Although perhaps not as well known among Nintendo fans, Richard Garriott is one of the original gaming auteurs, creating the Ultima series over twenty years ago. A few of the Ultima games were eventually ported to NES and Super NES, although the series was always at home on the PC. It even spawned one of the very first MMORPGs, Ultima Online, which is still running today. In promotions and advertisements for his older games, Garriott often appeared as "Lord British", establishing the role of celebrity game designer long before Shigeru Miyamoto was widely recognized.

What you may not have realized is that Richard Garriott is also the son of an astronaut, Owen Garriott. Now, Lord British plans to follow in his father's footsteps as a space tourist in October 2008. His flight to the International Space Station is being brokered through Space Adventures, the same company that has already sent five other private citizens to the station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for an estimated $30M USD each. Garriott will probably take some of his games on the trip as souvenirs, but he plans to spend most of his time working on commercial experiments from his father's biotechnology company.

Richard Garriott may be the first game designer in space, but he's not the first one to get involved in the space industry. John Carmack, the programming genius behind Doom and Quake, splits his time between id Software and Armadillo Aerospace, an engineering firm he founded. Armadillo's stated goals are to develop suborbital space tourism and eventually orbital capability, but their current work is focused on a Lunar Lander vehicle that competed in the 2006 X-Prize Cup.