That fortune has allowed him to have many eccentric hobbies and collectables. For example, he owns the very first moon buggy and has taken trips to Antarctica. Perhaps his biggest eccentric possession is a throwback to his alter ego Lord British. In the late 90s, he bought a 25,000 sq ft. estate on top of a hill and built his own castle complete with moat, underground passages and a dungeon.
His Lord British alter ego has its roots in the cruel high school days where kids made fun of you and came up with ridiculous nicknames. Kids thought he had a British accent, so the kids started calling him Lord British. Although he was born in Cambridge, England, he was raised in League City, Texas.
Back in 1979 when Garriott was 19, he started working on his now-famous game called Alkabeth. It was a pet project he worked on during the summer after Senior year of High School. He was an employee of ComputerLand at the time and the owner of his store convinced him to publish the game himself. So Richard went out and bought 200 zip-lock bags and had 200 cover sheets and 200 manuals printed up. At the time though, floppy disks were so expensive he only made 16 disks to start with and he sold 15 of them. One of those 15 discs found its way to California Pacific who purchased the rights to Alkabeth and published it, selling 30,000 units.
Happy with the Alkabeth success, Garriott went to work on a follow up game called Ultima 1. This game shared the dungeon code form Alkabeth and had bit mapped graphics for the outdoor environment. This was published in 1980.
The Ultima series was gaining a lot of attention, enough that Sierra was interested in publishing the next installment. Therefore, in 1982 Sierra published Ultima 2. The partnership wasn’t a good one for Garriott though. He ended it and founded Origin Systems with his brother Robert in Austin, Texas. A year later, Origin Systems published its first game, Ultima III.
The first three Ultima games were building blocks for Garriott. He was teaching himself how to program and testing out what did and didn’t work in a game. These first three releases were a mix of fantasy, sci-fi and whatever else was ‘hot’ during the time period. For example: the time travel 
focus of Ultima III was influenced by the hit Time Bandits movie. So, after the launch of Ultima III, Garriott wanted to re-invent Ultima and what an RPG could be as he began work on Ultima IV.
In 1985, Ultima IV introduced the now legendary Avatar character and the eight virtues. This was the game that broke the RPG mold and introduced things that would be copied in RPGs to this day. This game also had a full feature NPC conversation engine for character interaction. Garriott wanted the NPCs to be as life-like as possible; this would continue to evolve as future games developed. This was the first RPG to break the typical “build your stats up to beat the main guy” model. In this game your goal was to become the Avatar through following and practicing the eight virtues. Your bad actions that didn’t matter in other RPG’s would have consequences in Ultima IV. The game also kept traditional RPG elements such as dungeon crawling, monsters to kill, in-depth story lines and a core quest to complete to finish the game. These are themes that would carry through all of the subsequent Ultima games.
Brittania, now with a cohesive society with morals and a role model hero would now focus on struggles of the land to live up to and manipulate the virtues. Ultima V showed how the virtues could be corrupted by an unscrupulous ruler in an inflexible society. Ultima VI showcased prejudice brought on by not understanding other cultures. By Ultima VII, the society that made up Brittania had taken up a life of its own as NPCs struggled to balance the virtues with their goals and own vulnerabilities. Ultima VII was the last Ultima game published by Origin Systems as an independent entity.
In 1992, Richard Garriott sold Origin Systems to Electronic Arts. EA invests in companies to help increase the level of creativity in games released under its brand. Richard Garriott still remained on board Origin Systems, creating his vision of what RPG’s should be. Ultima VIII, the first Ultima title published under EA’s influence, was a mess. It was more action oriented than RPG, was full of bugs and became known by its fans as ‘jump and run’ Ultima.
As realistic as Garriott had taken Brittania’s NPC’s, they still weren’t real people, they were just conditional programming. So Origin began working on Brittania to be inhabited by real people and in 1997 Origin created the modern day MMORPG by releasing Ultima Online into the wild. Since Ultima Online was a new breed of game, again Garriott was learning through doing. The original beta test of UO ran on one server which very quickly crashed when 50,000 beta testers tried to log on and play. While this showed how badly they calculated demand and load, it did justify that the online RPG idea had a lot of interest to the Ultima fans. With EA breathing down their necks and watching everything through a magnifying glass, the talented people at Origin Systems fixed UO post-release and grew it into a huge success.
With the problems of Ultima Online’s initial release and a very long development cycle of Ultima: Ascension, the relationship between Garriott an EA became strained. The last chapter in the Ultima series, Ultima: Ascension was forced out the door by EA way before it was ready -- much to the dismay of the loyal fan base that had eagerly been waiting for five years. The game was full of problems and bugs. This was the last straw for Garriott, who left Origin Systems/EA in 2000 along with his brother.
During his one year non-compete contract, Garriott and his brother started brainstorming about opening their own game company again. EA, also watching the calendar, laid off almost everyone at Origin systems one year and one day after Garriott’s departure. All of Origin’s projects were cancelled and the company was moved out of Texas. The only Origin game left standing was Ultima Online, which to this day is still EA’s best selling MMORPG. In April 2001, Garriott made a return to the industry when he and his brother formed Destination Games. Their initial investment of $2,000,000 to start Destination Games was to see them through the first couple years of startup. However when EA laid off all talent Garriott had initially put there, he wanted to hire them all back for Destination Games. The Garriott brothers quickly decided they needed to accelerate their plans to bring in money.
This is where NCSoft entered the picture. NCSoft (a Korean company) released a MMORPG called Lineage not too long after UO. The game had four million subscribers, mostly in Asia. In contrast, UO and EverQuest had 220,000, and 400,000 subscribers, respectively. Here in the US noone had heard of NCSoft nor the hugely successful Lineage MMORPG. NCSoft had been trying to get US gaming magazines to review Lineage but there was no interest. So, having heard about the Origin/EA Richard Garriott split and their new Destination Games startup, NCSoft gave Garriott a call. Through discussions they found each of their companies to be a compliment to the other and their overall vision was the same. Destination Games needed outside funding and an equal partner. NCSoft needed USA exposure and talented MMO developers it couldn’t get on its own. The two companies joined, and Destination Games became NCSoft Austin. Richard Garriott currently serves as Executive Producer for NCSoft Austin.
A lesser known part of Richard Garriott’s life is his role as Vice Chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism agency. Garriott’s father was an astronaut, so space flight is in his blood. Space Adventures, on behalf of Richard Garriott, contacted both NASA and the Russian Space Agency to find out if Garriott could fly to space as a tourist. While NASA said no, the RSA said it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to research such a mission and millions more to do it. Garriott paid for the research to find out how much a private space visit would cost and RSA came back with the large figure of $20 million.
While Garriott had recently sold Origin Systems to EA, this was the time the stock market crashed and the disaster of 9/11 and Garriott saw a lot of his fortune evaporate. Since Garriott couldn’t afford to go at that time, Space Adventures started to look for someone else to take the initial private space tourist flight and found Dennis Tito. Tito has since made history and is credited as being the first private space tourist. Though Space Adventures now has millions in cash from pre-paid reservations for sub-orbital flights, there are no sub-orbital airline seats to book today. Space Adventures currently invests in the space tourism vehicle development businesses, hoping to one day fill their reservations and spawn a whole new travel and vacation industry. With both Space Adventures and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galatic focused on producing an aircraft and both having working prototypes that have completed test flights, private sub-orbital travel could be a reality in 2008.
Richard Garriott continues to pursue his passions for bringing interactive virtual worlds alive and his love of space travel. He has become a legend in game development and amassed a fortune, which lets him keep eccentric hobbies such as his hilltop castle home and investing in bringing space travel to the masses. Maybe one day we’ll be able to take a flight on Space Adventures to Ultima Space Station.
