And as Polygon reported yesterday, Oculus is about to head in to a legal battle with ZeniMax, the game developer and publisher that has been across monolithic titles such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom among others. The battle centres on Oculus CTO John Carmack, a former employee of ZeniMax and co-founder of ZeniMax subsidiary id Software. ZeniMax’s contention is that, during Carmack’s final weeks as an employer before moving to Oculus, he was working to improve the Oculus Rift prototype that was given to him by Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey — and that he stole ZeniMax software and leveraged ZeniMax employees’ internal knowhow to do it. Once again, Luckey’s Oculus, trading in virtual realities, is having to face up to hard, actual realities.

What makes Oculus’ and by extension Luckey’s struggles so hard to bear witness to is Luckey himself. The smart-as-a-whip kid who bootstrapped his way to a working VR prototype out of readily available components — hacking the thing into ski goggles with duct tape — not only fit the archetype of the maker generation but built something people were going wild for. And Luckey has always been one of “us”, seemingly motivated initially by the same impulse that resides in every video game player, “How can I get this setup better?”. But when we buy better headphones, or set up multiple monitors, he made a VR headset that would set the agenda for the industry.

The incompatibility of Luckey’s cargo-shorts-and-bare-feet normalness with the increasingly polished and dressed-up industry he was coming to change began to show. Most notably, a TIME cover of Luckey — superimposed onto a beach scene, floating with the Rift over his eyes — illustrated two things: the user could change the industry, and the industry and larger world fundamentally just didn’t get it. However, as unfortunate as it might be, with the company owned by one of Big Tech in Facebook, the industry and the larger world have to now be handled by Luckey. That photo came to signal that one of “us” was being funnelled into a world that he might not be equipped to handle.

There’s a sense in which generations of video game players move as quickly as generations of video game consoles. Luckey was part of the Xbox 360 generation — at 23, he came of age during the huge strides made in first-person gaming, in graphical fidelity, and in online multiplayer. He’s part of a middle generation of video game players — we grew up on the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and dreamt increasingly of immersion offered in titles like Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge.