As Case understood, the secret sauce was not games or published content; it was a yearning for connection. “Our big bet, even back in 1985, was what we called community,” he recounted. “Now people refer to it as social media. We thought the killer app of the Internet was going to be people. People interacting with people they already knew in new ways that were more convenient, but also people interacting with people they didn’t yet know, but should know because they had some kind of shared interest.”
