ABSTRACT
Richard Garriott is the son of an astronaut and one of the pioneers of PC gaming. In the late 1970s, while still in high school, he wrote a game called Akalabeth and distributed it in plastic baggies. Initially, the marketing team wanted St. John to have the official launch of DirectX at COMDEX, which at the time was a pretty big event that took place every year in Las Vegas. St. John was counting on getting a lot of coverage from the hundreds of press people that were expected to attend the DirectX party. Naturally, the event coordinators at Microsoft expected the Halloween party to be a pretty tame affair, with some spook masks and some rooms set aside for the DOOM tournament. People experienced the GWAR event differently, some remembering specific details, and others remembering very little beyond the chaos.
