How did airG begin?
FG: We started because three former engineering students, including myself, used to play video games on these big $50,000 Sun computers in engineering labs, where thousands of dorks like us would interact through text-based games like Zork and Dungeons & Dragons. They were powerful machines, and because they were networked with other powerful machines around the world, you could play BBS-style text-based games with many others . . . causing you to fall behind forever in your studies because your magic orb would get stolen if you didn’t stay online all the time (laughs). In 2000, we looked at mobile phones and the type of experience and latency they offered, and we thought “why not build a massively multiplayer game where we could put thousands of people together interacting on their cellphones?” We did do that, and we managed to convince ten or fifteen telcos, who sold the game to their customers. We put almost 200,000 people together, and what we found really quickly was that they wer
