Tag Archives: Gaming
Minecraft creator outbids Beyonce and Jay-Z for $70 million home
Well here’s a success story. Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of the insanely successful world-building game Minecraft, had a huge pile of cash burning a hole in his pocket after selling his company to Microsoft for $2 billion.
So what does he do? What we would all do! He outbid power couple Beyonce and Jay-Z to buy a Beverly Hills property for $70 million, making it one of the priciest homes in the country and a standout even for Beverly Hills.
That link has a slideshow of images from inside the home, and shows the power of the gaming industry. He instantly became wealthier by far than any celebrity once his company was bought. Stay in (programming) school kids.
Here’s another pic of his new house as a teaser.
Game On
I have another PC mod story for later in the week, in the meantime the setup this guy has to play Elite: Dangerous is nothing if not worthy of a look.
Elite: Dangerous is a space exploration game, and, if you can believe it, takes place in a galaxy that is a 1:1 scale of our own Milky Way, and it uses procedural generation (meaning the content is generated by the software, not pre-supplied by the developers/designers) to create its planets and stars and whatnot.
In order to experience it to its full potential, one player in Germany dedicated a whole room and a whole lot of technology to re-creating, sort of, a whole cockpit. You can see it in the image above, and the incredible way it works in the video below.
Alienware releases their Steam Machine
That headline requires more explanation than you might think. You see, this is a tale of three separate companies all coming together to make PC gaming more accessible. I don’t know how well they’ve succeeded, but let me give you some background, some opinion, and you can make your own decisions about whether or not this is a step in the right direction or not.
The first company we’ll mention is the well-known PC builder Dell, formed by Michael Dell who built PCs in his dorm room, sometimes going so far as to scrounge components from dumpsters. The company had huge success in the 90s, making its founder one of the richest men in the world, however they have since fallen somewhat from that high point although they still do very well. I personally only used Dells for many years, and for the price they’re good machines.
