Richard Garriott, also known as Lord British, is one of the pioneers of the games industry. His Ultima series is the longest running in the history of games - the first came way back in 1979 - and it's still going strong with Ultima Online: The Second Age. He is an avid astronomer (his dad used to be an astronaut) and an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

What games are tickling your fancy at the moment?
In the last six months, I haven't actually been playing many games, but if you look back a little further, the last set of games I played a ton of was Command & Conquer, Warcraft and Heroes of Might & Magic II. For me that was kind of interesting as I hadn't been a strategy gamer before that but as soon as I played C&C it really grabbed me.

What was the first computer game you ever played? Was it any good?
I think it was probably an adventure game, you know, one of the text adventure games, on a mainframe at a local business near where I grew up. I thought that was an outstanding game, very inspirational.

Any particular favourites from yesteryear?
If I look back really far, one of my favourites was a game called Sundog, by a company called FTL (Faster Than Light). It was a kind of Ultima meets Wing Commander. It was a fabulous game with a character that could run around on the ground and jump in a spaceship. You could do like Star Trek, in the sense that you could move around inside your spaceship and go to the engines or the storage rooms and you could fly around in first-person 3D through space and fight the bad guys. Excellent game.