Last week, Richard Garriott announced that he will visit the International Space Station, joining the few, wealthy individuals who have enjoyed commercial space flight, and marking the first time that video games have ever actually taken a gamer into space.

Richard Garriott is best known for his long history of creating Ultima games, a game world he not only created, but also presides over as Lord British. More recently, he has been working with NCsoft to create Tabula Rasa, a massively multiplayer online game that should be released on November 2. Garriott operates in Tabula Rasa as his alternate avatar, General British.

Garriott’s trip to the International Space Station will take place in October of 2008, making Garriott the sixth private space tourist to reach the ISS. The trip is being coordinated by Space Adventures, a private space tourism company of which Garriott is Vice-Chairman.

Garriott's father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut who participated in Skylab and Spacelab-1. ExtremoZyme, a company founded by Owen Garriott, will be helping fund Richard Garriott’s journey so that the mission can include research into protein crystallization that might help develop drugs to treat common diseases.

Ultima fans will be disappointed to learn that Richard Garriott will travel to the ISS aboard a Soyuz TMA-13 craft, and not traveling to the ISS via a moongate.