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 Rasa, and the $28 million judgment he won against NCSoft. Then comes the space quest itself: losing his first seat after the dot-com crash, undergoing liver surgery to stay eligible, and launching to the ISS on October 12, 2008 while his father watched from the pad in Kazakhstan. The episode closes with his Mariana Trench dive, his presidency of the Explorers Club, and his role as an inspiration for Ready Player One’s James Halliday.

• How a text-only teletype and paper tape shaped Garriott’s approach to building worlds before he ever had a screen
• Why his Ultima morality engine opened with ethical questions from a gypsy instead of dice rolls for stats
• The canceled Harry Potter online game and the split with EA that led to Destination Games and NCSoft
• Apogee of Fear, the first fictional sci-fi film shot in space, and the laminated card hidden under the Columbus module floor
• The 1993 Sotheby’s purchase of the Lunokhod 2 rover and the legal loophole behind his claim to lunar property