Penn Jillette and Randy Pitchford at the DICE Summit.
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Penn Jillete: ‘If you liked rock ‘n’ roll in 1971, you have to love video games today’

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

LAS VEGAS — Penn Jillette, the famous comedian and magician (and the speaking portion of the Penn & Teller act), is a defender of video games as an art. He got up onstage with Randy Pitchford, chief executive of Borderlands maker Gearbox Software and an amateur magician, to talk about video games as a protected form of art and free speech.

Their talk shed some light on the common ingredients that all great entertainment and art share, and the session was meant to inspire the elite creators of the video game business to be more creative and think outside the box, because that’s what results in blockbusters that can change the industry.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.