I recently went on the journey of determining when I first started using Unity. It was a rabbit hole that was so deep that even my Gmail history was starting to struggle. It came up in conversation with a few engineers after they recognized my alias having used some of the tools I’ve made in the past for Unity. One thing leads to the next, ending with me feeling older than usual, unable to remember something that far into my past. An information adventure was afoot!
When I first started using the internet, I realized the importance of keeping an archive of email. Something that I could search and reference over time. Initially, I maintained that responsibility, but when Gmail came to the market I quickly migrated my repository over to it. It provided a much more accessible format and certain assurances of data integrity. Finding when I started using Unity would be an interesting challenge, but the searchability and deep history provided by Gmail was going to help me here.
Finding my first commercial usage of Unity was easy. I could remember a super cheap purchase price (in comparison to today’s costs), and I remember being excited by a Unite announcement. Looking back over purchasing emails for dotBunny, I made a purchase in October 2007, at version 2. That makes it 12+ years professionally working with Unity. At the time, I was asked to make a cross-platform educational game for a government organization. This was back when Unity’s IDE was macOS only but could deploy to Windows and macOS.
It was around this time that the community for Unity was starting to take off, at the helm was Tom Higgins. Oh, HiggyB, looking back we had some great conversations back then, including Unity offering to pay for my conference pass. It was also back then when the beta list started for the Windows editor. Good times!
This wasn’t when I first heard about Unity though, I had played around with it prior, even purchasing an Apple MacBook at the time to give it a try on. Fun fact – this was my first Mac computer purchase. The question of that timing is really what was at stake here, because I had memories of the crew at Blurst, and later even hiring some of them as contractors on future projects (some even are leads at Unity now). Unfortunately, this is where my email history started to fall apart, mainly because I would have made the Mac purchase at a store. My archive of accounting for dotBunny came to my aid here, and good record keeping.
November 10, 2006
Date of my Unity-fication
It looks like that it would have been Unity v1.51 around that time, just before the release of Unity 1.6, and let’s not forget its tropical demo island. I found this great comparison on the Unity forums when searching for pictures of the demo (albeit from Unity 3). It sums up the progress made in Unity over the last decade+.
Unity sure has progressed a lot in that time span, and it has been a great adventure watching it grow and being involved with so many parts of it. Here’s to many more years and many more experiences, like this one.
The Forgotten Soul 