Richard Garriott, "...the legendary video game programmer and designer, noted as one of the PC Gamer’s 'Game Gods'" (according to his website) is to pay $30m (£15.5m) to join South Korean astronaut, Ko San, and ISS Expedition 18 commander Michael Fincke as they head for the International Space Station (ISS).

Once up there, Garriott could even pay an additional £8m to go for a walk...

Garriott, speaking in a recent edition of Space magazine, says we can forget about more games this year:

"This year is definitely where all my priorities and schedules have rotated to where space becomes the top priority and terrestrial activities become secondary. There's no aspect of the actual training that I perceive that's going to be scary or intimidating, I just look at it as going to be really smooth from here".

The creator of Tabula Rasa and the classic Ultima series, will, according to Space, "...spend about nine days aboard the space station, during which time he will perform protein crystallization and Earth observation experiments, some of which include photographing sites his father observed from Skylab in 1973."

But first he's got to spend six weeks training with the Russians in order to be able to get to the ISS via Soyuz.

15.5 million quid to go into space, eh? Remember that all this comes from Richard, his dad and brother putting copies of Ultima in small plastic bags around their kitchen table back and then flogging them mail order in the 1980s.