Matthew Benning

You Can't Kill The Lord British

Richard Garriott, also know as the Lord British, is a truly fascinating individual. One might think that anyone who refers to themselves as the Lord British would be fascinating, at least in a crazy, yelling on the street corner sense, but he has done a preposterous amount of amazing things over the course of his life, a decent number of which managed to make him huge sums of money. He is a pioneer in basically every field he has applied himself to, from video games to space exploration. He is filthy stinking rich, and yet he remains fun, interesting, and very nice on a personal level. Richard Garriott's career in the video game industry started when he was eighteen, and working at a ComputerLand in Austin, Texas. By that point, he already had experience creating video games in the self directed programming course he convinced his high school to let him start, but this was the first time he sold one of his games commercially. It was his boss who saw the games he was creating and convinced him that selling them might be a good way to make some extra money. He sold his first commercial game, Akalabeth, bundled with a manual and cover sheet he his mother had drawn and then printed up, for a total production cost of about two hundred dollars. A few copies were sold, but one of them caught the interest of a California Pacific executive, who published it in a significantly more professional capacity, and ended up making the teenage Garriott over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Realizing, perhaps, that he could make suitable returns as a game designer, the Lord British's career was launched. He published the first of the increasingly long running Ultima games later that year, his first game to be published in a real box, and by his third game, the second of the Ultima series, he managed to gather together enough like minded individuals to create the game publisher Origin. From there, he published a stupendous number of Ultima games, including Ultima Online, which is widely considered to be the first Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, and for which Mr. Garriott coined the term. Origin was eventually sold to Electronic Arts, and Lord

British continued with them for almost a decade until they began shutting the company down. He then rejoined the industry at the helm of Destination Games, which partnered with NCsoft to bring even more Ultima games to a populous waiting with baited breath. The Ultima series eventually ended, but this working relationship continued until the rather unfortunate death of Tabula Rasa, Garriott's attempt at a science fiction MMORPG, which failed to draw in a sustainable playerbase, after which he was forced out of the company, but managed to win a lawsuit based on the manner of his departure. Richard Garriott is probably best well known for... well that's an unfinishable sentence. Richard Garriott's most well known game series is Ultima. His second commercially available game, Ultima spawned a huge following and eventually led to the creation of the first MMORPG to have a significant number of subscribers, as has already been mentioned. Ultima is world that sets the bar for a sustainable universe in video games. There are more games in the Ultima series than the Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior series combined, and they still manage to have a coherent overarching plot and a consistent world. It certainly wasn't the first game series to revisit it's own world, or even the first popular one to do so, but it's certainly the longest running one of note. The Ultima series is also notable as it helped popularize both Richard Garriott's pseudonym of the Lord British, as well as the in game sport of murdering him. The Lord British, within the Ultima universe, is a supposedly unkillable character, as well as the ruler of the fictional land of Britannia. Video game enthusiasts being what they are, killing the Lord British through various game flaws or exploits has become something of a sport among the games players. The machinations of the players often border on ingenious, including murdering him while sleeping, as the sleeping model was not invulnerable, to luring him into range of a nearby battleship and blasting him to death with cannons. The most famous of these is probably the fiasco involving his personal visit to Ultima Online, in which his guards were unable to appear, his invulnerability was turned off, and a player used a stolen fireball spell to fry him to a crisp. This trend was capitalized upon in his latest game, Tabula Rasa, where General British, Lord British's space based counterpart, was forced to fight off the entire Beta testing team.

As much as it was the making of his fortune and fame, the Lord British is about so much more than just video games. He is also, for example, the best at space. Space Core's desires aside, Richard Garriott has done more to promote space travel than anyone who did not actually work for the space program. His father was astronaut Owen Garriott, which greatly influenced young Richard's view of the space program. He invested heavily in Space Adventures, a company that aimed to put tourists in zero gravity environments as well as in space itself, and managed to convince the Russian space program that such a thing was even a possibility. He did, unfortunately, have to sell his first ticket and with it the bragging rights of world's first space tourist, but he managed to re-grow his fortune and made it up as the sixth, still managing to the first second-generation American Astronaut and the second man to wear the Union Jack in Space. While technically a Space Tourist, Lord British underwent every physical and mental test a NASA astronaut undergoes, and assisted in performing numerous experiments while aboard the international space station. He also took numerous pictures and communicated with Amateur Radio enthusiasts, so the Space Tourist label my not be entirely inaccurate. After returning from his Space Adventures space adventure, Garriott produced a film about his experience and toured the nation, visiting college campuses, among other places, in an attempt to drum up further interest in Space Flight and Space Exploration. As an interesting aside, while preparing for his Space Adventures space adventure, Richard Garriott was surprised to learn that his astronaut father had been inspired to travel to space by the Russian's Sputnik probe, which was a strange coincidence because Richard himself was traveling in a Russian rocket, and also because the same inspirational Sputnik satellite was currently in his attic. This surprising turn of events aside, Lord British has made a habit of purchasing things of or relating to space, including the Luna 21 lander and Lunokhod 2 rover, which may have made him the first private owner of lunar real estate, although that point has been and is still being argued. It may come as something of a shock, but Lord British has something of an interest in things medieval. He has been an active member in the Austinian chapter for the Society for Creative

Anachronism since his teenage years, in which he is known by the rather outlandish pseudonym of the Lord British. He holds a number of events every year at his mansion, oddly enough called Britannia Manor, including a weekend long festival built around jousting and a number of charity events for various causes. His home, in addition to being enormous and having a yard large enough to throw what is essentially a Renaissance festival in, also contains a dungeon in the style of Dungeons & Dragons in which he holds yearly Halloween parties that require the attendees to form parties and and navigate said dungeon in the style of a Live Action Roleplaying Game. These events are extremely popular, with people camping out weeks in advance to receive tickets to his various events, such as the plays he holds for charity in his replica of the Curtain Theater. His home, the current one anyways, contains a working canon in the front yard, an immense collection of medieval weaponry, and an actual human mummy in a coffin. He is also a huge fan of magic tricks, to the point where his home contains a museum to various magic tricks and he himself has appeared on the cover of MUM, the magazine for The Society Of American Magicians. At some point, telling the story of Richard Garriott's life and success simply becomes ridiculous. He once fired an Uzi at a home invader to scare him into submission. He visited the wreck of the Titanic in a tiny Russian submarine, thanks to a company he invested in that promotes Deep Sea Tourism. He went to space for twelve days in a Russian rocket ship thanks to a company he invested in that promotes space tourism. He is the only private citizen to own a portion of the moon, which technically makes him a supervillian. He own and operates his own Dungeons & Dragons style dungeon, which technically makes him a lich, or possibly a dragon, as they are richer. He made one hundred and fifty thousand dollars as a high school senior and decided to take his family to England to celebrate. He built a replica of the Curtain theater in order to house plays for charity in his back yard. He holds weekend long jousting competitions with full medieval faire construction on his lawn, which does in fact make him a Lord, for all intents and purposes.. He is several unkillable video game characters in games he designed. Lord British officiated the first wedding ever held in zero gravity,

aboard one of the planes designed for use by his Space Adventures company. He is an extremely accomplished magician. He traveled with Stephen Hawking in the Vomit Comet, another plane that simulates zero gravity owned by Zero Gravity Corp, in which he is also an investor. He owns an observatory that takes slow motion, wide angle pictures of the cosmos. His house contains a grotto that can rain hot or cold water on those swimming in it. Richard Garriott served as the corner man for his friend Jesus Chavez in his first title defense. Richard Garriott owns an entire sixteenth century vampire hunting kit, possibly just in case. The problem one runs into when describing the life and times of Richard Garriott, is that the man cannot stop doing amazing things, and indeed seems to continually come up with new ways to be amazing, so the list quickly becomes something akin to Chuck Norris Facts albeit entirely true. He is also a fantastic human being, who does not take himself too seriously. He has lived a fascinating life and insists on giving back to the community. He is very personable, as down to earth as someone as obviously insane can be, and never seems to leave a bad impression on people. He is very passionate about space and space exploration, and believes it is important to our future. He is passionate about his hobbies, and about helping people. Lord British is the game designer all game designers wish they could be, a man who makes the games he wants because he wants to, and makes enough money from it to do all the things he wants. What the future holds for Richard Garriott, no one but he can say, but we can rest assured it will be amazing.

He also once shook my hand and told me I could work on robots in space, and I managed not to pee myself. [Editor's Note: Take that out, this is a professional paper]

A description of Richard Garriott. http://www.richardinspace.com/index.cfm? fuseaction=About_Richard.Austin Another description of Richard Garriott, with a focus on Tabula Rasa.. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/do-you-want-to- play.html?page=0%2C0 An article with a partial list of the ways to kill Lord British (the character) http://www.computerandvideogames.com/181917/features/the-many-deaths-of-lord-british/ An article about the re-release of Ultima Online. http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm? ReleaseID=314331 Another bio of Richard Garriott. http://www.cs4fn.org/spacetravel/thespacegame.php Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission A movie about his trip to space. I have also met him personally and talked to many other who have met him multiple times.