In the summer of 1979 an 18-year-old who had just left school in Houston took a job at a ComputerLand store, mainly, he said later, so that he could use its Apple II after closing time. Richard Garriott had already written 28 small role-playing games on his school’s paper-tape Teletype. On the Apple he wrote one with “perspective-view dungeon graphics”, called it Akalabeth, and spent $200 on zip-lock bags to sell it in. He had sold about five of his first 200 copies when the shop’s owner sent one to a publisher, California Pacific. “A few days later I got a call from California Pacific saying that there were tickets waiting for me at the airport!” That game led to Ultima, to Origin Systems, and to twenty years in which Garriott, signing himself “Lord British”, kept rewriting the same fantasy world from scratch.
Fast facts
- Born: 4 July 1961, in Cambridge, England, to American parents; he grew up in the United States.
- Also known as: Lord British, his name for himself and for the king of Britannia in his games.
- Company: co-founder of Origin Systems (1983) with his brother Robert and Chuck Bueche.
- Games: Akalabeth (1979), the Ultima series (1981–1999), Ultima Online (1997), Tabula Rasa (2007), Shroud of the Avatar (2018).
- Later: flew to the International Space Station in October 2008.
Lord British
Garriott was born in Cambridge while his parents were on sabbatical from Stanford. The family returned to America when he was two months old; his father, Owen Garriott, left teaching for NASA and in 1973 walked in space as part of the Skylab crew. The nickname came from a summer course at the University of Oklahoma. Other students heard him say “hello” instead of “hi”, decided that no one from round there talked like that, and called him British. He began calling all his fantasy characters Lord British.
He learned Dungeons & Dragons in 1977. His school offered one computer class, so he and another student got a three-year self-study course approved, and his projects were the 28 role-playing games. Akalabeth followed in 1979. He told the German magazine PC Player in 1999 that California Pacific eventually sold 30,000 copies and paid him five dollars for each, and that his father had written the maths routines in Akalabeth and the first Ultima.
Ultima (1981) took nine months. According to Amiga Computing’s 1988 profile, it was written in BASIC with a couple of machine-code routines a friend wrote for him, and Garriott taught himself machine code for Ultima II. When California Pacific ran into financial trouble he moved to Sierra On-Line, because it agreed to put Ultima II in a box with a cloth map. He did not find Sierra “author friendly”, and in 1983 he, his brother Robert and Chuck Bueche, a friend from high school and his college room-mate, started Origin Systems. Ultima III was its first product. Origin began in the family garage in Houston, moved to New Hampshire, and from 1986 was based in Austin, Texas.
Games about the player
Garriott rewrote each Ultima from scratch, and each took longer: a year for Ultima II and III, two years for Ultima IV (1985). Ultima IV was the one that changed what his games were about. By then, he told Computer Gaming World in 1986, he was getting fan mail from players who read things into his games, “things that I never even put in there”. In the earlier Ultimas a champion of good often had to steal from shops to survive; he wanted the effect of his games to be “a net good rather than a net bad”. He built eight virtues out of Truth, Love and Courage, which he found in the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion of The Wizard of Oz, and set the player the task of living by them. In his words, “It is intended that it be you, the player, traveling in the lands of Britannia.”
He gave PC Player another reason. At the time, he said, American adults were convinced that Dungeons & Dragons was devil worship, and he found himself called “Satan Garriott”. He told Amiga Computing in 1988 that he wanted fantasy to be “a psychological game with the environment — not just rules”, and complained that the standard plot was still “go out and beat up the bad guy”.
The rest of the series is told in the Ultima entry: the larger worlds of Ultima V to VII, the disappointment of Ultima VIII: Pagan (1994), for which Lord British apologised to fans in an open letter, and Ultima IX: Ascension (1999). His brother Robert ran the business side as Origin’s president; Electronic Arts bought the company in 1992.
Lord British in the game
Garriott played his own character. Lord British rules Britannia from his castle in the Ultima games, and players tried to kill him. During the beta test of Ultima Online in 1997 one of them succeeded, and Computer Gaming World noted that “there goes the goal that many players had set for themselves”. When he left Origin, Computer Gaming World reported in 2001 that the character belonged to Garriott and that Lord British would appear in his next company’s games.
Away from the keyboard he had other interests. Computer Play reported in 1988 that he was the first recipient of the Challenger Center’s Dick Scobie Space Science Education Award, for a plan to take a simulated space flight round American schools, and that he ran a company, Encore, with his brother, his father and other astronauts.
After Origin
Garriott left Origin in 2000 and set up Destination Games, which was formed as a unit of the Korean online publisher NCsoft. After the company’s press conference in 2001, Computer Gaming World headlined its report “ULTIMA is dead, but Richard Garriott’s new plan is a killer”: he had hired about 50 of the staff EA laid off at Origin, planned to help bring NCsoft’s Lineage to America, and was starting a new online game under the working title Tabula Rasa.
Tabula Rasa came out in 2007. Garriott told Edge that year that Ultima Online had sold ten times as much as all the single-player Ultimas together, and that most online games had turned into “turn-based whack-a-mole” with thin stories. His answer mixed shooter-style combat with missions built as what he called ethical parables, where “the only challenges that are actually interesting are the ones where it’s debatable what you ought to do”. NCsoft shut the game down in February 2009. In 2004 Computer Gaming World had added Garriott to its Hall of Fame, alongside Jon Van Caneghem of Might and Magic.
Later history
On 12 October 2008 Garriott launched on a Soyuz to the International Space Station as a paying private astronaut, following his father into space, and landed on 24 October, just under 12 days later. The flight was reported to have cost him about $30 million.
He came back to fantasy role-playing through his company Portalarium. In 2013 Edge noted that he had “drifted away from his gaming roots”, “dipping into online casino games”, and was now making a “spiritual successor” to Ultima, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. It was crowdfunded that year and released in 2018. He has since followed his interest in exploration: he dived to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in 2021 and was elected president of the Explorers Club the same year.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 26, March 1986, pp. 18–21, interview with Richard Garriott: school games, ComputerLand and Akalabeth, the zip-lock bags and five of 200 copies, California Pacific; born in Cambridge and the Lord British nickname; Sierra and the cloth map; founding Origin with Robert Garriott and Chuck Bueche; development times; the fan mail, stealing from shops, the virtues and The Wizard of Oz; “traveling in the lands of Britannia”.
- Computer Play, premier issue, August 1988, pp. 34–35, “Origins”: born 4 July 1961 in Cambridge; the return to America; Owen Garriott and Skylab; the Dick Scobie award and Encore.
- PC Player (Germany), October 1999, pp. 170–176, Origin history with Garriott’s own account: the ComputerLand job before university, Akalabeth’s 30,000 copies at five dollars each, Owen Garriott’s maths routines, “Satan Garriott”; the garage in Houston, New Hampshire and Austin.
- John Minson, “British in the New World”, Amiga Computing vol. 1 no. 7, December 1988: Ultima in BASIC with a friend’s machine-code routines, machine code for Ultima II; “a psychological game with the environment”; “go out and beat up the bad guy”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 160, November 1997: a player killed Lord British during the Ultima Online beta.
- Computer Gaming World issue 206, September 2001, Thomas L. McDonald, “Lord British Returns…Via Korea?”: Destination Games as a unit of NCsoft, the 50 former Origin staff, Lineage, Tabula Rasa, and the Lord British character.
- Computer Gaming World issue 243, October 2004, pp. 66–67, Hall of Fame: Garriott and Van Caneghem.
- Edge issue 180, October 2007, from p. 60, “Grind Designs”: Garriott on Ultima Online’s sales and Tabula Rasa.
- Edge issue 253, May 2013: Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues preview.
- Wikipedia, “Richard Garriott” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): leaving Origin in 2000; the Soyuz flight of 12–24 October 2008 and its reported cost; Tabula Rasa’s release in 2007 and closure in February 2009; Portalarium; Shroud of the Avatar’s release in 2018; the Mariana Trench dive and the Explorers Club in 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garriott