Thinking Big

In 1983, I was asked to attend a meeting in Southern California to discuss a standard for CD-I, a scheme to build a CD player that would include interactive elements. The standard was being put together by Sony and Philips. The meeting consisted of about 20 people: engineers from Philips, a few Hollywood people, and some Atari Research people, including Alan Kay and myself. Like any huge committee meeting, this was a ghastly bore and a great waste of time, as the engineers picked over lots of tiny details that would only be significant much later in the standards-setting process.

I had looked over the technical specifications and was disturbed by the limited processing power that the standard included: They were contemplating an ...

Get Chris Crawford on Game Design now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.