Steve Russell—the man who made the first video game—is still alive. Not a myth. Not a footnote. Walking around, same as the rest of us.

In 1962, Russell coded Spacewar! on the DEC PDP-1 at MIT. It spread fast. So fast that it directly led to the formation of Atari. Their first arcade release, Computer Space was essentially Spacewar! shoved into a coin-op cabinet.

Russell didn’t stop there. He wrote the first two implementations of Lisp. He later taught Bill Gates and Paul Allen how to use a computer.

Video games. Programming languages. Microsoft.

Same guy. Still alive.