Richard Garriott built imaginary worlds first. Then he started exploring the real one.
Before spaceflight and deep-ocean expeditions, Garriott was already helping define an industry. He began developing computer games as a teenager and created the Ultima series, one of the foundational franchises in computer role-playing games. The Computer History Museum describes Ultima Online as an early massively multiplayer online role-playing game and credits the broader series with decades of influence on computer gaming.
Garriott and his brother Robert founded Origin Systems in 1983. The studio expanded the Ultima universe and later became part of Electronic Arts. Decades later, the influence of those games is still visible in open-world RPGs and online virtual worlds.
Then Garriott took the word “exploration” literally.
On October 12, 2008, he launched aboard Soyuz TMA-13 and traveled to the International Space Station. NASA records that Garriott spent 10 days aboard the station, conducting educational outreach and photographing Earth. He also became the first American second-generation space traveler; his father, Owen Garriott, had flown on Skylab and the Space Shuttle.
That places him alongside other remarkable private-space pioneers such as Anousheh Ansari, whose engineering and entrepreneurial career also eventually led to orbit.
Space was not the end of the journey. Garriott traveled to the North and South Poles, visited the wreck of the Titanic, and in 2021 descended to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench—the deepest known point in Earth’s oceans.
That descent put him in another tiny group of explorers whose careers span the most extreme places on Earth. Victor Vescovo helped make modern full-ocean-depth exploration possible, while Kathryn Sullivan became the first person to both walk in space and reach Challenger Deep.
The thread connecting Garriott’s career is not simply adventure. It is the habit of building a world, learning its rules and then pushing beyond the boundary that everyone else accepted.
He did it first with software.
Then he did it with the planet.
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