I wasn't really sure who to choose as an old new media hero. First I was thinking about Nicola Tesla, but somehow I didn't have the feeling he was the appropriate subject to choose for me, as it is more his persona that intrigues me than his inventions (although I am rather fascinated by these too, he didn't seem close enough to me). So I kept on thinking, for a moment in the direction of written text, literature, but again who to choose from that? My heroes in those media haven't been really on the front lines of development of their mediums, although Oscar Wilde might be an interesting choice for some reasons. But then all of the sudden I though of one of my favorite media of old times, computer games! Nowadays I hardly play computer games anymore (or lets just say non), but I used to play them very much. Considering the definition of 'old' media that was named in class, those media that have been around since you can remember, computers come quite close for me in that area, as they have been around me for as far as I can remember, and I truly grew up with them. First playing games on the MSX, later with the PC, where I got into games such as Prince of Persia, The Secret of Monkey Island, Duke Nukem Forever, and not to forget Command & Conquer.
Another game I got into, some times later, was Quake, Quake 2 mostly to be exact. The Quake games in their entire design truly reached the state of art, in my humble opinion. Not because of its high conceptual multi-layered approach of gaming (run around and shoot everything that moves), or its amazing storytelling capacity (in Quake 2 you are a space marine that got stuck on some planet of hostile enemy alien cyborg zombies after they shot down your entire fleet of space ships, and you are the only one that survived, so the only way out is shoot everything that moves and run through an endless labyrinth of industrial buildings). No, the reason why Quake is such an amazing game series is simply because of their game engines. There is nothing which surpasses the pure work of genius that these engines are in gaming development. A game engine is responsible for generating all the core elements to create a game, namely the graphics, physics, and other such fundamental aspects of games. Now, the Quake engine has been developed in such a way that it simply creates a truly flawless and unsurpassed gaming experience. Of course you might think that it is practically impossible to make something completely flawless, but the Quake engine is the one exception on the rule. And it is so because even its flaws contribute to its truly genius flawlessness.
Because Quake is so simple in its essence (run around and shoot everything that moves), the engine itself has been fine-tuned to near perfection. This results in such an experience that nothing that you do wrong can be attributed to anything else but yourself. If you miss while shooting, you know you should aim better. If you jump off a cliff, it is purely your own fault. This doesn't sound like such a big achievement perhaps, but many games already fail in this area. The biggest fascinating part of the Quake engine however is not these purely perfected game elements, but the fact that it has a few rather curious flaws. Flaws which experienced players can exploit, into such high altitudes of genius that it will make moderate gamers shit their pants when playing against these experienced pro gamers. These flaws are actually the result of certain bugs which could be found in old versions of OpenGL, which was responsible to create the graphic elements of the Quake engine. These bugs make it possible to, for example, increase ones speed to huge velocities simply by jumping in a specific manner (strafe jumping, or also known as bunny-hopping). Although a bug in earlier games of Quake, later sequels kept these flaws intacts as it had become a common way of playing and advancing ones skill to unsurpassed levels in these series of games.
Not only is the Quake engine famous for its flaws, graphically it also simply is unsurpassed for its time. This also accounts for other versions of the engine, which has evolved to other game series, specifically Doom 3 and Rage. Doom might ring a bell to some too. Actually, the same developers are behind the first Doom (a precursor to Quake), as are behind Wolfenstein 3d (one of the first "3d" games) and Commander Keen (nice fluffy revolutionary side-scrolling game). This brings us finally to my old new media hero which I would like to treat here on this page, John Carmack. John Carmack quite simply the original mastermind behind the engines of all these games, which all have been state of the art within the game industry at their time of conception. Without John Carmack, it would probably have taken some more years before a proper 3d game would have been released that was actually playable on a normal computer. And we would never have gotten millions of gamers get familiar with evil scientific experiments on teleportation being done on Mars to open the gates to Hell (within Doom), or space-alien cyborg zombies on some unknown planet that have chain-guns growing out of their arms (within Quake), while endlessly bunny-hopping through grey industrial complexes and shooting on everything that moves to release frustations of chronic crashes and infinite number of bugs everyone at these times was encountering while working with Microsoft Windows.
Not only is John Carmack a mastermind in creating gaming engines, he also is a strong supporter of the open source community (as one of the few leading game developers), releasing source code of old engines (such as Quake) and always supporting different rarely supported platforms to release games on, such as Linux and Mac OS. Next to this awesome state of mind, somewhere at the end of the nineties, after making huge amounts of cash through his games, he realized that he could just as wel spend the amount of money he was putting into his Ferrari's, on developing aerospace rockets, and thus decided to spend his money on building rockets to get into space. He taught himself aerospace engineering and setup his own aerospace group, and currently is one of the leading figures in the amateur aerospace engineering community in the US.