When Unity CEO John Riccitiello talks about the metaverse, it’s not a horrible idea to listen to.

Riccitiello has been in gaming and computing for a long time. The first game he played was Pong. The first games he coded (“miserable” text-based games, he says) were on a PDP-1011 mainframe computer released by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s and with less raw computing power than a five-year-old iPhone 8. the former CEO of Electronic Arts and one of the early investors in the Oculus product that Mark Zuckerberg eventually bought and was so dedicated to changing Facebook’s name to Meta.

So what does Riccitiello think about the metaverse?

“I saw an analyst report…