At some point in the mid-'80s game designer Richard Garriott got a letter in the mail that declared him "the satanic perverter of America's youth." Earlier this month he was inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame. Yes, these two events are related.

On February 9 at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Garriott became the ninth inductee to the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' Video Game Hall of Fame, joining a list that includes original inductees Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and Zelda) and John Carmack (co-creator of "Doom").

Most of the night was spent announcing games that won for Best Gameplay or Best Sports Title, awards that kept the audience in its seats. But when the night's host, comedian Jay Mohr, presented a statue — the only one made from gold — from the Academy to Garriott, the crowd cheered in appreciation. When Garriott and his brother/ business partner Robert brought out their mother to bask in the glory, the crowd finally rose to its feet.

"I've been very fortunate to have a few points in my career where I can look back and say, 'Those were milestones,' " Garriott told MTV News a few hours before the awards show. Would he consider his career Hall of Fame worthy? "Yeah, I suppose so."

Richard Garriott is renowned in game circles for creating the fantasy role-playing series "Ultima." While "Final Fantasy" got Nintendo and PlayStation's increasingly mainstream fans excited about RPGs in the '90s, Garriott's "Ultima" had already won a fanbase on home computers the previous decade. And in 1997, seven years before "World of Warcraft" began wooing millions of players into America's most successful massively multiplayer game, there were the Garriotts taking a pioneering stab at it with "Ultima Online."

That, according to Joseph Olin, president of the AIAS, is a Video Game Hall of Fame career indeed. Olin said the 15-member Academy board of top video game professionals considers up to four candidates a year for their contributions to game craft. "We need some people we can single out within the sea of media and say, 'These guys are incredible, these are our Spielberg and Lucas,' " Olin said.

Like many things video game, the AIAS Hall of Fame is virtual. There's no building — just a Web site, found by navigating Interactive.org (although two weeks after the awards, the site still didn't include Garriott). Last year in San Francisco, the Sony Metreon entertainment complex literally started going a few steps further by introducing Walk of Game (WalkOfGame.com), a place where stars commemorating gaming greats are plastered into the floor Hollywood-style.

The 44-year-old Garriott published his first full game, "Akalabeth," when he was 19. The third youngest of three children, he grew up in Houston as the son of an astronaut. "Not only was our dad an astronaut, but literally our [two] neighbors were astronauts as well as the guy who lived behind us."

Garriott's father did a tour on the space station Skylab, and young Garriott could use a special phone in his mom's room to make a call right up to dad. "I could literally be sitting at home, need some help on my math homework, go to the Batphone, press the button that would call NASA, they would call up to my dad on Skylab, and I would just get help with my homework."

This was the ordinary stuff. What really fascinated young Richard Garriott was "Lord of the Rings" and, later on, "Dungeons & Dragons." And so in 1981, he created the Tolkien-inspired fantasy world of the "Ultima" games. For the first three editions, he threw in a dash of "Star Wars" and "Time Bandits" — "everything I thought was cool," he said, not all of it heavily disguised.

By 1984 Garriott was looking to do something new, something that felt like it was wholly his. There was one other motivation: "In those days, that was when a lot of fantasy things were coming under fire from religious extremists. I would get hate mail written from people who had never played or seen any of my games, just seen the advertisements we put out, and go — this is a quote — 'You are the satanic perverter of America's youth.' " Richard eventually made a T-shirt with that accusation and put a sign on his door calling him "The Prince of Darkness." But back then, he says, he really was bothered by the criticism.

"It did cause me to reflect on why people were getting this message out of ['Ultima']," he said. He decided "Ultima IV" would be a little different: It would challenge players with ethical dilemmas and encourage them to pursue noble virtues like honor, honesty and sacrifice. "As I was developing that game I was sincerely worried that it would be a total failure because most games ... pretty much [consist of] mindless violence. I was really worried that no one would get it."

Instead the game was a critical and commercial success and, along with "Ultima VII," became Garriott's proudest accomplishment.

In 1997 the Garriott brothers broke new ground with "Ultima Online," one of the first big successes in massively multiplayer games. It too would be a test of gamers' virtuousness. Players loved to push the game's limits, poking at the possibilities of what could be done in a way that prefigured the "griefing" behavior that makes so many of today's online games often lawless frontiers. On the last day of the game's beta test, players managed to even temporarily kill Garriott's own supposedly invincible Lord British character. America's youth were turning the tables on their so-called perverter.

Garriott and his brother are now the lead business and creative forces, respectively, of NCsoft, the company that publishes the "City of Heroes" and "Guild Wars" MMOs. Up next is "Tabula Rasa," a sci-fi MMO that Garriott says will rewrite the rules of how such games are played.

The fascination for outer space is indeed finally there. It actually had Garriott financing a "couple hundred thousand dollar" study that led the Russians to send the first paying civilian, Dennis Tito, to space. Now Garriott hopes to spend his earnings as a developer to buy his own way up there. After all, he's already gotten into the Video Game Hall of Fame — that's a club with even rarer company.