Hard to believe it's been 8 years since I started focusing on the video games industry for Sun. After 2 years of trying to sell the idea of Sun focusing on the games industry, Scott McNealy bought into the idea and gave me the green light to get started. My first action was to consult with the games industry and build an API stack that mirrored DirectX in Java. Enlisting Jeff Kesselman, Vicki Abe and Bart Calder to the effort, we invited 18 game companies to Santa Clara to help us define what we needed in Java to make the platform viable for game development.

The result of that meeting was the creation of the Java Games Profile (JSR-134) and included the following API specifications:

1. 3D Modeling and Rendering for Games
2. 3D Physics Modeling for Games
3. 3D Character Animation for Games
4. 2D Rendering and Video Buffer Flipping for Games
5. Game Marshalling and Networked Communication
6. Streaming Media for Games
7. Sound for Games
8. Game Controllers
9. Hardware Access for Games

We had quite a few members in the experts group, including the creator of the Sony EyeToy, and were off to a good start. Unfortunately, this, ultimately, could never get the traction it needed in Sun and we were left to shut the JSR down. We did manage, under Doug Twilleager, to move 3 APIs into open source and this resulted in the release of JOGL, JOAL and JInput. These APIs, along with LWJGL, are in use in most of the high performance Java games in existence. JOGL is even being used in JavaFX.

The following pictures are from the first, and only, meeting of the JSR-134 experts group in January of 2002. Scott was scheduled to come in for 30 min and stayed for over an hour and a half. During an awesome physics demo by Shawn Kendall, Scott turned to me across the table and said, "I see this and get the same feeling I had when Andy showed me the bouncing ball demo on his first workstation." The room went dead silent. Basically, he equated the work we were doing to the technology that launched Sun Microsystems. Wicked cool.

During that period, Adam Sesseler, on the former TechTV channel (miss that SO MUCH), had this bit to say on his show "X-Play":