Baikonur(Kazakhstan): After earning millions of dollars creating computer fantasy games, Richard Garriott decided to fulfill a childhood dream of his own by flying into space aboard a Russian rocket.
"I have been working for decades on this," Garriott told AFP in this Soviet-era space base in the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan, where he is to blast off Sunday aboard a Soyuz rocket for the International Space Station (ISS).
But unlike the five space tourists who came before him, Garriott views space as a family business: He is the son of US astronaut Owen Garriott, who in 1973 spent two months aboard Skylab, the first orbiting space station.
"I grew up in a family of astronauts and I always wanted to do what my father did," said Garriott, a balding, goateed 47-year-old who was born in Cambridge, England, and grew up Houston, Texas.
The young Garriott -- a computer whiz-kid who wrote games for fun -- was dubbed "Lord British" by his classmates because of what they perceived as his English accent.
In the 1980s, "Lord British" became the name of the ruler of an alternative fantasy world that Garriott created for Ultima, a series of role-playing games initially written for the now-ancient Apple II computer.
The series, which became a runaway hit and later spawned an Internet version called Ultima Online, cemented Garriott's reputation as a pioneering game designer and turned him into a multi-millionaire.
"It is a goal I have been working on for 20 to 30 years," said Garriott, who paid USD 30 million and underwent a series of medical examinations and months of training to be allowed aboard the flight.
