55-year games industry vet helped make the first CRPG, got laid off, went bankrupt, but said "I don't care" as long as he got to keep crafting games: "A business does not love you back, unless you are a business person"

Unless the gods of mythology take pity on you like they did Pygmalion, whose ivory sculpture came to lovely life, it's rare that work ever truly cares about you as much as you worship it. 55-year games industry innovator Don Daglow gave this advice to other developers during his recent panel at the 2026 Game Developers Conference (GDC), where he'll be collecting a Lifetime Achievement Award. Instead, he tells his peers to respect the craft as much as the reward.

"Games are a business, and right now, for the last few years, it has not been a good time," says Daglow during his March 9 talk, GDC Masters: 50 Years in Games and a Legacy for Creators, attended by GamesRadar+. "And I wanted to share the way I look at it. First of all, with games, business does not love you back." An accompanying slideshow nailed in, "Games are a Business. A business does not love you back.*

"*Unless you are a business person whose craft is enabling games to be made." But Daglow, who created – among about 100 other inventions – the first baseball sim in 1971, acted as one of the five original Intellivision developers in 1980, and designed Neverwinter Nights, the first MMORPG to include graphics, is undeterred by his own dark truths.

He continues at GDC, "I have to remind myself about this sometimes, sailors will curse the storms." But they remain at sea, so "I'm not gonna let anybody take this away from me," says Daglow. "I don't care what happens in the business – I've been laid off, I've gone bankrupt, I've done all sorts of things. I don't care. This is our craft. We'll keep doing it."

"It's important to not think of business as capable of loving us back," he reiterates. "It's like the ocean. It's a force of nature. The ocean obeys the laws of physics. Business obeys the laws of economics. That's why we have to sail it as an environment that challenges us."

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