Because we’re celebrating Don Mattrick’s departure to Zynga today, I decided to dig down the rabbit hole because I’d always wondered where a guy like Mattrick comes from. In 1983, game developers Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember of Distinctive Software, Inc. went on CBC’s Front Page Challenge to explain their trade as Canada’s first video game developers. The panelists’ inquiries reveal a strange, naive era in which video games are still rare things to be dissected and understood. Let’s take a deeper dive, shall we?

Don Mattrick Wasn’t Always A Suit

In the show’s open, the panelists must guess who these two guests are. When one calls out that maybe they’re Wayne & Schuster (a Canadian comedy duo from the 40s and 50s), Mattrick breaks out into a little jig before others suggest they may be the MacKenzie brothers. Y’see, he may be wearing a suit, but Don Mattrick was a kid once.

If he were a kid though, his parents might be concerned about what video games were doing…

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