Few people can say they witnessed and shaped the birth of the video game industry. During a visit to the Video Game History Museum in Zagreb, designer, programmer, and executive Don Daglow shared stories from his five-decade career. It began with a encounter with a college computer terminal and grew into some of the medium’s most important work.
Daglow’s path into games began far from any tech lab: “I was studying to be a writer, specifically a playwright,” he recalled. “One day I walked into my dormitory and heard this sound coming from what had been a little storage room. I stuck my head in and there were two computer terminals in there. A student looked at me and said, ‘Welcome to the computer room. Would you like to learn how to use the computer?’ Why yes, yes I would.”
That unexpected access to a university mainframe changed everything. One of the first games he encountered, a text-based Star Trek simulation that “printed out a script”, felt like interactive theater. “I look at that now. I’m studying to write for theater. This is a game that prints out a script. And my head just exploded. Interactive theater. We can program the computer to write,” he said. “At that moment, I fell in love with game design.”
From those early text adventures and mainframe experiments in the 1970s, Daglow pioneered foundational ideas across genres. He wrote one of the earliest computer role-playing games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and implemented line-of-sight and fog-of-war mechanics on machines with tiny amounts of memory.
Neverwinter Nights is a graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Beyond Software and published by Strategic Simulations. It ran from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.
“We could draw maps using asterisks and slashes and dashes,” he remembered. “No graphics, still only alphanumeric text.” He later created the first interactive computer baseball game and introduced television-style camera angles and the now industry-standard visual indicator circle under active players.
A radio advertisement in 1980 prompted Daglow to leave teaching for industry work at Mattel’s Intellivision division. There he fused educational simulators and classroom activities into Utopia (1981), widely recognized as an early city-building and “god” game. “I basically said, we’ve got these old simulators that have been on mainframes for a long time. I’ve got games I designed on the cafeteria floor at our school. If you put them together, you’ve got Utopia,” he said.
The explosive growth of the early 1980s led to an equally dramatic crash in 1983. Daglow recalled how rapid expansion and market saturation proved unsustainable: “Video games kept growing and growing. We became a multi-billion-dollar industry from nothing in probably three years.” By August 1983, he said, retailers would not take new titles: “By August of 1983, you could not sell a single game because the toy stores would reject them.” That collapse, however, created new opportunities.
Trip Hawkins recruited him to Electronic Arts, where a belief in interactive art shaped Daglow’s outlook. “Can a computer make you cry?” the company famously asked; Daglow embraced the idea. “I believed that at our best, we interact with theater, with music, art. I believe passionately, after doing this for 55 years, that at our best, we touch people and their lives, and we influence them the way any form of art does.
Daglow went on to direct development at Brøderbund and founded Stormfront Studios in 1988, leading it for two decades. At Stormfront he helped create Neverwinter Nights (1991) for AOL, the earliest graphical MMORPG, and later worked on major licensed hits like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which he calls “economically my biggest hit ever” and notes earned a DICE Award for Outstanding Visual Engineering.
Yet commercial success sometimes brought creative constraints. “Once you do a successful movie game, suddenly now that’s what you’re going to do,” he observed. Movie tie-ins, he argued, can bind a game’s fate to a film’s success: “Even if you have the world’s best game, if the movie fails, your game is not going anywhere.”
Stormfront ultimately shuttered after a cancelled next-generation original IP in 2008, but Daglow’s career evolved rather than ended. He shifted into consulting, mentorship and industry leadership, serving as an advisor for startups, volunteer President of the AIAS Foundation and Senior Director for Industry Relations at The Strong National Museum of Play.
“Sometimes I’m doing design. Sometimes I’m doing executive work. Sometimes I’m coaching or teaching. It can be any of those things,” he said. One memorable role was mentoring a lead writer on a major project: “I got hired as the game writer to be his coach and advisor as he wrote the game.”
Daglow remains frank about the industry’s recurring cycles and current challenges. He warns that ever-growing budgets do not guarantee success: “Just because you have a beautifully created game, and a very big game, and a game that looks like a movie, doesn’t make money. You cannot sell games that are not fun to play.” He notes that larger projects shrink the pool of competitors but increase financial risk, while indie creators can thrive by connecting deeply with audiences.
Utopia is a 1982 strategy video game developed and published by Mattel Electronics for the Intellivision. It is often regarded as one of the first city-building games.
He singled out Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please as an exemplar indie game: “Papers, Please was made for less than $100,000 by one developer who was brilliant. I think it’s an absolutely brilliant design.”
For Daglow, audience connection outweighs technological spectacle: “In the end, what kind of technology we have does not matter as much as what kind of audience we have. Connecting with an audience, that’s what makes money. That’s what creates long-term value.”
His views on remakes and remasters follow the same line: embrace modern technology only when it honors the original emotional core. “If they are using modern tech, modern graphics, modern everything, to bring that feeling to a new audience, I really support that. If it’s just putting some pretty pictures on old games to make more money, that’s different.”
Across five decades he returns repeatedly to one idea: games are about human connection. He cites titles like Planetfall and Seven Cities of Gold not for technical prowess but for emotional impact: “You came to care so much about what was going on.”
Even now, still active in creative work, Daglow feels the same thrill as a young game designer. “I’m working on a game right now,” he revealed. “We’ve got four team members working part-time on an indie game. We’ve just gotten to the point where we’ve got the funding, and now we’re making it pretty. I get the same excitement working now as I did when I was 19 years old.”
His summation of a long, influential career is both practical and lyrical: “When you connect with the audience, is when you not only love games, but games love you back.”
