Daniel Jung oral history interview, 2018-12-04

HAGENMAIER: Can you tell me your name, your year at Georgia Tech, and your major.

JUNG: All right. So my name is Daniel Jung. I am a third year computer science major at Georgia Tech.

HAGENMAIER: What's the title of your game?

JUNG: My game was called Tam Man.

HAGENMAIER: Can you describe what happens in the game?

JUNG: Sure. So it's a clone of a really old Japanese Konami game called Bomber Man where your player goes around and is able to place down bombs and he tries to basically destroy the blocks around him to uh, go and collect more bombs and be able to eventually kill the enemy player.

HAGENMAIER: So you said it's a clone of another game. Can you talk a little bit about what inspired you to make this specific game for the class?

JUNG: So the idea for the game just initially came from trying to think of old, really old games that I used to play when I was a kid and games that I used to like, and when I was really young, I used to play this, uh, I used to play a 00:01:00really old clone of a Bomber man on like the PC when they first started getting access to the Internet. And so that was one of the first games that popped into my head when we started getting this project where we were just trying to build a Game Boy game from scratch. And so I started looking at that and I was trying to think about anything around the time that I can make it relevant around. And so I had the antagonist actually be who is right now current president Trump just because there was so much talk about the wall during that time that I was just like, okay, well Bomber Man is all about destroying like blocks. And so I had the idea be that our protagonist was one of the TAs in the class, Patrick Tam, who was one of the more outspoken TAs during my semester that I was taking this course. And so your objective in the game is just to tear down Trump's wall.

HAGENMAIER: Can you tell me, um, one memory you have of using technology as a 00:02:00kid? Like a game you played or the first computer you remember using? Anything that pops into your mind or memory?

New Speaker: Sure, so I've been pretty familiar with technology for almost all my life. Both my parents were actually CS majors when I grew up. So technology was always like a huge part in our kind of household growing up. And uh, when I first got started having access to like the computer myself and just being able to see everything, I kind of delved pretty much straight into the Internet and um, wanted to explore as much as I could. I like found forum boards where I just started like posting. I remember really old IRC chats where just random people and random chats just talking to each other for like just the purpose of doing so. Uh, and yeah, that was a big part of the Internet for me was just finding like my own sense of community just because there were so many other like random 00:03:00people you could meet up on the Internet and just like talk to your, just, you ended up creating your own sources of communities around like random forum boards and random IRC chats. That was just the time when the Internet was starting up with just a time when like everyone was like willing to be sociable and friendly with each other.

HAGENMAIER: Can you tell me about one aspiration you have for your future after Tech, something you want to do or something you want to see in the world? Anything comes to mind?

JUNG: Sure. So, I will hopefully be graduating with my degree in Computer Science at the end of this year. So I'm hoping to be a third year graduate, hopefully that lasts. But um, I'm definitely hoping to try to continue make uh, making I guess progress in that kind of like CS technology with like the whole social aspect thing. I am going on, I have a job offer currently with Ford Motor 00:04:00and I'm planning on going there. And one really nice thing that I like about Ford is, they are actually changing their image from a just a car company to a general mobility company and they're trying to increase the availability of technology to be able to use, to be able to be used for like anyone to use, whether it's greater accessibility to like carpooling or biking or just basically any kind of mobility. And I think that mixed with just the ability to use technology for greater goods and to just use the aspect that technology has allowed so much, um, I guess more crowdsourcing and crowdfunding just because the [mass of the?] technology connects people who just have random resources and people who have need for those resources to just be able to connect because it has like that age old, um, kind of thought of all it would take to get a billion 00:05:00dollars is to get one dollar from a billion people. And that in like the old sense is almost like impossible because to connect one billion people is extremely difficult to do without some kind of mass crowdsourcing technology. But really technology is what bridges that gap and allows, um, that availability to just become there for people who have different needs or people who have different, even like resources to be able to spread because some people like have a huge amount of resources and aren't able to actually get that to anyone. So I mean I've been doing a lot of projects and stuff like um, my junior design project is actually sourced around being able to use technology to connect medical mission trips to areas like Haiti and Vietnam and the Philippines where devastations and stuff have really impacted the people there. But there is no real resource to communicate between any doctors to actually get any resources there because people don't even know whether these areas have running water or whether they have oxygen masks. Whether they have all these things. And I really think that technology is pretty much the best tool we're ever going to get to be able to mass communicate, mass, kind of, cooperate between regions, be able to really bridge that gap and be able to make differences that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to in the past.