Tabula Rasa - Richard Garriott Interview @ The Independent

Talks about his childhood and involvement with NASA as he trains for his Space Flight promoting TR.

I was at Webster Elementary from the age of five to 11 and then I went to Webster Intermediate for three years and after that to Clear Creek High School.

One of the particularly visionary things at high school was that personal computers had come out and, although it was too soon for the school to develop a place for them on the curriculum, they saw my early interest and allowed me to have my own class – with no teacher, no fellow students, no assignments and no tests.

I would develop my own plan at the beginning of the semester and at the end I would make a presentation of what I had done, which was to develop a programme, consisting of mostly creative games.

These would be more sophisticated than the commercial games available.

Right after I left high school, the last game I had written there was good enough for the owner of a local computer store to sell it. One of my discs found its way to a national distributor and this game sold 30,000 copies, earning me $150,000 (£76,000). I produced three games in total for other publishers, until my brother said: "Why don't we form a company?"