Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.
From the moment Alex Seropian’s father brought home an Atari 2600, he was “hooked” on video games.
By his final year at the University of Chicago, Seropian, SB’91, was coding his first game. Within a decade, he had transformed the gaming world.
He and classmate Jason Jones co-founded Bungie Studios and released industry-shifting games like Myth, Marathon and Halo: Combat Evolved—a game that launched with Microsoft’s original Xbox console and became a blockbuster franchise. Seropian would go on to work at Microsoft and Disney, and founded several more gaming studios, including Wideload Games, Industrial Toys and Look North World.
Seropian returned to campus to give the opening keynote for the Oct. 17-19 Year of Games symposium, which kicked off a year-long celebration of game study, design and fandom at UChicago.
That would have been inconceivable to college-age Seropian.
“The idea that there are folks who are academically thinking about video games as craft, something that was a basement hobby back in the '80s and '90s, is mind-blowing,” Seropian said. “Now it’s being celebrated and studied. Being able to come back here and talk about it is awesome.”
During the keynote, a live recording of the podcast My Perfect Console, Seropian traced his storied career in the gaming industry. After founding several studios, he’s never lost his love of the game.
“I love games because play tickles some part of the human brain,” Seropian said. “As a player, they can transport you somewhere else. As a maker, there’s no more interesting, creative, technical, hard to do, rewarding craft in the world.”
Tutorial mode
When he arrived at UChicago from the New York City suburbs, Seropian was less concerned with the life of the mind than making friends, dancing on tables at the Checkerboard Lounge and pursuing his entrepreneurial ambitions. Armed with a black-and-white Mac computer, he quickly began printing and selling his chemistry notes to the chagrin of the department.
To his own surprise, Seropian also discovered a love of math.
“Through my years here, I learned to see myself differently. I never would have thought in a million years that I would major in math,” he said. “This place gave me enough confidence to feel like I could figure it out.”
Though there was no computer science program, Seropian took the few offered computing classes. (Today students can join a robust computer science program as well as study game design as a Media Arts and Design major.) In a machine learning course, he scoffed at a classmate with an overly fancy computer. That was Jones, who was also working on a game of his own.
By his fourth year, Seropian was on the brink of figuring out another passion: how to combine his love of business and games.
“I was still playing games. I knew how to code. I thought: I could do this,” Seropian said. “If you're really into something, you figure it out. That was my mindset then, it's my mindset now.”
In his apartment on 56th Street and University Avenue, Seropian founded “Bungie Software Products Corporation” with Jones to release their first commercial games. Looking back, Seropian advised students to look around. Their next business partner could be sitting right next to them.
“If you’re one puzzle piece on a campus, find the other puzzle pieces to create something,” he said.
Leveling up
Crunch. In 1999, the future of Bungie sounded suspiciously like a CD being crushed under the wheels of a car.
That year, Bungie was headed to the MacWorld trade show to introduce their newest game, Halo, to the world. But at the airport, Seropian recounted to My Perfect Console host Simon Parkin, the music track for the game trailer had accidentally been smashed to bits. The company, similarly, was in dire straits.
Since its founding, Bungie had grown steadily, finding a niche making games for the less competitive Mac market. With the releases of games like Myth and Marathon, the irreverent, almost aggressively informal company had cultivated a devoted following, establishing itself as a top producer of games for Mac.
However, their latest release had a nasty bug—one that erased the player's hard drive. Bungie recalled the game, losing a sizable chunk of money in the process.
“What was at stake was really the future of the company,” Seropian said of the MacWorld debut. “This game had to work.”
Oddly calm, Seropian left a message for the composer asking to burn a new disc and have it rushed onto a FedEx flight. At MacWorld, after an introduction by Steve Jobs, the world got its first glimpse of Master Chief, the armored protagonist of Halo, a sci-fi shooter game.
Players could fight across an alien landscape, out under an open sky—all rendered in real time. The demo snagged the gaming world’s attention, including Mac’s rival, Microsoft.
“We got the opportunity to be the launch title on the Xbox, which we totally went after,” Seropian said.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000. The team spent the next year working feverishly on Halo to finish in time to launch with the Xbox. Within five years, the game had sold over four million copies. The Halo franchise would go on to be one of the industry’s greatest successes, spawning half a dozen “mainline” sequels, even more spinoffs, books, films and a devoted fandom.
After Halo, Seropian left Microsoft, returning to Chicago to start a family and a new company.
“I wanted to figure out a more sustainable way of making games that didn't have to roll the dice and get it perfect every time,” Seropian said. “That was the genesis of Wideload Games, my second studio.”
Teaming up with other UChicago alums, Seropian focused on making games his kids could play, like Hail to the Chimp. When Wideload was acquired by Disney in 2009, Seropian was tapped to lead their Interactive Studios.
After departing the entertainment giant in 2012, Seropian went small again—pocket-sized. His next studio, Industrial Toys, focused on developing mobile games.
“There weren't millions of people on these machines, there were billions,” Seropian said.
Now his current company, Look North World, is publishing games within Fortnite, an online open-world game known for its battle royale format as well as creator modes.
“The people who are playing the games are the ones who are building them,” Seropian said. “Once again, I find myself in uncharted territory.”
Bonus round
After 30-plus years in the video game industry, Seropian still sees a shining horizon when he considers the future of gaming.
He notes the depth and breadth of contemporary game catalogs: cooperative games, first-person shooters, platformers, farming simulators and text-based adventures, all of which only scratch the surface of what’s on the market.
“That means there’s such an incredible future ahead of us in terms of what games may look like,” Seropian said. “We’re already seeing it.”
For aspiring game makers, Seropian says that college is an ideal time to experiment without the pressure of “making to eat.”
“If you’re young and in college, there’s no better time to make things,” he said. “The tools are so good right now, so accessible that you can have an idea, put it on a screen and in front of a friend in a weekend. My advice is to make stuff, play stuff, learn stuff.”
Seropian also notes another valuable resource found on campus: people.
“The people that you meet in college can be pretty important in life. I met my wife here, I met my business partners here,” he said. “This place is an incredible environment to meet people because everybody here is bound for exceptional things.”
Luckily for game lovers, Seropian believes games will be around for a long time.
“Play in general, games in particular, have been part of the human experience longer than written language,” he said. “I think games might be forever.”
