Richard Garriott de Cayeux is a video game developer and entrepreneur. He is
also known as his alter egos Lord British in Ultima and General British in
Tabula Rasa. A well-known figure in the video game industry, Garriott was
originally a game designer and programmer and now engages in various
aspects of computer game development and business.
On October 12, 2008, Garriott launched aboard Soyuz TMA-13 to the International
Space Station as a self-funded private astronaut, returning 12 days later
aboard Soyuz TMA-12. With his trip, he became the second person, and first
American, to be a second-generation space traveler.
Garriott founded a new video game development company in 2009, called
Portalarium. His current project is Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues
where his primary role is as CEO and Creative Director.
In 2011 he was married and changed his name to Richard Garriott de Cayeux.
Richard and wife Laetitia, had their first child, Kinga Shuilong Garriott de
Cayeux, on June 30, 2012. Their second child, Ronin Phi Garriott de Cayeux was
born on July 28, 2014. Biography
= Early life = Richard Garriott was born in Cambridge,
England to American parents, and was raised in Nassau Bay, Texas, United
States. He is the son of Helen Mary Garriott née Walker and scientist Owen
K. Garriott, who became an astronaut and flew with Skylab 3 and Space Shuttle
mission STS-9. What Garriott later described as "my
first real exposure to computers" occurred in 1975, during his freshman
year of high school at Clear Creek High School. As he wanted more experience
beyond 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, in which he created
fantasy computer games on the school's teletype machine. Garriott later
estimated that he wrote 28 computer fantasy games during high school.
In the summer of 1977, his parents sent him to the University of Oklahoma for a
seven-week computer camp. Shortly after he arrived, some of the other boys
attending the camp introduced themselves. When Garriott replied to
their greeting of "Hi" with "Hello" they decided he sounded like he was from
Britain, and gave him the nickname "British". Garriott uses the name to
this day for his various gaming characters, including Ultima character
Lord British and Tabula Rasa character General British; however, despite his
nickname and birthplace, his parents moved to Texas when he was a baby and
his accent is American rather than British.
= Game design career = Garriott began writing computer games in
1974. His first games were created on and for teletype terminals. The code was
stored on paper tape spools and the game was displayed as an ongoing print-out on
the spools of printer paper produced by teletype machines. In summer 1979,
Garriott worked at a ComputerLand store where he had his first encounter with
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
US$200 printing copies of a manual and cover sheet that his mother had drawn,
then he put copies of the game in Ziploc bags to sell at the store. Although
Garriott sold less than a dozen copies of Akalabeth at the store, one copy made
it to California Pacific, who signed a deal with him. The game sold over 30,000
copies, and Garriott received $5 for each copy sold. Akalabeth is considered
the first published Computer Role Playing Game. In the fall, Garriott
entered the University of Texas at Austin, joined the school's fencing team
and later joined the Society for Creative Anachronism. He created Ultima
I while at the university. It was published by California Pacific
Computers and sold in Ziploc plastic bags, as was common in those days.
Steve Jackson Games maintained a friendly relationship with Garriott and,
when he stopped by the SJG office one day, Garriott was so impressed by the
artwork of Denis Loubet that he commissioned him to paint the cover of
Ultima I. Loubet subsequently painted many other covers for Garriott's games.
In the early 1980s, Garriott continued to develop the Ultima series of computer
games, eventually leaving university to author them on a full-time basis.
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. By the time he developed Ultima III, Garriott, together
with his brother Robert, their father Owen and Chuck Bueche established their
own video game publisher, Origin Systems, to handle publishing and
distribution, in part due to controversy with Sierra over royalties for the PC
port of Ultima II. Garriott sold Origin Systems to
Electronic Arts in September 1992 for 30 million dollars. In 1997, he coined the
term massively multiplayer online role-playing game, giving a new identity
to the nascent genre previously known as graphical MUDs. In 1999 and 2000, EA
canceled all of Origin's new development projects, including Privateer Online,
and Harry Potter Online. In the midst of these events, Garriott resigned from the
company and returned to the industry by forming Destination Games in April 2000
with his brother and Starr Long. Once Garriott's non-compete agreement with EA
expired a year later, Destination partnered with NCsoft where he acted as
a producer and designer of MMORPGs. After that, he became the CEO of NCsoft
Austin, also known as NC Interactive. Tabula Rasa failed to generate a
significant amount of money during its initial release, despite its seven-year
development period. On November 11, 2008, in an open letter on the Tabula
Rasa website, Garriott announced his plans to leave NCsoft to pursue new
interests sparked by his spaceflight experiences. Later, however, Garriott
claimed that the letter was forged as a means of forcing him out of his position
and that he had had no intention of leaving. On November 24, 2008 NCsoft
announced that it planned to end the live service of Tabula Rasa. The servers
shut down on February 28, 2009, after a period of free play from January 10
onward for existing account holders. In July 2010, an Austin District Court
awarded Garriott USD$28 million in his lawsuit against NCsoft, finding that the
company did not appropriately handle his departure in 2008. In October 2011, the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment.
Garriott founded the company Portalarium in 2009. The company is developing
Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a spiritual successor to the Ultima
series, with Garriott having remarked that had they been able to secure the
rights to the Ultima intellectual property from Electronic Arts, the game
could literally have become Ultima Online 2 in name. On March 8, 2013,
Portalarium launched a Kickstarter campaign for Shroud of the Avatar:
Forsaken Virtues. = Spaceflight =
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". The income from the success
of Garriott's video game career allowed him to pursue his interest in
spaceflight, and the sale of Origin Systems allowed him to invest in Space
Adventures and purchase the ticket to become the first private citizen to fly
into space. However, Garriott suffered financial setbacks in 2001 after the
dot-com bubble burst, and he was forced to sell his seat to Dennis Tito.
He then says he got back into making games, to make money, and once he had
enough, put down a non-refundable deposit to go into space. During the
mandatory medical examination, they found he had a hemangioma on his liver,
which could cause potentially fatal internal bleeding if there was a rapid
depressurization of a spacecraft. He was told he had to give up his large
deposit, or undergo life-threatening surgery, so he decided to have the
operation, and now has a 16-inch scar from it. He spent a year in Russia
training before he launched into space. On September 28, 2007, Space Adventures
announced that Garriott would fly to the International Space Station in October
2008 as the sixth space tourist, reportedly paying $30 million USD. On
October 12, 2008, Garriott became the second second-generation space traveler
and the first offspring of an American astronaut to go into space, and the
second person to wear the British Union flag in space. The Soyuz docked with the
station on October 14. His father, Owen K. Garriott, was at the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for the launch of his son and was in attendance when a
Soyuz capsule returned with his son twelve days later.
During his spaceflight, Garriott took part in several education outreach
efforts. As a part of that outreach program he worked with the free Metro
newspaper in London, which provided him with a special edition containing
details of British primary school student's space experiment concepts
which Richard took to the ISS. The Metro has claimed as a result that it was the
first newspaper in space. He is an Amateur Radio Operator, and during his
stay on the International Space Station, communicated with students and other
Amateur Radio operators using Amateur Radio. Garriott also transmitted
photographs using the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station
slow-scan television system. Garriott also placed a geocache while aboard the
ISS. Garriott also worked with the Windows on
Earth project, which provides an interactive, virtual view of Earth as
seen from the ISS. 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 Richard was
experiencing out an ISS window. Richard'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.
Tracy Hickman wrote a screenplay for Garriott, for the first science-fiction
film shot in space, Apogee of Fear. On October 24, Russian cosmonauts of ISS
Expedition 17, Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, along with private astronaut
Richard Garriott, aboard Soyuz TMA-12 capsule, landed safely at 9:37 a.m., 55
miles north of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan. They were lifted to the Kazakhstan Baikonur
space center by helicopter, and then flew to Zvezdny Gorodok, Moscow Region.
On June 3, 2009, the New York Daily News announced that Garriott would officiate
at the first wedding to be held in zero gravity. The wedding took place in a
specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, G-Force One, operated by Zero
Gravity Corp, or ZERO-G, a company offering weightless flight experiences,
of which he is the co-founder. In 2010 he released a documentary Man on
a Mission: Richard Garriott's Road to the Stars.
Other accomplishments and interests In 1986, Garriott helped start the
Challenger Center for Space Science Education. His high school science
teacher was June Scobee-Rogers, wife of Challenger Shuttle Commander Dick
Scobee, who piloted the STS-51-L mission. STS-51-L was intended to carry
the first teacher in space flight, before it and its crew were tragically
lost on lift off. Scobee drew on Garriott's early leadership in gaming,
to help design what has become approximately 50 global interactive
networked facilities, where students study about and perform simulated space
missions. Garriott bought the Luna 21 lander and
the Lunokhod 2 rover from the Lavochkin Association for $68,500 in December 1993
at a Sotheby's auction in New York. Garriott notes that while UN treaties
ban governmental ownership of property off earth, corporations and private
citizens retain such rights. Lunokhod 2 is still in use with mirrors aligned to
bounce 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. Lunokhod 2 held the distance record for miles
traveled on another planetary body, until surpassed by the NASA Opportunity
Rover in 2014. Garriott acted as corner man for
professional boxer and friend Jesús Chávez in his first title defense
against Erik Morales in 2004. He is also an avid magician and magic
collector, and appeared on the cover of the January 2008 issue of MUM, the
magazine of the Society of American Magicians.
Garriott built a haunted house/museum at his residence called Britannia Manor in
Austin, Texas. Garriott promotes private space flight
as vice-chairman of the board of directors for Space Adventures.
Garriott is a trustee of the X PRIZE Foundation.
Garriott performed the first Zero-G wedding on June 20, 2009.
Garriott's collections were featured on the June 10, 2012 episode of the
Oddities TV series. In 2007, he co-founded Planetary Power,
Inc. with Eric C. Anderson and Miguel Forbes.
Garriott received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Queen Mary University
London in 2011 Garriott is an adviser of SpaceVR, a
virtual reality space exploration company.
Awards Garriott was named Ernst & Young
Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1992 Garriott was named one of the "15 Most
Influential Players" by Computer Gaming World
Garriott was inducted into the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame
Garriott was named "Designer of the Year" by PC Gamer
Garriott was named "Game God" by PC Gamer in 1999
Garriott became the ninth inductee into the Academy of Interactive Arts and
Sciences' Hall of Fame in 2006 Garriott became the sixth recipient of
the Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006
Garriott was named an "Industry Legend" at the UK Develop Conference in 2007
Garriott received the British Interplanetary Society's Sir Arthur
Clarke Award for Best Individual Achievement in 2009
Garriott received the British Interplanetary Society's Astronaut Pin
given to British born astronauts in 2009 Garriott received the Society of NASA
Flight Surgeons Lovelace Award for Contributions to Space Medicine in 2009
Garriott was inducted into the Environmental Hall of Fame in 2010.
Games References
External links Official website
Richard Garriott at the Internet Movie Database
Blog and details about Garriott's spaceflight
Facebook page for Richard Garriott de Cayeux
Richard Garriott on Twitter Windows on Earth