interactive-entertainment
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The Guillemot Brothers Sell You the Ferrari Wheel and the DJ Deck
Five brothers from a Brittany village of a few thousand people built the joystick empire behind Microsoft Flight Simulator and the decks that teach the world to DJ. The famous siblings run Ubisoft. This is what the quieter ones do.
Sony Sells the Console at a Loss. The Real Money Starts When You Turn It On.
Inside Sony Interactive Entertainment - the PlayStation maker that turned a spurned Nintendo partnership into 93 million consoles sold, 125 million monthly players, and a $31 billion games business built on selling hardware cheap and everything after it dear.
Chip Lange Has Spent Three Decades Making Games Easier to Enter
From a Sega test bench to EA Sports, Origin and HiDef, Chip Lange has kept returning to one practical question: how do you invite more people into play - and give them a reason to stay?
HiDef, Inc.
HiDef, Inc. is a San Diego-based mobile game studio building social, creative-first games aimed at players of all backgrounds. Founded in 2019 by interactive-entertainment veterans - including game designer Jace Hall, industry operator Anthony Castoro, three-time NBA champion Rick Fox, and former Obama aide Dr. David Washington - the company launched publicly in 2021 with $9M in funding and a mission to make games with meaningful social impact. HiDef partnered with Unity to power its titles and with Snap Inc. to build a Bitmoji-based dance-and-music social game.
Windup Minds
Windup Minds is a Seattle-based, remote-first independent game studio building the next generation of virtual pets for virtual and mixed reality. Founded in 2023 by a crew of veterans from Oculus, EA, Microsoft and Bungie, the studio's debut, Stay: Forever Home, drops a magical companion named Ember into your living room via Meta Quest passthrough - a pet you feed, play with, and grow attached to. The bet: VR and MR are the only mediums that can make a digital creature feel genuinely, instinctively real.
Bernard Yee
Bernard 'Bernie' Yee is the CEO and co-founder of Windup Minds, a Seattle-based independent VR/MR studio building 'Stay: Forever Home,' a mixed-reality virtual pet named Ember. A games-industry lifer who started as a journalist and trained as a lawyer, Yee has produced or shaped some of the most influential titles in gaming - Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Peggle 2 at PopCap, Destiny at Bungie, Rock Band at Harmonix, EverQuest at Sony Online - before spending nearly a decade at Oculus/Meta Reality Labs producing landmark VR experiences like Dreamdeck, Toybox, First Contact and First Steps. His thesis: XR is uniquely capable of making a digital creature feel real, and a game can make you feel loved.
BEAT THE BOMB
BEAT THE BOMB is an immersive social entertainment company that turns teamwork into a real-life video game. Squads of four to six players suit up in hazmat gear and battle through a series of high-tech, motion- and touch-driven game rooms - dodging lasers, cracking codes, and racing a Bomb Clock. Fail the final mission and you get blasted with paint, foam, or slime. Founded in Brooklyn in 2017 by former Tough Mudder executive Alex Patterson, the company has grown into a national chain backed by $22M in venture funding, hosting corporate outings, school groups, and birthday parties across multiple U.S. cities.
Genvid Holdings Inc.
Genvid Holdings Inc. is a New York media-technology company that invented the Massively Interactive Live Event (MILE) - part TV show, part video game, where thousands of viewers vote on what happens next in real time. Founded in 2016 by Square Enix cloud-gaming veterans, Genvid has produced the Emmy-winning SILENT HILL: Ascension, the Webby-winning The Walking Dead: Last Mile, Rival Peak, and DC Heroes United. Backed by $166M in funding, the company is now extending its production infrastructure into studio-grade generative AI tooling for professional creators.
Jacob Navok
Jacob Navok is the co-founder and CEO of Genvid Holdings, the New York company betting that audiences would rather steer a story than just watch it. He coined the category MILE - Massively Interactive Live Event - and shipped it with Silent Hill: Ascension and The Walking Dead: Last Mile, where hundreds of thousands of viewers vote, bid, and play their way into canon. Before Genvid he ran worldwide business development at Square Enix and built its cloud gaming arm, Shinra Technologies. He raised $113M in a 2021 Series C to turn interactive streaming from a technology into a consumer brand.
Twitch
Twitch is the world's largest live-streaming platform, where creators broadcast video games, IRL content, music, and talk shows to a real-time audience that talks back in chat. Founded as a gaming-focused spin-off of Justin.tv in 2011 and acquired by Amazon in 2014, Twitch turned watching someone play a game into a social, participatory medium, building a creator economy powered by subscriptions, Bits, ads, and a culture of emotes and live community.
Reggie Chan
Reggie Chan is a Hong Kong-based serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Nex (nex.inc), the motion-gaming company behind the Nex Playground console - a $249 camera-based gaming device that outsold Xbox in the US during Black Friday 2025 and hit $150M+ in annual revenue. Before Nex, Chan co-founded EditGrid, an online spreadsheet startup acquired by Apple in 2008, then spent nearly a decade at Apple as a Software Engineering Manager before betting everything on body-motion entertainment. At Nex, his team has built technology that tracks 18 body points per player, enabling real physical movement as the controller - no wires, no wearables, just your body and a TV.