Video by MyCareerTube

In this video, Eran Egozy, a co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems, the company that brought us Guitar Hero and Rock Band, talks about how he embarked on his career, and the kind of qualifications necessary to break into the gaming industry.

An ArsTechnica article talks about Egozy's start at the MIT Media Lab:

[His first project] involved the piano, specifically the player piano, a machine that played a regular upright piano using notes encoded as gaps in a roll of paper.

Egozy had apparently come across a series of scrolls that dated from the 1920s, but had nothing to play them on, a problem he solved in true Media Lab style. To feed the scrolls, he built a mechanism out of LEGO that fed them under a video camera. The video feed went to a NeXT box, which digitized it, read it, and converted it to MIDI. The MIDI was then sent over the network to a MIDI piano that resided in the basement.

Learn more about Egozy through his videos for the PBS program Nova's Web video series, The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers