To expand on yesterday’s post, I don’t think the problem with Mark Bolas being written out of the Oculus Rift story was the fault of Palmer Luckey. Rather, it was the fault of us, collectively.
In the U.S. we tend to frame all such stories as a “Hero myth”. The first question we ask is often “who was the individual who did this?” The idea that a story can have multiple heroes (which in reality is generally the case) is often too complex to form a compelling national narrative.
So we say that Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb, that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, that James Clerk Maxwell invented Maxwell’s equations. None of these statements is really true, but they are all convenient myths that have satisfied somebody’s agenda, and that were much easier for people to keep in mind than the far messier and more complicated reality.