
The unexpected forefather of music games
The Commodore 64 game Moondust (1983) is best remembered as a software programming experiment that helped launch the career of its creator, Jaron Lanier—an eccentric polymath who many now consider one of the earliest and foremost pioneers of virtual reality. But it might be better acknowledged as the progenitor of the modern music game. Lanier used the capital he generated with Moondust to found VPL Research, a company that conducted some of the first virtual reality machine-building efforts in the mid-1980s. Since then, his rigorously exploratory ethos has informed his wide-ranging body of work, which has included enterprises as diverse…