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Richard flopped onto his bed in the small, two-bunk dorm room at Oklahoma University and surveyed his options. There didn’t seem to be many. His parents had dropped him off here, seven hours from his home and high school friends, so he could attend a seven-week summer computer camp. He could think of more tedious-sounding things, but this camp was already high up on his list.

He was used to summers full of weird art projects and near total freedom, and the little bit of programming he’d already experienced hadn’t captured his vivid imagination. He kicked the bag he’d flung on the floor as he’d come in, a new feeling of dread washing over him. Already, this felt like a lonely place. He was trapped, for seven weeks, with computer nerds.

Long and wiry, with a mop-top haircut and a peach-fuzz face, 16-year-old Richard was here at his parents’ behest. He was actually looking forward to tinkering with the machines using his rudimentary programming skills, but he didn't think it was worth losing almost his whole summer. This was the summer of 1977, and while computers were still out of reach for most of the country, Richard’s parents wanted to make sure he was on the cusp of the technological revolution.

The family—and really, most of the kids that Richard had grown up with—already lived in something that looked a little like the future, with rocket scientists and astronauts as their neighbors in suburban Houston. His own father, Owen, was an astronaut and had temporarily shared the title for the longest space flight any human had ever taken. Owen had taken his whole family to Palo Alto, California, for a year of study in 1976, and there at Stanford University Richard’s parents had gotten the computer religion. Richard had done some rudimentary work on the computer terminals that had been placed in every classroom in Palo Alto’s technologically savvy high school, but he hadn’t been nearly as impressed as his parents.

Before long, there was a knock on his dorm room door. He roused himself and answered it. A small group of boys was there.

“Hi,” one of the boys said.

“Hello,” he replied, a bit intimidated but determined to make friends while he was here.

“Did you say hello? Nobody from around here says hello,” one of the boys said, frowning a little. “You must be from Britian, so we’ll call you British.”

Richard had been born in England, but his parents had moved to Houston when he was a baby, and he had no discernable accent at all. He had no idea what the boy was talking about. This certainly wasn’t helping to quell his desire to run down the hallway, down the 10 flights of stairs, and out on the highway.

“Okay, you’re British, then,” the boy said, tagging him with a nickname that would follow him for the next 26 years. “Welcome to camp.”

He realized what was happening. It was a welcoming committee, and simultaneously a naming committee. In this group, he’d be known as British. Fine. The group moved on to the next door, repeating the sequence. Knock. Answer. Bestow a nickname. Move along. Resigned, Richard followed as the group made its way down the boys’ corridor, through the main lobby, and into the girls’ corridor. By the end of the circuit, everyone had a new name.

The rest of the day was taken up in meetings. Meetings about rules. Meetings about courses. Meetings about the campus. The day, which had started miserably, began looking promising when he’d met the girls, but had turned sour again until he found himself in thecommonarea after dinner. There he noticed a small group of students huddled together at a table playing some kind of game, surrounded by soda cans and crumpled candy wrappers.

He was intrigued. He’d already decided that the way to make the best of his time at programming camp was to try to make a game, and it looked like these others might be allies.

He sauntered over but didn’t say anything, hovering for a minute behind the person who appeared to be leading the game. This boy had a stapled pamphlet laid out on the table in front of him, and he was slowly describing a landscape and scenario. The other players responded, in turn, telling the leader what their character would do exploring, opening doors, even fighting monsters that seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

Every once in a while someone would roll some weird-shaped dice. Richard was confused. There was no game board or little pieces to move around. If this game had rules or an immediate objective, they certainly didn’t seem to be obvious. The players were simply talking about fighters, dragons, dwarves, elves, and magic.

It sounded a little like the books he’d read earlier in the year, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. After several minutes had passed, Richard leaned down, tapped the leader on the shoulder, and asked him what they were doing.

“It’s Dungeons & Dragons,” the boy responded, not looking up. “It’s a role-playing game.” That didn’t help much. Richard had never heard of the game, and he didn’t know what role-playing was outside of his occasional role in the local theater. He stuck around for a little longer, listening to the game unfold, while the Dungeon Master that was the leader’s title—wove the tale.

Other students drifted over, too, and before long the original group had to stop and explain in more detail. Richard quickly joined a game, and others did as well. By the second night, the little lobby was filled with several gaming groups, all telling each other stories of dragons and skeletons and orcs. Girls were as eager as the guys to play, and they threw themselves into playing their characters with just as much bravado.

The role-playing helped them talk to each other in ways that shy high school kids might have had trouble doing otherwise. It was a little silly at first, pretending to be a dwarf or elf or magician, and “British” Garriott exchanged embarrassed grins with other players more than once, but once the stories started flowing it all seemed to make sense.

After the initial social awkwardness of strangers faded, other barriers fell. Among the first to go were the rules imposed by the gender-segregated halls. The college-aged chaperone tasked with keeping boys and girls apart moved one of the female students into his room, and the other girls and boys quickly paired up.

One enterprising student figured out a way to jimmy the locks, keeping them out of the closed half of the dormitory, and soon the theoretically off-limit rooms had become hideaways or clubhouses for couples and gaming groups. Richard and his summer girlfriend laid claim to a particularly choice room with a door labeled “The Crypt ” in dripping, blood-red letters, with a full-room mural depicting a swamp creature about to abduct an oblivious half-naked woman.

Running through all of these social interactions was the reason the teens were there. They were programmers together, learning to control computers that had been mysteries—or just sources of boredom—to them before now. They worked in the FORTRAN computer language, feeding punch cards into the big machines as a means of programming them. The programs they learned were simple, certainly not enough to fulfill Richard’s vague notions of writing a game, but they hinted at a vast potential power.

Just as powerful was the shared experience. People spoke the same language here. For some of the students, it was the first time experiencing this sense of community. They shared an implicit understanding that computers, programming, technology, fantasy, and role-playing games were okay. They weren’t nerdy, dorky, or strange. The group just accepted these as perfectly logical and natural parts of their day, in the same way athletes assume practice would happen after school or cheerleaders would do routines between bells. For Richard, it would prove a starting point that was bitterly hard to give up at the close of the seven-week camp.

“It was a summer of programming and girls,” Richard would say later. “It was one of those pivotal moments. A lot of firsts happened there.”

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