Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux (born Garriott; born July 4, 1961) is a British-born American video game developer, entrepreneur, and private astronaut.

Garriott is the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott. He began his career as a game designer and programmer and now works in many areas of computer game development. On October 12, 2008, Garriott traveled to the International Space Station as a private astronaut on the Soyuz TMA-13 mission. He returned to Earth 12 days later on the Soyuz TMA-12. He became the second person to travel to space with a parent who also traveled to space, and the first person from the United States to do so. During his time on the International Space Station, he filmed a science fiction movie titled Apogee of Fear.

Garriott created the Ultima game series. He was involved in every game in the series and directly oversaw the development of all eleven main games. The series began with Akalabeth: World of Doom in 1979 and ended with Ultima IX: Ascension in 1999. In the Ultima games, Garriott was known as the fictional character Lord British. The Ultima series is considered important for helping to create the computer role-playing game genre. In 2009, Garriott founded the video game company Portalarium. He served as CEO of Portalarium and creative director of Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues until 2018. In 2019, he gave up ownership of all Shroud of the Avatar projects to Catnip Games.

Early life

Richard Allen Garriott was born in Cambridge, England, on July 4, 1961, to Helen Mary Garriott and Owen Garriott, who was one of NASA's first astronauts who also worked as scientists. Owen was chosen as part of NASA's fourth group of astronauts and flew on the Skylab 3 mission and the Space Shuttle mission STS-9. Richard's parents met in high school in Enid, Oklahoma. Even though both of his parents were American, Garriott has citizenship in both the United States and the United Kingdom because he was born in the UK.

Garriott was raised in Nassau Bay, Texas, when he was about two months old. From a young age, he dreamed of becoming a NASA astronaut like his father. However, vision problems discovered when he was 13 made it hard for him to become an astronaut, so he focused on creating computer games instead.

Garriott first learned about computers in 1975 during his freshman year at Clear Creek High School. Because the school only offered one semester of a BASIC programming class, and because he loved stories from The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons, Garriott asked the school to let him create a course where he could teach himself how to program. He used the course to make fantasy computer games on the school's teletype machine. Later, Garriott said he created 28 fantasy computer games during high school.

One of the names Garriott used in his games was "British," which he still uses for some of his game characters, such as the Ultima character Lord British and the Tabula Rasa character General British. His friends gave him this name because he was born in the United Kingdom.

Game design career

Richard Garriott started making computer games in 1974. His first games were created on early computer terminals. The game code was stored on paper tapes wound around spools, and the game was shown as a continuous print-out. In the summer of 1979, Garriott worked at a ComputerLand store where he first saw Apple computers. Inspired by the color graphics on their monitors, he began adding perspective views to his games. After creating Akalabeth for fun, the store owner encouraged Garriott to try selling it. Garriott spent $200 printing a manual and cover sheet drawn by his mother, then placed game copies in Ziploc bags, a common method for selling software at the time. Although fewer than a dozen copies were sold at the store, one copy reached the California Pacific Computer Company, which signed a deal with Garriott. The game sold over 30,000 copies, and Garriott earned $5 for each copy sold. The $150,000 he earned (equivalent to $665,000 in 2025) was three times his father’s astronaut salary. Akalabeth is considered the first published computer role-playing game.

Later that year, Garriott enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). He joined the school’s fencing team and later the Society for Creative Anachronism. He lived at home with his parents while attending university and created Ultima I with his friend Ken Arnold. The cover art and those of several later Garriott games were painted by Denis Loubet, whose work Garriott discovered during a visit to Steve Jackson Games.

Garriott continued developing the Ultima series in the early 1980s, eventually leaving UT to work on them full-time. Originally programmed for the Apple II, the Ultima series later became available on multiple platforms. Ultima II was published by Sierra On-Line, as they were the only company willing to include a printed cloth map in the game box. By the time he developed Ultima III, Garriott, along with his brother Robert, their father Owen, and Chuck Bueche, founded their own video game publisher, Origin Systems, to handle publishing and distribution. This decision was partly due to disagreements with Sierra over payment for the PC version of Ultima II.

The term "avatar," used to describe the player’s on-screen character, was first used in 1985 by Richard Garriott in the game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. In this game, Garriott wanted the player’s character to represent their real-life self in the virtual world. He chose the word "avatar" from Hindu tradition, which refers to a deity’s physical form on Earth, to emphasize that players should take responsibility for their in-game actions.

Garriott sold Origin Systems to Electronic Arts (EA) in September 1992 for $30 million. In 1997, he introduced the term "massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)," giving a new name to the emerging genre previously called graphical MUDs. In 1999 and 2000, EA canceled all of Origin’s new projects, including Privateer Online and Harry Potter Online. Garriott resigned from EA and formed Destination Games in April 2000 with his brother and Starr Long, the producer of Ultima Online.

After Garriott’s non-compete agreement with EA ended a year later, Destination Games partnered with NCSoft, where Garriott worked as a producer and designer of MMORPGs. Later, he became the CEO of NCSoft Austin, also known as NC Interactive.

Tabula Rasa did not generate much revenue during its initial release, despite taking seven years to develop. On November 24, 2008, NCSoft announced plans to end the live service of Tabula Rasa. The servers shut down on February 28, 2009, after allowing existing players free access starting January 10, 2009.

NCSoft fired Garriott in November 2008 but claimed he left voluntarily, leading to a lawsuit. In July 2010, an Austin District Court awarded Garriott $28 million, ruling that NCSoft mishandled his departure. In October 2011, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judgment.

In 2009, Garriott founded Portalarium, which developed Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, a spiritual successor to the Ultima series. Garriott noted that if he had secured the rights to Ultima from EA, the game could have been called Ultima Online 2. In March 2013, Portalarium launched a Kickstarter campaign for the game. An early access version was released on Steam in 2014, and the full game was released in March 2018. Critics gave the game mixed or average reviews. In October 2019, the game’s assets and rights were sold to Catnip Games, a company owned by Portalarium’s CEO, Chris Spears. Garriott is no longer associated with either company.

In April 2022, Garriott announced he was working on a new fantasy MMO using NFT technology with longtime collaborator Todd Porter. The game was named Iron and Magic in August 2022. However, in May 2023, reports indicated the game’s official website was no longer active, and its Facebook page had been inactive since September 2022, leading to speculation about the game’s future.

Private astronaut

In 1983, Softline reported that Richard Garriott wanted to go to space but thought it might not happen soon. He often joked with his father about hiding on a spaceship, and his ideas about space travel began to sound more serious over time. The money he earned from his successful video game career helped him explore his interest in space. After selling his company, Origin Systems, he invested in Space Adventures and bought a ticket to become the first private person to fly into space. However, in 2001, financial problems after the dot-com bubble burst forced him to sell his seat to Dennis Tito.

Garriott returned to making games and later saved enough money to pay another deposit for a space trip. During a required medical check, doctors found a growth on his liver that could cause serious bleeding if the spacecraft lost air pressure quickly. He had to choose between losing his deposit or having surgery to remove the growth. He chose surgery.

On September 28, 2007, Space Adventures announced Garriott would travel to the International Space Station in October 2008 as a self-funded private astronaut, costing about $30 million. After a year of training in Russia, Garriott flew to space on October 12, 2008. He became the second person from a family with a history of space travel (after Sergei Volkov), the first child of an American astronaut to go to space, and the second person to wear the British Union Flag in space. His father, Owen Garriott, was present at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for the launch and for Garriott’s safe return 12 days later, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

During his trip, Garriott helped students and others through education programs. The Metro newspaper in London gave him a special edition with ideas from British students for experiments to take to the ISS. Metro claimed it was the first newspaper in space. Garriott also used Amateur Radio on the ISS to talk to students and send photos, and he placed a geocache while aboard the ISS.

Garriott worked with the Windows on Earth project, which lets people see Earth from the ISS. He used the project’s software to choose places to photograph, and the public could use the same tool to track the ISS and see what Garriott saw. His photos, along with images taken by his father Owen Garriott in 1973, will be shared through Windows on Earth, showing how Earth has changed over time.

Garriott secretly carried a small piece of the ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan on a card, placing it under the floor of the ISS’s Columbus module. This was kept secret until 2020, when Doohan’s son shared it on social media. At that time, Doohan’s ashes had orbited Earth more than 70,000 times and traveled over 1.7 billion miles.

Garriott’s film Apogee of Fear was the first fictional short film fully filmed in space (other films, like Return from Orbit, were only partly filmed in space). Tracy Hickman wrote the screenplay.

In 2010, Garriott appeared in a documentary called Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott’s Road to the Stars, which showed his training and spaceflight journey.

Other exploration

In January 2021, Garriott was chosen as president of The Explorers Club. In February 2021, Garriott traveled to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean on Earth. During this trip, he completed scientific tasks, placed a geocache, and recorded a short science fiction film. These actions made him the person who holds both the highest altitude and deepest depth records for these activities.

Other accomplishments and interests

In 1986, Garriott helped create the Challenger Center for Space Science Education with his high school science teacher, June Scobee Rodgers, who was the wife of Challenger Shuttle Commander Dick Scobee. He led the ill-fated STS-51-L mission. Scobee Rodgers used Garriott's early experience in game design to help create about 50 interactive learning centers around the world. These centers allow students to practice simulated space missions.

In December 1993, Garriott purchased the Luna 21 lander and the Lunokhod 2 rover (both still on the Moon) from the Lavochkin Association for $68,500 at a Sotheby's auction in New York. The auction catalog mistakenly listed lot 68A as Luna 17/Lunokhod 1. Garriott explained that while international treaties prevent governments from owning property on other celestial bodies, corporations and private individuals may still claim such rights. Lunokhod 2 remains in use, with mirrors on its surface that help scientists measure the distance between Earth and the Moon. Garriott claims ownership of the lunar area explored by Lunokhod 2, which may be the first legally recognized private claim to extraterrestrial territory. Lunokhod 2 held the record for the longest distance traveled on another planetary body until NASA's Opportunity Rover surpassed it in 2014.

From 1988 to 1994, Garriott built a haunted house/museum every other year at Britannia Manor, his home in Austin, Texas. Each haunted house cost tens of thousands of dollars to build, required many months and a large team to complete, and was free for the public to visit.

Garriott supports private space travel and served as vice-chairman of the board of directors for Space Adventures. He is also a trustee of the X PRIZE Foundation.

In 2009, Garriott participated in the first zero gravity wedding with his wife, Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux. The ceremony took place on a specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, G-Force One, operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, a company Garriott co-founded.

Garriott wrote a memoir with David Fisher titled Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark. The book was published on January 10, 2017.

Garriott inspired the character James Halliday in Ernest Cline's book Ready Player One.

Garriott currently serves on the executive advisory board of Colossal Biosciences.

Awards

• In 1992, Garriott received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
• In 2006, Garriott was inducted as the ninth member of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame.
• In 2006, Garriott was the sixth person to receive the Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award.
• In 2009, 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, which is given to British-born astronauts.
• In 2010, Garriott was inducted into the Environmental Hall of Fame.