The following excerpt comes from Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution, available on Amazon from Schiffer Publishing. The book chronicles the making of more than a dozen groundbreaking PC games, featuring interviews with their developers and details how those games went on influence many others that followed.

Richard Garriott took it as a matter of fact that every kid his age had parents who flew to outer space. To him, that was normal. "It wasn't until I went to school at University of Texas that I ran into what I now describe as 'the Sesame Street people,'" he says.

"I never specifically thought of people who watched Sesame Street as a cross section of my neighborhood until I moved out of the neighborhood I grew up in and came here to Austin and realized, ‘Oh, wait. My NASA upbringing was the fantasy; the Sesame Street fantasy is, in fact, reality.’ It was quite a culture shock."

Although born in Cambridge, England in 1961, Garriott spent most of his formative years in Houston, Texas. His neighborhood was practically an extension of Johnson Space Center, the Houston-based outpost of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Most of his neighbors were astronauts, contractors and engineers at NASA. There was Joe Engle, one of the first astronauts to join the Space Shuttle program, a manned-vehicle launch initiative; and Robert Gibson, better known to his friends as Hoot, who went on to join STS-27, a team of astronauts who orbited the earth 68 times in just over four days.

Of all the spacefarers he rubbed elbows with, none awed Garriott more than his father. In 1973, NASA handpicked Owen to join Skylab 3, the second manned mission to Skylab, America's first space station. He was gone for 60 days. Back on terra firma, his wife, Helen, and their four children kept tabs on him by listening to squawk boxes, speakers connected to a one-way intercom system. Through the boxes, Helen and the kids were able to listen in on communications beamed down from outer space. "We even had to get government briefings so we weren't shocked when we heard about malfunctions," Richard recalls.

Other kitchen tables were littered with bills, magazines, and schoolbooks. In Garriott's household, space artifacts and hardware cluttered living spaces. "While growing up, there were things that, in retrospect, were truly amazing. But at the time, it not only seemed normal for our family, but for most families in the neighborhood."

Helen Garriott was more than capable of holding the fort while her husband worked long hours on earth or elsewhere. When her kids needed help bringing one of their projects to fruition — such as building a treehouse or erecting Native-American-style teepees — Helen rolled up her sleeves. Among her many talents, Helen was a professional artist, and a Jane of artistic trades. Every summer, she taught Richard a new form of art: painting one year, pottery the next, going so far as to guide him in assembling fountains and showing him the ins and outs of silversmithing.

Since age 11, he has worn a silver snake pendant around his neck — his prized possession from that summer's hands-on lessons. “It is permanently attached because, since it was the first thing I ever made, I didn't know how to make a clasp,” he says. “A clasp is actually a fairly advanced item. I've still never made one.”

Magical machines

Shortly before Richard entered high school, NASA issued Owen new marching orders. Owen had taught electrical engineering at Stanford University prior to answering NASA's call for scientists in the 1960s; now his employer wanted him to return for a one-year fellowship. The family packed up and relocated to Palo Alto, Calif., a metropolis located near the school.

Enrolling in Gunn High School for his freshman year, Garriott discovered that many of the students were the progeny of Stanford faculty. As such, the school had the benefit of sampling hardware not yet available to the world at large. Gunn High's propensity for inheriting cutting-edge tech through its connections made its single teletype, remotely connected to a CDC Cyber mainframe stashed somewhere offsite, stick out like a sore thumb.

"I'm hard pressed to remember if they were used very often," Garriott says. "It was used in a language class: if you took a foreign language, some of the testing was done on this teletype, I think. But for me, it was instantaneously a magical machine. Even at that time, there weren't really programming classes for those machines, but it was easy for me to set up after-school or between-classes time to sit down and code them on my own."

At the end of the school year, the senior Garriott's fellowship came to an end, and the family returned to Houston. Garriott faced a summer of boredom. He'd just started feeling comfortable sitting at the terminal, only to be forced to join a high school that might not have one. Owen and Helen picked up on their son's interest and enrolled him in a seven-week computer camp held at University of Oklahoma, their alma mater, in 1974. "That was my first live-away-from-home event," he says. Nervous on his first day, Garriott busied himself unpacking. A knock sounded at his door. When he answered, a pack of kids greeted him by saying, "Hi." He responded with a more formal "Hello." Laughing, the boys declared that he sounded British. From that day forward, that's precisely what they called him: British.

"Now, as it turns out, I was in fact born in Cambridge, England, and I carry a British passport," Garriott says. "So I am, in fact, British. But I only lived there for one or two months, so I had no British accent. But having grown up in Houston near NASA, all of my neighbors were people brought in from foreign countries all over the world, so none of us had the local southern accent. My non-southern accent sounded to true southerners like a British accent. That's why they used the nickname, but the reality behind the nickname is why the nickname stuck."

Garriott and his cadre of friends learned about more than computers that summer. Like many teens growing up in the mid to late 1970s, they got sucked into the swashbuckling world of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons. "Lord British became my character in D&D games,” he says. “We were gaming all night and learning about computers and math by day."

Garriott rounded out his education with private sessions in romance. "That summer was formative in oh-so-many other ways,” he says. “It was also the first time I lived away from home, and the first time I was in a dorm that was co-ed. You can use your imagination as to what things might have occurred in a co-ed, seven-week program with a bunch of high school students living independently from their parents."

“That was the moment where teaching myself about computers switched from a fascination with the machine itself to specifically trying to implement games on computers.”

Two months later, Garriott set foot in Clear Creek High School as a sophomore and got some good news. The school had a single teletype. A summer spent programming and roleplaying filled him with renewed purpose. Readily copping to an average academic career, Garriott survived more than thrived in most classes, pulling in Bs and Cs. Science fairs were an exception. Beginning in kindergarten and continuing through graduation, he showed up to competitions with projects that dazzled judges. As he grew older, he went on to compete in district, regional, state, and international fairs, making even bigger splashes.

Entering Clear Creek's administration office, Garriott made a request and cited his proven ability to self-govern projects as incentive for them to agree." When I got back to Houston, I told the faculty, 'I want to continue working on this machine. There is no curriculum [for computer programming]. What I would like is your permission to, instead of taking a foreign language, please consider BASIC my foreign language.'"

The faculty gave him its blessing. Over his junior and senior years, Garriott and a few other students with permission to tailor their curriculum to their strengths embarked on self-guided journeys. At last, Garriott had found the perfect outlet for his interests in fantasy adventures and computers. "That was the moment where teaching myself about computers switched from a fascination with the machine itself to specifically trying to implement games on computers. Just before that, my sister-in-law had given me a copy of The Lord of the Rings to read. I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I was beginning to master this unusual teletype, which was the same I used during the summer at OU. So off I went to start making games."

For the final three years of his high school career, Garriott embarked on a self-guided foray into the world of game programming. "As long as I showed them at the end of the semester what I'd told them I'd do at the beginning of the semester, they said, "Sounds good. Here's your 'A.'" That's what I did. I taught myself."

Dungeons 'N' Dragons

Garriott had no choice but to fill the roles of master and pupil in his self-taught programming class. No teacher knew how to use the teletype beyond turning it on and loading programs. To round out what he'd learned at camp, he hit up newsstands for magazines like Byte! and Creative Computing and pored over their code listings. Each one contained a nugget of information he was able to roll into his growing bag of tricks, like algorithms for sorting data according to specific parameters.

Even though the listings were prone to typos, debugging them became another form of learning. “When you typed it into the computer you happened to be using, some of the commands wouldn't work right, or maybe they'd made a typo,” he says. “You'd have to debug it on your own and therefore figure it out on your own.”

Starting day and date with his first self-taught class, Garriott kicked off the design of DND1, his first roleplaying game. Inspired by D&D, DND1 was a straight dungeon-crawl: enter a dungeon, fight monsters, loot treasure. Teletypes were incapable of printing images, so he used text characters in place of graphics: asterisks for walls, blank spaces for floor tiles, dollar signs for treasures, and capital letters to represent monsters, like 'A' for a giant ant.

“My dad said, 'Richard, you know, you're undertaking a monumental feat. I'm not sure you're going to be able to pull off something this big.’”

DND1 proceeded by taking input from players and printing results on a paper roll. A tiny icon representing players was printed to the center of a grid signifying the dungeon. At the prompt, “What would you like to do next?,” players could move in the four cardinal directions, attack, or browse their inventory. “As soon as you input your command, the printer would re-print that top-down, 10-by-10 little grid,” Garriott says. “It took maybe 10 seconds to make each move.”

Time needed to refresh and print dungeon layouts was a critical reason players had to wait so long between moves. The teletypes dialed into a minicomputer located off-campus, and because minicomputers allowed multiple terminals to connect at once, each had to wait for the machine to process its commands and send back new data. The process was so slow that Garriott found himself turning to a more primitive yet faster method of coding.

“I would write [games] in notebooks. I still own all of these notebooks marked DND1, DND2, DND3, and so on,” he says. “Often I would only write 10 or 20 pages of the program out before thinking, ‘There's something fundamentally wrong about the approach I've taken to writing this one. I thought I was going to solve some big problem, but it just led me to other problems, so I'll start over.’”

Entering his senior year, Garriott purchased a new notebook and wrote “DND28” on the front. Around the time he applied finishing touches, he got an opportunity to make the jump to a new computer. "I happened to be in the office of the president of the school, and there was an Apple II. I said, 'What's that?' He explained that it was a new computer that had just come out."

Smitten, Garriott asked for permission to use the computer, and got it. His one-hour language class was moved to the office, where he set about writing DND28 in AppleSoft BASIC. Floppy drives were rare and valuable commodities, so he saved code on cassette tapes.

Garriott graduated that summer and picked up a job at ComputerLand, a chain of retail stores that specialized in the newfangled PC market. When he wasn't educating customers about the merits of owning a PC, he commandeered a free Apple II and pecked away at DND28.

Limited access to an Apple II compounded Garriott's difficulties. He used one at school and another during free time at ComputerLand. What he really wanted, what he really needed, was an Apple II of his own. He broached the subject with his father. Owen listened as his son outlined what he'd managed to accomplish on terminals and on the Apple II. His eyes widened slightly when Richard shared that his most recent version of DND came to 1,500 lines of code. That was more than most commercial software, based on what he knew of computers. When Richard finished his pitch, Owen processed the information and gave his answer.

“My dad said, 'Richard, you know, you're undertaking a monumental feat,” he says. “I'm not sure you're going to be able to pull off something this big.' I was like, 'Oh! How dare you underestimate me! Not only will I pull this off, but I bet you this program will work right out of the gate!’”

Owen rose to the challenge, giving his son some wiggle room. If Richard could get a new-and-improved version of his game up and running with minimal debugging, Owen would split the cost of an Apple II with him. Richard pulled it off, and Owen stayed true to his word. Saving up paychecks, Richard pooled his money with his dad's share and bought an Apple IIe, the latest and greatest in the family line. "The first remark statement is DND28b," says Richard, explaining that a REM (short for remark) statement in BASIC is a comment meant for humans reading the code and ignored by the computer.

“That became Akalabeth,” he says. “So there's a direct lineage from DND1 through to Akalabeth, through the rest of the Ultimas. There's a direct lineage through all of my work starting in the 1970s.”

The game evolved far past its original form, trading text characters for color graphics, and a new way to maximize immersion. “I took DND28, and I decided to change the top-down, text-based graphics into perspective-view, looking down the corridor,” he says. “That became DND28b. DND28b is literally Akalabeth, which is, in my mind, Ultima 0.”

Garriott planned to assemble dungeons from line-based graphics. Walls, floors and doors would appear as single-colored outlines, as would enemies. Constructing architecture and characters from wireframes took more forethought than merely plotting X-Y coordinates to form ceilings and floors. He wanted to create a realistic perspective based on distance: A door right next to the player's position should appear larger than a door farther down the hall. With concepts such as sine and cosine still fresh in his mind from high school, he mulled over the problem and sketched out the trig functions to get the job done.

To double-check his work, he consulted his favorite artist. “The first thing I did was sit down with my mother and say, 'Mom, if I want to draw a dungeon that you're in, how would you draw that on a canvas?' And my mother showed me the geometry techniques that she used.” Helen drew a line on a piece of paper and asked Richard to imagine it as the horizon. Then she drew a series of vertical lines meant to represent telephone poles — although Garriott's game-designer brain interpreted them as doors lining a corridor — and showed him the math he could use to calculate the precise distance between each “pole” and render them realistically on the screen.

Helen's geometry matched the results he had reached using trigonometry. To make absolutely certain he was correct, Richard went to Owen. “He used calculus,” Richard says. “He took the same piece of art that my mother did and used calculus to come up with a set of equations that ultimately arrived at the same results I had. Therefore, I had confidence in my trigonometry. With those equations, I had to go hand-calculate and hand-place pixels on the screen.”

Every pixel had to be plotted on the screen precisely where he wanted it. Sets of interconnecting lines, such as points where walls and ceilings touched, had to be calculated and drawn. "Steve Wozniak created that hardware,” he says. “If you're the hardware maker, your goal is to minimize the cost of the hardware, not make it easier to program. While I did some very clever things that made the hardware practical, [drawing] graphics using an Apple II was monstrously difficult."