new yorker

[A revista New Yorker revelou vários talentos da língua anglo-saxófica (por exemplo, Truman Capote) e é "palco" de artigos de fundo importantes e curiosos. Aqui fica um exemplo sobre o criador de video jogos Will Wright.]

Profiles
GAME MASTER
Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims. Can he do it again with Spore?
In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell started a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California. As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an early computer game called Spacewar. The game’s developers, a group of graduate students who were part of the Tech Model Railroad Club, at M.I.T., an early proving ground of computer hackers, had never considered selling the game; their idea was to demonstrate the appeal of interactivity, and to take a first small step toward simulating intelligent life on a computer. Bushnell’s ambition was more worldly. He wanted to manufacture coin-operated game-playing machines and license them to amusement arcades. He foresaw a new kind of midway hustle, in which the hustler would be inside the machine. “The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games,” he later said, “I put those sales pitches in my automated box.” From this unlikely marriage—the computer lab and the carnival—the video-game industry was born.
mais in New Yorker