Even More Groundbreaking Alumni-Developed Video Games

Our post listing five revolutionary video games spawned from the minds of MIT alumni generated much buzz—and a list of other games and developers that should also be included.

So, like the best of all sequels, here is another installment of groundbreaking, inventive, and really cool video games, all with ties to MIT.

1974 and 1978: Maze and Trivia Dave Lebling ’71, SM ’73 (of Zork fame) and Greg Thompson ’78 cowrote Maze, the first 3-D multiplayer first-person shooter game based on a simpler game Thompson had worked on at NASA Ames. It was played over the ARPANET to USC as a tour de force. Trivia, a user-contribution trivia game that was a run-up to Zork, was created by Lebling; Tim Anderson ’75, SM ’77; and Marc Blank ’75 and widely played over the ARPANET. Lebling also wrote in to note that many, if not most, of Infocom's games were written by MIT alums and that Stu Galley SM ’70 should be added to the list as an Infocom "Imp."

1980 & 1981: Defender and its sequel, Stargate Larry Demar ’79 codesigned these games. These days, his company, Leading Edge Design (LED), creates gaming concepts for casinos.

1981: Ms. Pac-Man Was originally conceived as a bootlegged hack of Pac-Man called Crazy Otto and created by Doug Macrae NON ’81 and Kevin Curran NON ’81, founders of then video-game company General Computer Corporation. Eventually Atari hired the pair to make games for them legitimately.

1984: John Madden Football Rob Hunter ’73 made the deal and signed the contract between CBS Video Games and John Madden for the original game. He codeveloped the game construct (as far as he knows, the first ¾ over-the-shoulder view of any sports game) with Madden's active involvement.

1992, 1994, & 1998: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, System Shock, & Thief Philip Tan ’01, SM ’03 wrote in to say that Looking Glass Studios had numerous MIT alums working on its first-person computer role-playing, action role-playing, and stealth video games. Those alums dispersed to various parts of the industry (like Harmonix, Electronic Arts, Mind Control Software, and Irrational Games/2K Boston) when the company closed.

1999: Asheron's Call Eri Izawa ’92 codesigned this game, a first-generation MMORPG.

1999-2005: NBA 2K, 2K1, & 2K2; Panzer Dragoon; Fantastic 4 Trevor Stricker ’97 codeveloped these and is currently working on Quick Hit Football with Denise Ichinco ’09.

2004: Revolution Students and faculty at MIT's Education Arcade developed this multiplayer, American Revolution-themed role-playing game.

2007: The Witcher Sande Chen ’92 was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for outstanding achievement in videogame writing for this, the 2007 PC role-playing game of the year.

2009: Cogs Rob Jagnow SM ’01, PhD ’05 and his company, Lazy 8 Studios, released this game for the PC in April. It's an innovative puzzle in which players build a variety of machines from sliding tiles. Jagnow did all the programming and level design.

And, of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore created to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium.