Who owns a Soviet rover sitting on the moon, smuggled the ashes of Star Trek's Scotty onto the International Space Station, and coined the word avatar for a digital self? This episode traces the life of Richard Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who was told at 13 that his eyesight disqualified him from spaceflight and responded by building virtual worlds instead. We follow him from programming dungeon crawlers on a teletype in 1975 to selling Akalabeth in Ziploc bags in 1979, earning $150,000 as a teenager, roughly three times his father's NASA salary.

We cover the Lord British persona, the cloth maps that led him to found Origin Systems, the virtue system that silently tracked player morality, the $30 million sale of Origin to Electronic Arts in 1992, coining the term MMORPG with Ultima Online in 1997, the failure of Tabula Ra ...