There Michael Barnes was, this precocious middle school kid with a Commodore 64 in tow, and an urge to see what was inside, to understand what made it tick.
“I’ve been programming computers since… middle school,” Michael reflected.
Even so, the goalposts had already been set.
“I had two big dreams as a kid. One was to work at NASA, the other was to make computer games,” he said. “And I’ve been very fortunate… I’ve been able to do both.”
NASA came first. Michael managed to snag a front-row seat to space exploration by way of his first love: computer science, starting out as an intern, and then eventually landing a full-time gig there.
He still sounds a little amazed when he rattles off all the projects he’s worked on: “Aeroacoustics research, supercomputers, giant wind tunnels, even a Space Station project… it was all a dream to me and I loved every minute of it.”
But that second dream of his still tugged at him. You might even say, it had a gravity of its own.
Not to mention, good timing as well. After getting married, Michael and his wife, whom he had met at NASA, had wanted to put down roots on the East Coast, to be closer to family.
Right around the same time, a role at this gaming startup entered Michael’s orbit. “It was hard to leave NASA,” he said, “but it was a great opportunity to try something different.”
But that “something different” came with turbulence of its own… the kind that only startups can deliver, in the form of sudden pivots and markets turning on a dime.
In Michael’s case, the rug got pulled from underneath him shortly after his son Nicholas was born. He was laid off in the early 2000s, when the startup he was working for ran out of money, another casualty of the dot-com-bubble bursting.
The timing, though, still turned out alright.
