World of gamecraft: Origins From a young fan of gaming and graphics to a major industry player, Steve Collins , PhD (1996), BA (1991), has transformed the video game scene id you know that Sir Clive Sinclair passed away three years ago? Yes, other things might have overshadowed his death at age 81 but readers who specialise in screens and circuits will have sighed to see the name for the first time in so long. Sinclair’s name floats into the reveries of people like Trinity Computer Science department icon Steve Collins. Collins is a child of the 8-bit era whose love of gamecraft goes back deep into a time that smartphone generation kids can scarcely imagine. Into smoking in pubs, the Pope’s visit, probably smoking in church as well, of cartridges and cassettes on carpeted floors, of switching off the Angelus to make way for 3D Monster Maze, wherein a Tyrannosaur of harrowing blockiness slowly bore down on Sinclair users in a corridor. Also, of long ‘loading times’ and endless crashing that gave one a chance to figure out for oneself how these weird machines worked: there was a lot of formative loneliness. When he was twelve, Steve Collins’ father (a lecturer in Regional Technical College, Dundalk) brought home a Sinclair ZX-81, manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, and named for the year of its appearance, a hot update on the foregoing ZX-80. ‘It was a little slab of plastic with a Z80 processor inside it and a screen refresh rate of maybe once per second, so every time you pressed a key or it executed an instruction, the screen would jump.’ The year after the ZX-81 saw the launch of the Commodore 64, another alchemist’s toolkit, but miles ahead of anything else, with dedicated hardware for video and music. It would outsell competitors like Apple for the remainder of the decade. Collins’ adolescence was timed perfectly to the first emergence of the Digital Empire, and driving it all was the promise of better games. ‘I was one of those bedroom coders you hear about, back in the 80s, developing games on the C64.’ Collins found he loved graphics and design. He sold his first game while in his first year at Trinity. At the time, the divisions of labour in technology were different. He aimed to be a ‘systems analyst, wearing glasses and a lab coat sitting beside some huge machine with Winchester tape drives and a green screen.’ He studied with Professor John Byrne, a pioneer in the science and its study in Ireland. But he kept making games. Tellingly, his first milestones in Trinity were graphics- related: BA Computer Science, 1991 (Gold Medal, 1st Place for final year dissertation on Parallel Ray Tracing ); PhD Computer Graphics, 1996 (thesis on Global Illumination Algorithms for Photorealistic Image Generation ). The push for better graphics processing was the forge of the first modern games and, now, the AI boom and much of the industry as a whole. With another PhD student, Hugh Reynolds, Steve set up the first graphics group in the college, the Image Synthesis Group, supported by their mentor, Professor Byrne. ‘We both really were interested in the commercialisation of technology. His [Reynolds’] area of research was in physics and simulation of the real world and mine was in graphics… it's sort of funny to look back. This was the mid-90s. Games were not a thing in serious research at all. You couldn't say ‘games’. Because that wouldn't get funded.’
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