Do you remember what made you want to do your job?
Can you trace it back to a single, formative experience, a moment of pure wonder when something inside you quietly declared:
“I want to do this for the rest of my life”?
I can.
In fact, I can clearly remember the two games that made me want to become a game developer.
Today, I want to talk about one of them: Bermuda Triangle.
Released in 1975, Bermuda Triangle is, in retrospect, a rather mediocre board game. Its one central gimmick only works once. But when it works, it works, especially on a five-year-old. Just like I was, the first time I played it.
For the uninitiated: the Bermuda Triangle (also known back then as the Devil’s Triangle) is a region of the Atlantic Ocean once made famous by a wave of mysterious, unexplained disappearances of ships and planes.
In the pre-internet era, it was a pop-culture mystery; a conspiracy theory with its own books, documentaries, and late-night talk.
The board game itself, however, is disappointingly un-triangular.
Four players. Four ships each. A rectangular board.
You run trade routes and try to avoid a plastic cloud that slowly drifts across the map. The cloud represents the supernatural force that haunts the triangle. It moves at random. So do your ships. Strategy is minimal. The rules are vague despite being simple.
In short: it’s not a great game.
But then came the moment.
We sat around the table: my uncle, my cousin, my mom, and me, age five.
I rolled the dice. The cloud moved. And there: One of my ships was caught beneath the drifting plastic cloud.
According to the rules, a ship covered by the cloud can’t move. And because the cloud physically obscures the piece, I couldn’t even touch it.
So I waited for the cloud to move again…
And then it did.
And when it passed…
my ship was gone.
Completely, inexplicably gone.
I don’t mean “removed according to the rules.”
I mean physically vanished.
It was there one moment, and the next, it wasn’t.
The board game had performed a magic trick.
I froze. Then I looked up at my uncle, hoping for an explanation.
He was just as surprised as I was.
Bemused, he picked up the cloud and turned it over. Inside were two concealed magnets.
My ship, like all of them, had a small metal stud.
And by sheer chance, that stud had aligned with the magnet. The cloud had lifted my ship as it moved, silently, invisibly, and swallowed it whole.
For many people, discovering the trick behind the magic ruins the illusion.
But not for me.
For me, it was the opposite.
I was even more fascinated because someone had designed this moment. Someone had thought this through. Someone had planted that seed of wonder.
And I loved them for it.
Right then and there, I knew:
I wanted to be that person.
Someone who makes people feel what I had just felt.
Someone who creates games, not just to entertain, but to astonish.
That silly plastic cloud was the first step in a long journey.
The first whisper of the future.
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