Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Apple bestseller. But when Lord British prepared his sequel, he let it be knownthat he wished to leave his current publisher who, he said, was not paying him allhis royalties.He was deluged with offers from software houses. Though he was only twenty atthe time, Lord British was no stranger to pressure situations: his real name wasRichard Garriott, and he was the son of Skylab astronaut Owen K. Garriott. He'dknown and enjoyed the reflected limelight of his father's fame, especially when hisSkylab 2 was aloft and the family seemed the focus of the world's attention.Richard had grown up in the engineering-intensive Nassau Bay area of Houston,and had gotten into computers in high school, where he convinced his teachers toallow him to take private classes in programming. His curriculum was writinggames.In many respects, he was a well-adjusted all-American boy. On the other hand, hewould stay up all night on the Apple Computer in his bedroom. "Once the suncame up I'd realize how late it was and crash right there on the spot," he laterexplained. He had long held an interest in fantasy role-playing games, and wasparticularly fascinated by medieval culture, belonging to a club called the Societyof Creative Anachronisms. While a freshman at the University of Texas, he joinedthe fencing team, but was really much more into swashbuckling free-swinging,climbing-on-table, Errol Flynn-style sword-fighting. He wanted to merge his twointerests, and attempted to make a computer game that would do it. After writingfor months, he completed his twenty-eighth game and named it "Alkabeth," andwas astounded when a publisher who happened to see one of the copies thatRichard sent to friends for free offered to publish it and send him money. Whynot? He requested the pseudonym Lord British because some kids at a computercamp once teased him that he sounded as if he'd come from England (he didn't).Alkabeth made enough money for several college educations. His next game,Ultima, was more ambitious, and with his six-figure royalties he bought a car,established fat Keogh and IRA accounts, and invested in a Houston restaurant.Now he was considering real estate.Garriott saw his follow-up as something special. He had learned machine languageespecially to write it, and was dizzy with the new power it gave him: he felt that itenabled him to see the memory, the microprocessor, the video circuitry ... youunderstood what each bit did and where the data lines went. And the speed it gaveyou was incredible. Only with this power could he bring Ultima 2 to fruition.Because, in Ultima 2, Richard Garriott was writing a true epic, one that enabledthe player to do more than any player of a computer game had ever done before.He insisted that some of these abilities be listed in the box in which the programwas sold: