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Funny is right. Gamers are not marginal now, not to the science nor the macroeconomics of IT. They act like the soldiers of the Empire, pushing out and patrolling its boundaries, while games makers are the recognised inventors and explorers, responding to gamers’ messaging, testing their limits, and growing in symbiosis with them. For instance, it might be worth noting here that NVIDIA, the company whose GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) designs underpin the current AI boom, also began life in the 90s as a startup focused purely on graphics acceleration. Among the most valuable companies on earth now, it is hard to believe that, 25 years ago, it was struggling to help Sonic the Hedgehog move faster for the Sega Dreamcast! Steve’s life in games also picked up pace in the 90s boom: with the parade of SNES, PlayStation, and other consoles, he and his friends began to see the things they’d dreamed about and worked on in the lab given exhilarating form. A trip to Japan to work with Hitachi had given a glimpse of how the pop and corporate cultures and ancient traditions of that country were all converging in game design. He co- founded what would become Havok, with Hugh Reynolds; while the dot-com bubble slowed things down, their middleware innovations, made to be plugged into the engines (game blueprints) of other developers, would be ready for more sustained online and mobile-based booms in the early 2000s. One imagines also that the constraints of smartphone game design must have felt like a return to the elementary beauty of early console and arcade games. The next two and a half decades: Collins morphed from researcher to founder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to board member for a dozen startups, to partner in investing firms, all while keeping a connection to Trinity as a teacher. The innovation flood that followed the iPhone was determinative of his career, as he co-founded Swrve in Dublin, a mobile-focused venture fusing games and marketing. That mobile game craftsmanship led to a four-year CTO role with the Swedish company King Games, makers of Candy Crush Saga. What of Frontline, the venture fund he joined as partner in 2017 for which he is now Venture Partner and Advisor? In Collins’ words, the ‘actual capital is the least valuable part’ of a network-building project that helps Europeans get comfortable with opening opportunities in the US, and mid-phase US companies extend to Europe. Right now, a year of downturn in VC funding is leaving companies looking for a way out of the maze, even as AI giants and startups are riding a hype that may be excessively buoyant. Steve Collins spends a lot of his time on AI these days. The final word, with an eye to up-and-coming local geniuses: ‘There's likely many false starts and dead-ends to be faced, as we all come to grips with how these new AI models can be harnessed. We've all heard about the challenges, from model hallucinations to existential questions about how to control the models, but without doubt, there are openings to explore. For Ireland, with a great track record of building companies, in particular in the B2B space, and with many of the main actors in the AI space having a presence here, and the barriers to entry to building a company being the lowest they've ever been, this feels like a real opportunity.’ As for the old masters, figures like Sinclair, and Bob Russel and Jack Tramiel of Commodore Business Machines – makers of the C64 – aren’t as prominent in the shrine of early computing as the likes of Jobs and Gates, but their names carry a special aura as the last of them fade away. Their origin stories carry special resonance. Sinclair started out by selling electrical hobby kits, before designing a pocket calculator. The Polish-born Auschwitz survivor Tramiel began by importing typewriters into post-war America. By the time they were preparing products for the kids of the 80s, these founders had refined a love of affordability and accessibility: the clunky boxes they delivered might have done a lot to shape the sleek devices and games of today, by inspiring the likes of the young Steve Collins.
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Novels & nostalgia Paul Murray, celebrated author and Trinity alumnus, reflects on the enduring influence of his alma mater on his life and work, from the chaotic creativity of his student days to his current role as Rooney Writer Fellow ‘T rinity feels like part of the fabric of my life: I was a student here. I taught a creative writing class here. Now I’m Rooney Fellow in the Long Room Hub, and I live not far away… it feels like I’ve been coming in and out of Trinity since I left school.’ Paul Murray, prizewinning novelist, graduate, BA(1997) and current holder of the Rooney Writer Fellowship – launched in 2021 by Dr Peter Rooney, Director of the Rooney Prize Foundation – has a sense of déjà vu being back on campus, or perhaps a sense of being a character in one of his own novels. Murray’s fictional characters also ‘come in and of Trinity’: Charles Hytholoday, protagonist of his debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes , is a Trinity drop-out, and the boarding school boys in his second novel, Skippy Dies are bound for Trinity (some anyway; others will go to UCD - the fictional school is based on Murray’s old school, Blackrock College). His most recent novel, The Bee Sting , a family saga hailed by the Los Angeles Times as ‘a big, sprawling social novel’, is about many things – most obviously, it is the Great Irish Recession Novel that everyone was waiting for – but within the sprawl is a campus novel, or rather two campus novels: Trinity in the early 1990s, when Dickie Barnes attended, and Trinity in the early 2010s, when his daughter Cass does. Trinity is one of the locales which grounds the novel, connecting characters through the generations (another such locale is the more sinister bunker in the woods behind the Barnes’ house). Dickie thinks that passing beneath Front Arch is ‘going through a portal’; two decades later Cass’s friend, Elaine, noting that Front Arch is ‘actually a little arch set inside a big arch’. Dickie's and Cass's Trinity’s are very different – and yet, when he drops Cass off at Front Arch, Dickie feels ‘as if no time has elapsed at all – as if his own life were still there, continuing somehow untouched by the years in some eternally resonating present’. He is surely not the only
