][18] Garriott later estimated that he wrote 28 computer fantasy games during high school.[11]
One of Garriott's game pseudonyms is "British", a name he still uses for various gaming characters, including Ultima characterLord British andTabula Rasa character General British.[19][20] The name was given to him by his first Dungeons and Dragons friends because he was born in the UK.[21]
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. In summer 1979, Garriott worked at aComputerLand store where he first encountered Apple computers. Inspired by their video monitors with color graphics, he began to addperspective view to his own games. After he createdAkalabeth 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 inZiploc 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 toCalifornia 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.[18][22][23] TheUS$150,000 (equivalent to $650,000 in 2024) he earned was three times his father's astronaut salary.[24]Akalabeth is considered the first published computerrole playing game.
Later that year, Garriott entered theUniversity of Texas at Austin (UT).[25] He joined the school'sfencing team, and later, theSociety for Creative Anachronism.[26] He lived at home with his parents while attending university, and from there createdUltima I with his friend Ken Arnold.[27] Its cover, and those of several subsequently Garriott games, were painted byDenis Loubet, whose art Garriott discovered during a visit toSteve Jackson Games.[28]
Garriott continued to develop theUltima series ofvideo games in the early 1980s, eventually leaving UT to work on them full time.[18] Originally programmed for theApple II, theUltima series later became available on several platforms.Ultima II was published bySierra On-Line, as they were the only company that would agree to publish it in a box together with a printed cloth map. By the time he developedUltima III, Garriott, together with his brotherRobert, their fatherOwen andChuck Bueche established their ownvideo game publisher,Origin Systems, to handle publishing and distribution, in part due to controversy with Sierra over royalties for the PCport ofUltima II.[29][30][10]
The use of the termavatar for the on-screen representation of the user was coined in 1985 by Richard Garriott for the computer gameUltima IV: Quest of the Avatar. In this game, Garriott desired the player's character to be their Earth self manifested into the virtual world. Due to the ethical content of his story, Garriott wanted the real player to be responsible for their character; he thought only someone playing "themselves" could be properly judged based on their in-game actions. Because of its ethically nuanced narrative approach, he took the Hindu word associated with a deity's manifestation on earth in physical form, and applied it to a player in the game world.[31]
Garriott sold Origin Systems toElectronic Arts (EA) in September 1992 for $30 million.[32] In 1997, he coined the termmassively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), giving a new identity to the nascent genre previously known asgraphical MUDs.[33] In 1999 and 2000, EA canceled all of Origin's new development projects, includingPrivateer Online, andHarry Potter Online.[34][35] Garriott resigned from the company and formedDestination Games in April 2000 with his brother andStarr Long (the producer ofUltima Online).
Once Garriott's non-compete agreement with EA expired a year later, Destination partnered withNCSoft where Garriott acted as a producer and designer of MMORPGs. After that, he became the CEO of NCSoft Austin, also known as NC Interactive.[36]
Tabula Rasa failed to generate much money during its initial release, despite its seven-year development period. On November 24, 2008, NCSoft announced that it planned to end the live service ofTabula Rasa. The servers shut down on February 28, 2009, after a period of free play from January 10 onward for existing account holders.[37]
NCSoft fired Garriot in November 2008, but publicly claimed that he left the company voluntarily, resulting in a lawsuit against them.[38][39] In July 2010, an Austin District Court awarded Garriott US$28 million in his lawsuit against NCSoft, finding that the company did not appropriately handle his departure in 2008. In October 2011, theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment.[40]
Garriott founded the companyPortalarium in 2009, which developedShroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, aspiritual successor to theUltima series. Garriott remarked that had they been able to secure theintellectual property rights toUltima from EA, the game could have becomeUltima Online 2.[41][42][43][44] On March 8, 2013, Portalarium launched a Kickstarter campaign[45] forShroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues.[46] Anearly access version of the game was released onSteam in 2014, and the game was fully released in March 2018.[47][48] The game received "mixed or average" reviews from critics.[49] In October 2019, the assets and rights toShroud of the Avatar were sold to Catnip Games, a company owned by Portalarium CEO Chris Spears.[50] Garriott is no longer associated with either company.
In April 2022 he announced he had begun working on a new fantasy MMO that uses NFT technology with long-time contributor Todd Porter.[51] In August 2022, the game was announced asIron and Magic.[52] However, in May 2023, it was reported that the game's official website has vanished and its Facebook page has lain dormant since September 2022, leading to many speculations regarding the status of the game.[53]
In 1983,Softline reported that "Garriott wants to go into space but doesn't see it happening in the predictable future ... He has frequently joked with his father about stowing away on a spaceship, and recently his speculations have been sounding uncomfortably realistic".[10] The income from the success of Garriott's video game career allowed him to pursue his interest inspaceflight.[10] After the sale of Origin Systems, he invested inSpace Adventures and purchased a ticket to become the first private citizen to fly into space. Due to financial setbacks in 2001 after thedot-com bubble burst, however, he was forced to sell his seat toDennis Tito.[54]
Garriott then returned to creating games; once he had accumulated sufficient funds, he put down another non-refundable deposit. During his mandatory medical examination ahemangioma was discovered on his liver, which could cause potentially fatal internal bleeding in the event of a rapid spacecraft depressurization. Given the choice of forfeiting his deposit or undergoing surgical removal of the angioma, he decided to have the surgery.[54]
On September 28, 2007, Space Adventures announced that Garriott would fly to theInternational Space Station in October 2008 as a self-funded Private Astronaut at a reported cost of $30 million.[3][55] On October 12, 2008, after a year of training in Russia, Garriott became the second second-generation space traveler (afterSergei Volkov),[56][57] the first offspring of an American astronaut to go into space,[3][56][58] and the second person to wear the BritishUnion flag in space.[59] His father, Owen Garriott, was at theBaikonur Cosmodrome inKazakhstan for the launch, and was in attendance when he landed safely twelve days later, along with Russiancosmonauts Sergei Volkov andOleg Kononenko.[60][61][62][63]
During his spaceflight, Garriott took part in several education outreach efforts. The free Metro newspaper in London provided him with a special edition containing details of British primary school students' space experiment concepts that Garriott took to the ISS. The Metro has claimed, as a result, that it was the first newspaper in space.[64][65] He communicated with students and otherAmateur Radio operators and transmitted photographs using theAmateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS)slow-scan television system,[66] and placed ageocache while aboard the ISS.[67]
Garriott worked with theWindows on Earth project, which provides an interactive, virtual view of Earth as seen from the ISS.[68] Garriott used Windows on Earth software to assist in the selection of locations on Earth to photograph, and the public were able to use the same online tool to track the ISS and see the view Garriott was experiencing. Garriott's photographs, along with images taken by his astronaut father Owen Garriott in 1973, will be available to the public through Windows on Earth, adding a personal element to studies of Earth and how Earth has changed over time.[68]
Garriott covertly smuggled a portion of the ashes ofStar Trek actorJames Doohan on a laminated card, which he placed under the floor cladding of the ISS's Columbus module. This action was kept secret until Christmas Day 2020 when Doohan's son made the fact public on his Twitter account. At the time of the reveal, Doohan's ashes had orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times and traveled more than 1.7 billion miles.[69]
Garriott's filmApogee of Fear was the first ever fictional (short) film fully filmed in space (whereasReturn from Orbit was only partially filmed in space).[70]Tracy Hickman wrote the screenplay.[71]
In 2010 he was featured in a documentary,Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott's Road to the Stars, which covered his spaceflight training and mission into orbit.[72]
In January 2021, Garriott was elected president ofThe Explorers Club.[73]
In February 2021, Garriott traveled to the bottom of theMariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on the planet.[74][75] While there, as well as performing scientific duties, he placed a geocache and recorded another short sci-fi film. This made him the holder of both altitude and depth records for these activities.[76][77]
In 1986, Garriott helped start the Challenger Center for Space Science Education with his high school science teacher, June Scobee Rodgers, widow of Challenger Shuttle CommanderDick Scobee, who piloted the ill-fatedSTS-51-L mission. Scobee Rodgers drew on Garriott's early leadership in gaming to help design what have become approximately 50 global interactive networked facilities, where students perform simulated space missions.[78]
Garriott bought theLuna 21 lander and theLunokhod 2 rover (both currently on the lunar surface) from theLavochkin Association for $68,500 in December 1993 at aSotheby's auction in New York.[79] (The catalog incorrectly lists lot 68A as Luna 17/Lunokhod 1.[80]) Garriott notes that while UN treaties ban governmental ownership of property on other celestial bodies, corporations and private citizens retain such rights. Lunokhod 2 is still in use, with mirrors aligned to reflect lasers such that precise Earth-Moon distances can be measured. With his vehicle still in use, Garriott claims property rights to the territory surveyed by Lunokhod 2. This may be the first valid claim for private ownership of extraterrestrial territory.[81] Lunokhod 2 held the record for distance traveled on the surface of another planetary body until it was surpassed by NASA'sOpportunity Rover in 2014.[82]
From 1988 to 1994 Garriott built ahaunted house/museum every other year atBritannia Manor, his residence inAustin, Texas. Garriott's haunted houses cost tens of thousands of dollars to create each year and took many months and a sizable team to construct, yet were free to the public.[83]
Garriott promotes private space flight and served as vice-chairman of the board of directors forSpace Adventures. He is also a trustee of theX PRIZE Foundation.[84]
Garriott participated in the firstzero gravity wedding on June 20, 2009, with his wifeLaetitia Garriott de Cayeux.[85][86] The wedding took place in a specially modifiedBoeing 727-200 aircraft, G-Force One, operated by a company Garriott co-founded,Zero Gravity Corporation.[87]
Garriott wrote a memoir (with David Fisher) covering his accomplishments in games publishing and spaceflight, entitledExplore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark. It was published on January 10, 2017.[88]
Garriott was the inspiration for the character James Halliday in Ernest Cline'sReady Player One.[89]
Garriott is on the executive advisory board ofColossal Biosciences.<"Executive Advisory Board".>
| Game name | First released | Garriott's role(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Akalabeth: World of Doom | 1979 | Game designer & programmer |
| Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness | 1981 | Original conceptor, programmer & graphic artist |
| Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress | 1982 | Game designer |
| Ultima III: Exodus | 1983 | Project director |
| Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar | 1985 | Project director |
| Autoduel | 1985 | Programmer & designer |
| Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny | 1988 | Designer, writer & programmer |
| Omega | 1989 | Designer |
| Ultima VI: The False Prophet | 1990 | Designer, producer, sound effect worker, writer & voice actor |
| Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire | 1990 | Executive producer |
| Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams | 1991 | Creative director |
| Ultima: Runes of Virtue | 1991 | Creative director |
| Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss | 1992 | Director & voice actor |
| Ultima VII: The Black Gate | 1992 | Director & producer |
| Ultima VII: Forge of Virtue | 1993 | Creative assistance & producer |
| Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle | 1993 | Creative director & audio team member |
| Ultima VII Part Two: The Silver Seed | 1993 | Director & voice actor |
| Ultima VIII: Pagan | 1994 | Producer |
| Ultima: Runes of Virtue II | 1994 | Creative director & additional design |
| Ultima VIII: The Lost Vale | Cancelled | Producer |
| BioForge | 1995 | Executive producer |
| Ultima Online | 1997 | Producer |
| Ultima Online: The Second Age | 1998 | Executive designer |
| Lineage | 1998 | Executive producer |
| Ultima IX: Ascension | 1999 | Director |
| Lineage II | 2003 | Executive producer |
| City of Heroes | 2004 | Executive producer |
| City of Villains | 2005 | Executive management |
| Tabula Rasa | 2007 | Creative director & executive producer |
| Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues | 2018 | Creative director |
| Iron and Magic | TBD | Creative director |
PCG: 'How did you come by the alias of Lord British? You're obviously not English.' Richard Garriott: 'Actually, that's not true ... I am a British citizen. That said, I only lived there for about two months prior to moving to the States.'
Richard Garriott first coined the termMMORPG in 1997.
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