Part VIII – Media & Entertainment

Video games from Ralph Baer’s Brown Box and Pong to Tetris, Doom, Steam and Fortnite, with the designers who made them. The part also covers computer animation at Pixar, digital music from MP3 to Napster and streaming, the pioneers of computer art, desktop publishing, e-books and virtual reality.

Ralph Baer and the Magnavox Odyssey — the Nazi-Germany refugee who invented the home video game console: the 1966 memo, the Brown Box, and patents that made Atari pay
Nolan Bushnell and Atari — Pong, the $250 startup that built an industry, Chuck E. Cheese, and the $50,000 “no” to Apple
Toru Iwatani and Pac-Man — a game designed for women, four ghost AIs, the up-direction overflow bug, and the level-256 kill screen
Ms. Pac-Man and the Enhancement Kit — two MIT students, Atari’s $15 million suit and $1.2 million truce, Crazy Otto bought by Midway, Midway v. Artic, and the kill screens of byte-sized counters
Yu Suzuki — Hang-On’s lean-to-steer bike, Out Run’s scaled sprites, the Model 1 and Model 2 polygon boards, Virtua Fighter and the 3D PlayStation, Shenmue’s cost, and the $6.3M Kickstarter
Sonic Team: Naka, Ohshima and Yasuhara — the programmer, the artist and the forgotten level designer behind Sonic, the one-button jump attack, Blast Processing, Phantasy Star Online, and an insider-trading conviction
Ken and Roberta Williams — the couple who invented the graphic adventure at their kitchen table, built Sierra On-Line, and sold it to a fraud
Will Wright — an island editor turned into SimCity (1989), Maxis, The Sims as the dollhouse nobody wanted, Spore and its DRM revolt
Colossal Cave, Zork, and Interactive Fiction — a caver’s FORTRAN side project, MIT’s Zork, and Infocom’s portable virtual machine fifteen years before Java’s
LucasArts and the Point-and-Click Adventure — SCUMM and Maniac Mansion, Gilbert’s rules against dying, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango’s modest sales, the cat-hair moustache, Telltale and ScummVM
Alexey Pajitnov and Tetris — seven pieces on a Soviet terminal, a license sold by a man who didn’t own it, the 1989 Moscow showdown, and 520 million copies
Henk Rogers — Japan’s first RPG, the tourist-visa trip to Elorg in February 1989, Tetris in the Game Boy box instead of Mario, The Tetris Company, and a Hawaii off oil
John Carmack — the engines behind Doom and Quake, given away as open source; then rockets, Oculus, and an AGI startup
The Video Game Industry — Pong, the 1983 crash, Nintendo, console wars, indie, and a $180B industry
The Video Game Console Wars — Atari vs. NES, Blast Processing, PlayStation, Wii, and platform exclusives
Mobile Gaming Before the Smartphone — Hagenuk’s 1994 Tetris, Armanto’s Snake, i-mode and i-appli, Java ME and BREW on the carrier deck, JAMDAT’s $680 million sale, and the N-Gage taco phone
MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds — MUD1 at Essex (1978), the DikuMUD/LPMud codebases, Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, EVE’s player-run economy, and virtual worlds as societies
EVE Online — one universe for every player, a board game that paid for it, an in-house economist, the Guiding Hand heist, the monocle revolt, the B-R5RB titan battle, and the second worlds CCP never finished
Richard Bartle — co-creator of MUD at Essex in 1978, British Legends on CompuServe, the achievers/explorers/socialisers/killers taxonomy, and the textbook of virtual-world design
Raph Koster — poet turned lead designer of Ultima Online, creative director of Star Wars Galaxies and its 2005 unmaking, the Laws of Online World Design, and A Theory of Fun
Richard Garriott — Akalabeth in Ziploc bags, the Ultima series and the virtues of Ultima IV, the words avatar and MMORPG, the $28M lawsuit, and twelve days on the space station
The PC Gaming Revolution — id Software democratizing 3D, Steam displacing retail, and modding as a development platform
Valve and Steam — two ex-Microsoft programmers, the 2004 Half-Life 2 forced-activation launch, digital distribution that killed retail, refunds and reviews as platform features, and the 30% cut
Gabe Newell — thirteen years producing Windows, Valve on his wedding day in 1996, Half-Life, Steam and the 30 percent, and piracy as a service problem
Tim Sweeney — ZZT from a Maryland basement, the Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and the 2020 decision to break Apple’s rules on purpose and sue over the 30 percent
Game Engines — Carmack’s id Tech, Unreal, and Unity; the engine-as-platform shift and Unity’s 2023 Runtime Fee revolt
Graphics APIs — OpenGL vs. DirectX, the Glide dead end, and the low-overhead reset of Vulkan, DirectX 12, and Metal
Pixar and Computer Animation — RenderMan, Toy Story, and the art of pixels
The CGI Revolution — Ed Catmull, ILM, and why Final Fantasy sank $137M in the Uncanny Valley
Ed Catmull — the 1972 hand, the z-buffer and texture mapping, NYIT, Lucasfilm, thirty-three years as Pixar’s president, and the no-poaching agreements that cost Disney $100 million
Turner Whitted and Ray Tracing — recursive ray tracing at Bell Labs in 1979, 74 minutes for two spheres, and the RTX hardware of 2018
Gary Demos — Triple-I, the first Cray X-MP as a render engine for The Last Starfighter, and the 1987 bankruptcy that wiped out the first CGI industry
Digital Photography and the Fall of Kodak — Sasson’s 1975 camera, the CCD, JPEG, the camera phone, and the company that invented its own destroyer
The Streaming Wars — Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and the reinvention of the cable bundle
The Digital Music Revolution — MP3, Napster, iTunes, and Spotify
Karlheinz Brandenburg and MP3 — the Erlangen dissertation behind MP3: a rejected patent, Suzanne Vega as test signal, and a stolen encoder that conquered the world
Napster and the P2P Music Revolution — 80 million users in eighteen months, shut down in 2001, and a music industry permanently changed
Computing and Music Creation — from Max Mathews at Bell Labs (1957) to the DAW and AI text-to-song
Computer Art and Generative Art — Stuttgart 1965, plotter drawings, Vera Molnár, Harold Cohen’s AARON, and the road to text-to-image
Processing and Creative Coding — Maeda’s Design By Numbers, Reas and Fry’s Processing, Wiring and Arduino, p5.js and openFrameworks, and Art Blocks’ $587 million month
Herbert W. Franke — oscilloscope and analog-computer art of the 1950s and 1960s, Ars Electronica, and West German science fiction
Manfred Mohr — a jazz saxophonist who learned Fortran, nights on the French weather service’s CDC 6400, the first one-man museum show of plotter art (Paris 1971), and fifty years of hypercubes
Peter Weibel — Vienna action artist turned media-art institution builder: Ars Electronica, the ZKM from 1999, The Algorithmic Revolution and Open Codes
Benoit Mandelbrot and Fractals — IBM’s maverick, the coastline paradox, the 1980 set, Bremen’s coloured Apfelmännchen, fractal terrain and fractal compression
Georg Nees and Frieder Nake — Bense’s students and the Graphomat Z64: the first computer-art exhibition (February 5, 1965), Schotter, the Klee homage, and the 1971 essay against computer art
Vera Molnár — the machine imaginaire of 1959, a plotter from 1968, 1% disorder, and sixty years of squares: the only woman among the plotter pioneers, working until 99
Harold Cohen — the Venice Biennale painter who learned to program at forty and spent forty-eight years writing AARON, the first program to make art on its own, and insisted it was not creative
A. Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton — Bell Labs’ microfilm recorder as studio: the Howard Wise show of April 1965, the Mondrian experiment, BEFLIX, and the 1967 nude made of transistor symbols
John Whitney and Charles Csuri — a war-surplus gun director as camera rig (Vertigo, Catalog), IBM’s first artist in residence, and the Ohio State tackle whose Hummingbird (1967) MoMA bought; Cranston/Csuri Productions, 1981–1987
The Podcast Revolution — RSS, Serial, and Spotify’s billion-dollar acquisition tour
The Desktop Publishing Revolution — Macintosh, PostScript, and PageMaker wiping out a print industry
Project Gutenberg and the E-Book — Michael Hart’s 1971 plain-text books, E Ink from MIT, Sony’s Librie, the Kindle, and the day Amazon deleted 1984
The History of Virtual Reality — Sensorama (1962), Sword of Damocles (1968), VPL, the CAVE, Virtual Boy, Oculus and Quest, Magic Leap, Vision Pro, and why mass VR remains elusive
Tom DeFanti — GRASS for Csuri’s artists, the Death Star briefing in Star Wars, ZGRASS for the Bally Arcade, the first data glove (1977), SIGGRAPH chair 1981–1985, and the CAVE, the 1992 room of stereo walls
Palmer Luckey — the garage headset Carmack showed at E3 2012, the Oculus Kickstarter, the $2B Facebook sale, the 2016 donation that ended it, and Anduril, the weapons company valued at $61B in 2026
The Creator Economy — YouTube Partner Program, Patreon, Substack, TikTok, and power-law creator income