Spacewar!: Birth of the Game Industry

Spacewar!: Birth of the Game Industry

November 30, 2018 0 By Brian Crecente

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It was a pilgrimage of sorts.

Some of the biggest, most established names in the nearly $140 billion game industry quietly descended on Washington D.C. this week.

Names like Warren Spector, Richard Garriott, Todd Howard, Ted Price, Tracy Fullerton, Ed Fries — museum curators, university chairs, association leaders. It was a cabal of creators there not as speakers, but listeners and fans. They were there to honor the birth of an industry that has grown to what would’ve been unimaginable heights decades ago.

For an hour Thursday night, packed into Coulter Plaza Stage in the bottom floor of the Smithsonian American History Museum’s west wing, the video game industry’s thriving present sat quietly facing its inceptive past: a group of seven elderly men neatly arrayed in chairs recounting the almost accidental creation of the video game industry through the birth of its first released game.

To read the rest of this story, which first ran on Nov. 30, 2018, visit the Variety.