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This series of collisions and discoveries would echo in the back of Richard’s mind for the next 25 years, and in the process it helped him shape the course of computer gaming as much as any other single figure in the business. The mix of computers and game play he found in Oklahoma was a heady one, and the moment he left campus he resolved to mesh them further if he could. He vowed to use his newfound power over the computer to create dungeon worlds as rich and frightening as anything Tolkien or the teenaged dungeon masters had come up with.

The history of his efforts to repeat and extend his experiences here would be in many ways the history of computer gaming and gaming communities. It would take only a few years before “Lord British” was one of the most widely known figures in the young computer gaming pantheon, and his work would become only more influential.

Strong communities of players and programmers would build around his games. He, like other developers, would give game players a common language, give them a sense of shared and individual mastery over their environment that was often missing from their everyday lives. As computer game players grew from scattered pockets of programmers and computer hobbyists into sprawling global communities, his games and influence would be felt throughout. If his own profile was ultimately eclipsed, it would be because his experience and passions had become assimilated by the wider world.

He would play with the elements discovered in that 1977 summer camp— programming and role-playing—for the next quarter decade. But he was already familiar with the feeling of community he found here. It was no accident that this would be a running theme in his life and in his work. It had been a part of his life from the beginning.

Richard grew up in a Houston neighborhood just a hop and a jump away From Johnson Space Center, where the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) influence could be felt everywhere. His father, Owen, was a former Stanford physics professor and Navy officer who had been tapped by the manned space flight program in 1965, and the family had quickly become a part of the tight-knit NASA circle.

Their own immediate circle—Richard’s two older brothers, Randy and Robert; a younger sister, Linda; and Helen, Garriott’s free-spirited artist mother—was even tighter. They’d all shared the national spotlight briefly in 1973,whenOwenwent up in Skylab 3 for 59 days, doubling the amount of time any human had been in space. Growing up in that kind of environment tended to undermine any kid’s sense of the impossible.

The Garriott household had been a mix between a mad scientist’s laboratory and a surrealist artist’s studio. Richard’s father, a thin, mustachioed man with an angular, serious face, had routinely brought home expensive government toys from NASA headquarters, tinkering with them for days on end, and taking them apart to see what made them work. When he emerged in the evenings from his study, he often brought with him the coolest science project imaginable.

In the mid ‘70s, years before weekend warriors would know what night vision goggles were, he brought home a prototype that the boys immediately strapped on and used to chase each other across the dark lawn outside.The Garriotts took instant pictures a decade before Polaroid would release a commercial version of its Instamatic camera.

One night, Owen emerged with a pair of glasses with special prisms that reversed the wearer’s vision, flipping the world 180 degrees. If someone reached out their right hand, the glasses would make it appear as though the person were reaching with his left. The distortion was mind-wrecking for a time after the wearer donned the glasses, making it impossible to accomplish even the simplest task, like grabbing the handrail on the staircase. The space agency was experimenting with cats, studying how long it took the mind to adjust to radical vision problems, but Richard and his brothers were happy to serve as unofficial test subjects.

“It was like magic,” Richard said later. “There was always something at our house. I didn’t realize that this wasn’t necessarily true in other places.”

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The book hit the shelves August 19, 2003. Order it.