Multi-millionaire Richard Garriott probably hasn't been to a garage sale in many years (unless they were actually selling garages), but he's making a game about them. Perhaps those are the "roots" he intended to return to with his recent startup, Portalarium.

Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale, going into closed beta "just after the holidays," is a Facebook game that claims to invent a new "shopping and collecting" category of social games. Players create homes and avatars, and then search in-game garage sales, storage units, estate sales, pawn shops, and other junkeries to complete collections of real-world items, using them to decorate their houses or flipping them in their own sales. Portalarium said that "national retailers" will also have in-game stores.

Garriott's own experiences do play into the design of Ultimate Collector. Many of the available items will be from his own collection of ephemera, including space memorabilia, "quack medical devices," and of course shrunken heads. And all of the real-world items will come with information about their provenance.

"In fact we've provided links in the game so players can go back to these websites to learn more about the items they've collected," said executive producer Dallas Snell, "and, in some cases, even buy them for real if they still exist and are available for sale."