Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen, an Australian man in his mid-30s, with a rural Catholic upbringing, is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps. THORChain is permissionless, so anyone can use it without getting prior approval from a centralized authority. As a decentralized network, the blockchain is built and run by operators located across the globe. During its early days, Thorbjornsen himself hid behind the pseudonym "leena" and used an AI-generated female image as his avatar. But around March 2024, he revealed his true identity as the mind behind the blockchain. If there is a central question around THORChain, it is this: Exactly who is responsible for its operations?

Pong was, however, the game that kickstarted the video arcade and home console industries, the profitability of its hardware and the simplicity of the gameplay – just two bats, a ball and a scoring system – ensuring its huge success and iconic afterlife. Devised by development engineer George J Klose as a means of repurposing calculator chips, it was a big success, leading to Mattel's legendary American football and soccer titles, and no doubt piquing the interest of a certain Nintendo engineer … It's a formative space shooter, with the player battling two computer controlled UFOs amid a rudimentary star-scape, but it's that curvaceous fibre glass cabinet (which earned the game a cameo in the 1973 sci-fi movie Soylent Green) that we'll always remember. Players aim and fire at passing battleships, targeting them via a rotating periscope fixed to the front of the cab. Its success inspired the nascent arcade industry to experiment with elaborate novelty interfaces, a factor that proved vital in maintaining the success of the coin-op industry as home consoles proliferated. Western Gun (1975, Taito) Alongside Tank, Western Gun (known as Gun Fight in the US) helped lay the foundations of the multidirectional shooter genre, allowing two players to navigate a cactus-strewn landscape, blasting six-guns at each other until one cowboy fell.

A new video game pulls inspiration from the nostalgic 1980s game'Oregon Trail', but adds a futuristic twist where gamers can test their skills in a climate change apocalypse. Called'Climate Trail', refugees travel through a world destroyed by climate change while encountering dangerous scenarios, such as heatwaves and melting Artic ice, until they reach a safe zone in Canada. Characters in the game will also stop along the path to share scientific facts about global warming, sea level rise and greenhouse gas emissions throughout the game. In ' Climate Trail ' refugees travel through a world destroyed by climate change while encountering dangerous scenarios, such as heatwaves and melting Artic ice, until they reach a safe zone in Canada The Oregon Trail became a hallmark in elementary schools in the 1980s and was designed to teach children about the lives of 19th-century pioneers as they traveled across the United States in search of a better life. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.