The City has a way of repeating its own history, usually while insisting this time is different because the underlying mathematics are silicon rather than subprime. We are currently watching that cycle play out in San Francisco with a predictability that would be amusing if the sums involved weren't so gargantuan. The latest dispatches from the front lines of the AI arms race confirm what some of us have been whispering over lunch for a year: OpenAI is hemorrhaging cash at a rate that would make a 1990s dot-com startup blush.

It’s like watching a plane crashing into a stricken ship in slow-motion: several tech and finance bubbles are about to pop and it’s only a matter of when. I’ve seen this film before, usually from a front-row seat at some overpriced trade show in Las Vegas or a smoky pub in Soho. I started covering this beat when the "portable" computer was the size of a suitcase and required a gym membership to carry.

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For more than thirty years I’ve watched the personal-computing landscape shift under the feet of companies that once looked immovable. Monopolies rarely fall in dramatic battles; they erode quietly, grain by grain, usually because the incumbent stops paying attention to the constituency that mattered most. With Valve preparing to roll out its new generation of Steam Machines, I can’t help but feel we’re watching that process unfold again - this time with Microsoft, once the unshakable steward of the PC gaming realm.

Die deutsche Autoindustrie gerät wegen der Blockade des chinesischen Chipherstellers Nexperia in Not. Die Grünen fordern von Wirtschaftsministerin Katherina Reiche eine groß angelegte Halbleiter-Initi...

Watching tech for a long amount of time teaches a humbling lesson: manias rhyme. Today’s AI trade smells like a circular economy of hype—vendors financing customers who finance vendors—while real, durable profits remain scarce. The one clear cash machine is Nvidia, the picks-and-shovels seller of compute. Its data-center juggernaut now throws off extraordinary revenue and margins, underwriting a $4 trillion market cap and ever-larger bets across the stack.

If you played Ultima VII, you remember the velvet-gloved menace of the Fellowship—and the two smiling fundraisers who always seemed to be one step ahead: Elizabeth and Abraham. Old-school lore hounds long read them as a wink (and a jab) at Electronic Arts—E. & A., “acquaintances of the Guardian,” woven into Britanni­a’s satire of corporate power. The in-joke lands differently this week, as EA itself prepares to step off the public markets and into a new fellowship of investors.

Silicon Valley is selling artificial intelligence as an economy-wide cure-all. Strip away the theatrics and you find a familiar cycle: when genuine breakthroughs slow, the marketing gets louder. The last half-century’s growth rode semiconductors and microelectronics; that engine is sputtering. We hit the power wall when Dennard scaling broke down in the mid-2000s, ending the era when you could crank clock speeds without melting the chip.

The market delivered a striking headline this month: Larry Ellison, at least briefly, was the richest person in the world. A vertiginous rally in Oracle shares on September 10 pushed his paper wealth toward the $390–$400 billion range, momentarily eclipsing Elon Musk on several real-time leaderboards before prices cooled. It was a reminder of how quickly AI-driven narratives can reset fortunes when a founder holds an unusually concentrated stake.

Nintendo has done it again. Not with a groundbreaking Mario game or a return of F-Zero, but with a fresh patent that looks less like innovation and more like a loaded legal weapon. Their newest filing outlines the ability to summon creatures and let them fight—yes, the very core mechanic of Pokémon, and by extension, one of the most fundamental ideas in the broader genre of RPGs and monster-collecting games.

Somewhere along the road from composite cables to HDR banners, games forgot that color is a language and started treating it like confetti. Boot up the latest showcase and you’ll see it: a wall of neon sugar, UI drenched in hot gradients, a splash screen that screams “gamer purple” like it’s a birthright. Nobody can tell you exactly who crowned purple the patron saint of gaming, but the breadcrumbs are obvious.

For years now Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has been playing a dangerous balancing act with its golden goose, YouTube. What began in 2005 as a quirky video platform run by three guys out of a garage has mutated into the world’s largest stage for creators, entertainers, preachers, scam artists, and everything in between. The early days were chaotic but genuine; if you uploaded something, you had a fighting chance of being seen, provided it caught the right eyes.

I still remember the jolt of curiosity I felt back in May 2018 when Tommy Tallarico took the stage and promised to resurrect Intellivision for a new generation. A sub-$200 box, family-friendly only, no loot boxes, no toxicity—just pick-up-and-play fun like the old days. The pitch even name-dropped Earthworm Jim and Atari licenses, and dang if that didn’t stir the retro blood in a lot of us long-timers.

I’ve watched thirty-odd years of gaming history spool past like a worn C-64 datasette, and every so often a moment comes along that rewinds the tape to Side A and lets you dream again. Seeing the fabled Commodore “chicken-lips” swirl back into view under new stewardship is one of those moments, the kind that makes an old joystick hand feel twenty pixels taller.

Three decades of watching series rise, flourish, and then face-plant has taught me that neglect rarely kills a gaming brand—over-attention does. The bigger the publisher, the greater the temptation to squeeze an IP until it squeaks, to pivot toward every passing fad, or to ship it half-baked and patch it in public. The result is an identity crisis the fans never asked for and a once-sparkling logo that now draws eye-rolls.

I’ve been pressing “Start” since CRTs buzz-hummed in the corner of the living room, and back then the fun was the business model. id Software’s Doom flung its first episode onto BBS boards as shareware in December 1993—if the blast of demon-slaying pixels hooked you, you mailed off a check for the rest of the game. At least I was told that - I was still a bit too young for that, but it rumoured among the older kids they already played it.

There reports of the last weeks in which is stated that Electronic Arts has budgeted well over $400 million for Battlefield 6—while internally projecting a staggering 100 million players—landed on my reel like a flash-bang. Ambition is nothing new in this trade, but even senior staff at DICE are said to doubt those targets, likening them to “dreams of 2010.” …

New rumours about the next engine generation hits journals, but who exactly cares about it? Not too long ago, Epic Games‘ CEO Tim Sweeney mentioned to think about new features for a new Unreal Engi…

New rumours about the next engine generation hits journals, but who exactly cares about it? Not too long ago, Epic Games‘ CEO Tim Sweeney mentioned to think about new features for a new Unreal Engine 6. When realising the impact of his words he quickly withdrew, but the pull back came too late: already had the journalists asked his fellow peers, gamers and employees at Epic what they think about it.

I was reading a german article this morning about an apparent software engineer who lost his 150k job to AI and is now living in a trailer and works for doordash because none of his 800 job applica…