Catastrophes in Game Publishing

My first game console was Pong, which was THE first game console. Pong was created a few years before I was born, but by the time I could twiddle a knob it was the only thing in the household to jack into a TV. From there, we had an Atari, ColecoVision, my dad’s Apple IIe, and then the NES. It felt like the videogame industry was five guys with pocket protectors rummaging in a Radioshack to see what they could do with pixels until the day the NES launched. It was a phenomenon. You couldn’t find one when they first launched. It felt like something from the future, complete with a laser gun and a weird robot accessory. From there, we got Playstation, XBox, and an entertainment sector that is now bigger than all of cinema and book publishing combined. In 2010 or 2011, I got an email from one of the biggest names in this industry: Bungie. Their first hit was a shooter called Marathon, which was one of the few games playable on an Apple back when PCs dominated gaming. Their next big IP was…