Lord British - Richard Garriott

Name:Richard Garriott Born: July 4th, 1961
Death:
Occupation/Title: Game Designer/Producer

Biographical Summary
Richard Garriott (or Lord British as he is sometimes referred to in the gaming community) is without a doubt one of the most influential figures in videogame history. As the creator of the famed Ultima series, the vehicle through which Garriott is often credited with pioneering the modern role-playing game (RPG). He is the co-founder of both Origin Systems, more recently Destination Games and was the 2006 inductee of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. As of October 2008, Richard Garriott also became the sixth commercial outer space tourist.

Early Life and Family
Richard Garriott was born in Cambridge, England after which his family then moved to Nassau Bay, Texas where he grew up. He is the son of American astronaut and scientist Owen K. Garriott. From a very early age Richard Garriott became interested in computers and general programming, even creating elementary adventure games for friends to try out. This eventually led to his creation of the game Akalabeth for the Apple II computer system, the original precursor to his Ultima games, at the age of 19 and just after the end of his senior year of high school. With this early foray into programming and the gaming market, Garriott earned more than enough to continue his education and entered the University of Texas at Austin.

Career Outline
Kicking off his career in 1979 at the age of 19, Garriott programs his first game Akalabeth, a game that would sell around 30,000 units under the publisher California Pacific. Using the momentum from Akalabeth, Garriott releases Ultima I, the first of the widely successful Ultima series. The second installment of Ultima was published by Sierra Entertainment (then known as Sierra On-Line), but after Garriott realized the full extent the following his games had and after some dissatisfaction with Sierra, he and his brother Robert founded their own company to publish and distribute his games, dubbing it Origin Systems. In 1992, Electronic Arts (EA) buys Origin Games as an in-house developer and continues to publish the Ultima series. In 1999, during the troubled release of Ultima IX: Ascension, EA all of Origins current developments at which time Garriott withdraws from the company. Again Richard Garriott and his brother establish a new development studio named Destination Games with the help of Ultima Online’s producer Starr Long (a long time friend and colleague of Garriott’s). Destination Games soon partnered with Korean MMORPG giant, NCSoft. After completing his commercial space flight on October 24th, 2008, Garriott has announced his plans to leave Destination Games and NCSoft to look into new interests, having been heavily influenced by his time in space.

Impact on Gaming
Richard Garriott could very well be considered as one of the “founding fathers” of the RPG genre we know and play today. The Ultima series at its core was always a quest-based adventure type game where the player commonly assumed the roll of an “avatar”. Garriott surely was not the first to begin using the RPG’s adventure theme, but the Ultima series has become a foundation from which many can draw comparisons to modern games. For example, in Ultima IV, the player-character is faced with moral choices (albeit it fairly elementary) that have farther-reaching consequences in the game, rather than just the immediate gameplay. Taking this early concept to next generation gaming, Garriott pushed the idea of “ethical parables” in his more recent online project of Tabula Rasa, where players must make a host of decisions to problems that, at times, have no real right or wrong answer. Another huge credit to Garriott’s name is the creation of Ultima Online. Though the idea of a multi-user game platform has been around well before Ultima Online’s 1997 launch, Garriott and his team (who included Starr Long) was the first to really make the transition. This effectively made Ultima Online the father of all modern massively multiplayer online games (MMORPG’s).

Influences
Richard Garriott’s influences are fairly numerous, ranging from science fiction to mathematics, space travel, and classic fantasy. Garriott is even quoted in an interview confessing to having almost blatantly ripped off some of the popular sci-fi movies of the time when he was designing and programming his early games. Ultima II’s primary plotline was heavily influenced by the movie Time Bandits, which includes time travel through “Time Gates” in various different eras within the Ultima world. Eventually as Garriott moved into more of the design and production aspect of the game creation process, he shifted his full attention to world building and fashioning new and original ideas for in-depth storytelling throughout his games.

Personality
Richard Garriott is an interesting character, to say the least; an eccentric millionaire with a creative bent. Having made a substantial amount of money from his early gaming ventures, he has become a collector of world lore, oddities, and artifacts. His collection even boasts an original moon buggy. As a fantasy enthusiast, he has a considerable collection of antique weapons and has constructed a castle-estate for himself to act as both a place of residence and a museum, complete with a moat, hidden passage ways, and secret doors. The Halloween parties Garriott has thrown have become legendary among those lucky enough to attend. Garriott’s sense of adventure has also never dimmed as is readily apparent from the wild expeditions he has embarked upon, including exploring the ocean floor, visiting Antarctica, and most recently becoming the 6th commercial astronaut (and the first 2nd generation American space fairer).

Anecdotes
One of the more popular (and somewhat peculiar) things about Garriott is how often he is referred to as Lord British (General British for Tabula Rasa). The character of a “Lord British” also always appears in every installment of the Ultima series. This old nickname was given to Garriott back in his high school days when upon greeting some students with an atypical “Hello” instead of the usual “Hi”, they claimed he had a British accent. And thus the name has forever stuck and is regularly used a replacement for saying Richard Garriott’s name altogether.

Contributors To This Listing: Brian Bedford
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