In 2003, Treg Derry opened Luna Video Games in Ocean Beach, making good on a plan that he’d had since he was 15. Growing up in Minneapolis, Derry wasn’t allowed to own video games, so he got his fix at friends’ houses and eventually started trading physical video games with them.
“We’ve always had a big culture in San Diego of people being really excited about video games—whether it’s newer games or older games,” Derry says.
That culture has a history that predates digital games. The classic board game Candy Land was created by Eleanor Abbott in a San Diego hospital in 1948 to entertain children recovering from polio. Long before players could meet in virtual worlds, a local invention gave them somewhere to escape.
The city’s video game industry would grow out of a different kind of ingenuity. The Navy’s presence in San Diego drew in scientists, engineers, and doctors after World War II, making it the promised land for innovators and entrepreneurs, says Dr. Mary Walshok, a longtime UCSD sociologist who has spent decades studying the region’s economic and industrial evolution.
That, Walshok says, laid the groundwork for the biotech, defense, and video game industries that San Diego is known for today. “You get these early companies here in San Diego in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s,” she says. “They’re the fathers and mothers of the crazy kids now who are building all these games.”
In the early 1980s, San Diego became a less military-focused (but still technology-rich) area, Walshok says. These workers used what they learned in military settings to contribute to civilian institutions, like Qualcomm (founded in 1985), UCSD (ranked sixth nationally in federal research funding in the mid-1980s), and Hybritech (San Diego’s first biotech company, which Eli Lilly acquired in 1986 for $300 million).
In Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California, UCLA professor Allen J. Scott wrote that in 1988, San Diego had 55,535 high-tech jobs—a 75 percent jump from 31,660 jobs in 1976.
Courtesy of Rockstar Games
By the time Derry opened Luna, local companies were already helping change how people played. Sony Online Entertainment, later renamed Daybreak, became a pioneer in massively multiplayer online role-playing games with the 1999 release of EverQuest. Sony San Diego Studio released MLB 06: The Show in 2006, launching the baseball video game series under that name. It would later become a competitive esports title for PlayStation. Rockstar San Diego (formerly Angel Studios) developed the 2010 blockbuster Red Dead Redemption. Carlsbad’s High Moon Studios worked on the Call of Duty franchise.
The games reached players around the world. Back home, shops like Luna gave fans a place to find each other. Today, Luna has two locations: in Chula Vista and SDSU. The store doesn’t offer anything digital, and it doesn’t stock merchandise. Luna only sells physical games and consoles to fans and collectors, young and old.
“I do think that even when I started, was still looked at as a nerdy thing to be looked down upon,” Derry says. “[Now,] we’ve had customers who come in once, twice, three times a week for 15-plus years.”
One of those regulars is Pat Contri, who goes by Pat the NES Punk online. Contri is a retro gamer, streamer, writer, and video game historian who came to San Diego in 2009. At the time, Contri says the Nintendo Wii, released in 2006, became a featured player at parties in Little Italy.
“Video games [are] not niche if you grew up with [them]; every other person my age played video games,” Contri says. “What really blew it up was the Wii came out in 2006. Everyone who [bought a Wii] with their own money probably grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Super Nintendo.”
San Diego’s tech-heavy universities created a setting for companies that want to hire the next generation of innovators. Niema Moshiri—a UCSD computer science professor who taught a course on the technical history of video games—says students who graduate from these schools are excited about the opportunity to work for heavy-hitters with San Diego offices, like General Atomics and Psyonix. According to Moshiri, major game developers actively recruit from these campuses.
“Sony Interactive Entertainment was part of the Jacobs School of Engineering corporate affiliates program for a few years,” he says. “[Today, Sony still] comes to UCSD and holds recruiting events and has workshops where they can interface directly with students.”
This November 13–15, another part of San Diego’s gaming story comes to the Convention Center. TwitchCon—a three-day pop culture event celebrating video games, content creators, and streamers returns for its sixth San Diego edition. In 2024, Twitch announced that it will be holding its massive pop culture party here until at least 2028.
“San Diego really has it all,” says Mary Kish, the head of community at Twitch.
Streamer Aplatypuss has attended every TwitchCon held in North America. Before becoming a streamer, his annual convention tradition was San Diego Comic-Con; after he began streaming, it became TwitchCon. “San Diego fits the Twitch community incredibly well,” he says.
For a city that has spent decades making games, it’s another way to bring people playing them together.
Jennifer Ianni is a long-time San Diego journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, PACIFIC magazine, Point Loma-OB Monthly, PB Monthly, and more. She’s a native San Diegan who loves puns, pop culture, dive bars, yoga, extra dirty martinis, walks with her dog, Luna, and hanging out with her nephew, Jay, and her niece, Siena.
