A Love Letter to Games

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about breakthroughs and the people behind them. Every breakthrough starts with someone who could have given up but didn’t. Someone who believed there was more on the other side of the obstacle. It all begins with imagination and hope and games are born from that same spark: every great game begins with those foolish enough to believe play and fun matter.

I’ve seen and lived through this in games. It’s early in the morning or maybe late at night, and it’s your third coffee or Red Bull. You’re close, you can’t seem to quit.

The code or design flow finally works, and suddenly, the world you’ve been building comes alive. Or maybe it’s watching someone play your first shipped game, seeing them smile, experiencing something you fought to keep.

That’s when you begin to realize: you aren’t just making games anymore. You’re a game maker.

And you want to keep doing it.

Going through old memories feels like flipping through a notepad of half-finished sketches and fragments of how I once lived through moments that now seem so distant they could have happened two centuries ago. Some things feel like a completely normal part of your life simply because you were born into them.

Other things arrive without an invitation.

Things we haven’t experienced before, wowing us, and leaving a kind of impact that makes the world feel new and makes us feel grateful to have been born when we were. That feeling of new, where your world suddenly expands, is like a new horizon seen for the first time, and once you’ve felt it, you’ll want to experience it over and over again.

Growing up in Ukraine, things moved slower. It often meant that everything arrived with a 5-to-10-year delay. In the late 90s and early 00s, I saw breakthroughs arrive one by one. To have a Walkman was a big deal. Music in your pocket, 12 songs that you could carry with you and listen to while walking from the bus stop to work or university.

Everyone had pagers strapped onto their belts. They would buzz with short-coded messages, Beep beep! And the next thing you’d hear was, ”I got to run! See you later!”

Then dial-up internet arrived, where no one could use the landline while you were online, of course. By the early 2000s, having a personal website meant you were ahead of the curve. Wired internet gave way to Wi-Fi, and suddenly the connection was always there, invisible, following you from room to room.

In the mid-2000s, those clunky mobile phones with long antennas gave way to sleek Nokias that fit in your pocket. By the late 2000s, even the beloved Nokia was yesterday’s news; we all wanted an iPhone just to swipe through a photo album on the screen with our finger. Then the movie Matrix blew our minds in 1999, and we were never the same again.

By the 2010s, our minds were blown again by the movie Avatar, and we knew we wanted… no, we expected faster and cheaper internet. We expected better iPhones every year, music on demand any time and everywhere.

And yet, through all those years, one frontier was always there, evolving alongside everything else: games.

Even when life was busy, there were moments for play. Super Mario and Montezuma passed on cartridges, the bulky plastic Tetris devices we snuck into our backpacks to play under school desks and during breaks. I watched friends walk home feeding their Tamagotchis with the same care you’d give something alive, checking on them between classes, genuinely worried when the pixels looked sad.

At home, the wolf-catching-eggs game sucked everyone in. My parents, who never had time for such foolish things, were suddenly hooked. Dad’s high score at catching eggs left us in the dust.

Those small moments were my first experiences with games. Simple screens, yes, but inside them were worlds that were never just about mechanics or pixels, they were about being pulled into something magical. Those moments felt small at the time, but they shaped how I saw the world.

I didn’t know it then, but play itself was teaching me to see what could be built next.

Games had a life of their own; they were new horizons and classics at the same time. They lived in the same space as Walkmans, iPhones, and Wi-Fi, but carried something different.

They invited us to play in those worlds that did not exist before, and then they felt real enough for us to get lost in. Looking back, I realize games advanced us not through one big revolution, but through a rhythm of small breakthroughs, invisible at first, yet world-changing over time.

Each new idea, mechanic, or piece of technology pushed the edge just a little further. Life was busy, studying during the day, working into the night, and I wasn’t paying close attention.

But even then, games never felt like they were just about quests or objectives; they were about imagining the impossible and making it real.

And in doing that, they carried technology further than most of us could have seen in the moment. Only years later did I begin to see how deeply games were intertwined with progress itself and how the tools built for play began to shape the real world.

The GPUs we chased for sharper pixels became the backbone of deep learning. Physics engines that once made barrels roll and walls crumble now train robots and self-driving cars. VR headsets that let us stand on cliffs or ride virtual horses now steady surgeons’ hands and help veterans heal. The endless maps of games seeded what we now call generative AI, and reinforcement learning toughened up in battles of Go and StarCraft before running factories and supply chains.

Games have always been about worlds. Worlds with rules, physics, and time. Worlds where we learned by exploring, failing, and trying again.

Games, though, aren’t built by themselves.

Behind every engine, every system, and every screen, there are people. People who bring their imagination, their stubbornness, grit, and their passion. If we think of games as new horizons, then game makers are the pioneers and builders who turn ideas into playable and fun.

Game makers arrive here by many paths, some more thorny than others.

Maybe you knew as a kid that you wanted to make games, and you steered your whole life toward that dream. Maybe you stumbled in by chance. Maybe it was a summer job in QA, a side project with friends, or a pivot late in your career from tech into games. But before long, you found yourself in the state of mind where you can’t stop thinking about how to make the game more fun, more engaging, more exciting.

For many, games became a home, a place where those who once felt like misfits could finally belong. A place where you didn’t have to be a square peg forced into a round hole, where fierce debates, bold ideas, and obsessions with design, rendering, code, music, art or narrative systems all found a home.

Perhaps you weren’t sure who you were in your twenties, but somewhere along the way, you discovered it: this is who I am, I’m a game maker! And yet you are never just that. You have a life beyond the screen, people who matter to you, commitments you keep, moments you show up for. Dinners cooked between builds, caring for whoever needs you, or celebrations squeezed between milestones.

Every game begins as something absurdly hard to do. Too big. Too ambitious. "No one wants this," they said about Minecraft. "Mobile games can’t be art," they said before Monument Valley. Yet game makers ship the impossible time and time again, building the game everyone swore would be impossible to make. Because the game industry invites this kind of attitude. This kind of imagination. It’s woven into the culture. In games it’s often that the hard thing is the worthwhile thing.

Things are always changing in games. You persevere through engine rewrites that add years to the development process. Platform shifts that obsolete your codebase overnight. Whole features deferred after months of perfecting them. That new mechanic you finally got right? Gone. Because the core loop evolved. Builds sometimes break minutes before the demo.

Yet the pursuit continues.

Because the goal is worth it. That worth is realized when a player gasps at the unlock of the new level you and your team spent weeks and months building. When a gamer breaks your game in a way that makes you wonder. When someone posts on social media: "I just finished it. I’m crying. Thank you." When someone writes that your game saved their life during depression, that it was the only thing that made them feel something. This is where that sense of belonging and that sense of purpose becomes something much bigger. This is where you realize you’re reaching people in ways you never expected. Meaningful ways. Powerful ways. And that is special.

What draws people here is not just work, it’s love. The love of play. The joy of building places where others can lose themselves, explore, and imagine. The burning desire to solve a hard problem well or make a mechanic feel just right, balancing a system until it works, shaping something fragile and alive, and sharing it with the world.

And while every game maker carries their own story, the reality is that you don’t stay here by accident. You stay here because it’s a part of who you are. And that creative and gritty journey is what makes games not only possible, but unforgettable.

The game makers are bound by curiosity about "what if," imagination of what could be, empathy for the player, and a sense of rhythm: "what would that feel like?"

A culture that blends systemic thinking, creativity, ingenuity, psychology, insanely good storytelling, and planning, with endless validation and iteration into a single act of creation and coordination. This is the field where many disciplines come together every day, in the daily grind of bringing something alive and fun.

And a feeling of belonging runs through it all: the endless iteration, the jokes about broken builds no one outside the room would ever understand, the nod of respect when a teammate couldn’t stop thinking about that one problem and found a solution for the bug that’s been haunting everyone for weeks.

The heartbreak when a piece of good work is deferred, and the pride of knowing it mattered anyway. The joy, shock, and disbelief when, after months of work, things come together and a player somewhere in the world laughs, cries, or feels wonder because of something made here. The work hits players in ways we hoped for but never expected.

Games are an emotional ride, alone and together at once. Alone, because every person carries a piece that only they can build. Together, because the near-disasters and sudden breakthroughs are lived as one team.

The moment when the makers and the players connect is special. That player who stayed up all night to finish your game or climb the leaderboard. They’re part of this journey now, too.

Because behind every game are hundreds of hands and minds, designers, artists, engineers, writers, producers, all weaving their individual sense of craft into something whole. And on the other side of the screen are millions of players who walk into your creation, breathing life into it, one decision, emotion, moment at a time.

What happens between them is profound: a connection through screen and emotion, between those who imagined a world and those who allowed themselves to play in it, seeking joy, escape, challenge, and skill. This is the miracle that gets repeated every day, the moment when imagination finds its echo.

Games are not distractions. They are playable horizons.

They are laboratories where we figure out what tomorrow holds. That is why games move the world forward. They exist because game makers cared enough to make the play feel real.

Right now, someone in a lab is building the impossible. The game that teaches AI to respond to humans with empathy. The world that will let paralyzed patients walk again through neural interfaces. The experience that will define how humanity explores Mars. The story that will make someone decide to keep living.

What new horizons are today’s game makers building? What impossible thing will seem obvious in ten years because someone refused to give up?

A future inspired by play, inspired by games, and evolving to fields beyond. Science, technology, and art are coming together like never before to solve humanity’s biggest problems and opportunities.

To everyone just starting: Welcome home. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s worth it. Yes, you belong here.

To my friends, colleagues, leaders and heroes in this wild and crazy industry of game making: Keep the pursuit alive, it matters. It always has and it always will. You rock.