When Professor Louis Natanson began teaching at the Dundee Institute of Technology in the 1980s, little did he know he was starting a journey that would transform the city.
The former high school teacher was responsible for teaching a generation of programmers who would go on to carve a new identity for Dundee as a home of computer game design.
And he helped found the school of Arts, Media and Computer Games at Abertay University, aiding the former Institute of Technology develop an international identity all of its own.
Professor Natanson, 62, who retired last week, said helping shape the school’s mixture of arts and science was his crowning achievement.
And despite helping nurture the careers of gaming industry titans like Dave Jones, he maintains his role has simply been that of an educationalist.
After beginning his career at Kirkton High School, he taught at three high schools before arriving at the then Dundee Institute of Technology in 1985, which had started offering a degree in micro processing systems.
“Probably one of the first students to go through the degree was Dave Jones,” said Professor Natanson.
“Because it was a degree about how to work with hardware it wasn’t a simple computing course.
“In about 1988 or 1989 when I was teaching them about the bits and bytes it turns out Dave and others were using that to create Lemmings and then Grand Theft Auto.”
He said gaming and computer technology has changed dramatically over the past 30 years and society has changed as a result too.
“It’s not just technologically, culturally people are different too and it’s important to remember that,” he said.