Richard Garriott has been many things: video game pioneer; wildly successful entrepreneur; and daring adventurer. In 1997, Garriott, who is known online by the handle "Lord British," forever changed the video game industry when he published Ultima Online, the first massively multiplayer, online role-playing game (MMORPG). Garriott's game, highly successful in its own right, was the originator of a genre that would later spawn such smash hits as World of Warcraft, and it was the first videogame to truly tap into the transformative power of the internet. Garriott made hundreds of millions on Ultima and subsequent games, and spent much of the money funding expeditions to the furthest reaches of the earth -- and outer space.
Drawing upon the two guiding tenets of Garriott's life -- exploration and creation -- his memoir, Explore/Create, follows his many passions to the extraordinary places they have taken him. Garriott brings us on an expedition to Antarctica to hunt for meteorites, and explores the wreckage of the Titanic in a submarine (nearly dying in the process). He becomes one of the first civilians to fly in outer space, and later arranges a zero-G flight for Stephen Hawking, watching the legendary physicist experience weightlessness for the first time. And above all, Garriott introduces us to many of the wondrous and magical things we can find in our own backyards.
A larger-than-life figure, Garriott has been hailed as a "game god" (PC Gamer), as one of "The 6 Most Interesting Men You Can Actually Meet" (Maxim), and was the inspiration for one of the main characters in Ernest Cline's bestselling novel Ready Player One (movie adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg forthcoming). Here, in his own words, is his extraordinary life story.