Throughout my life, I've seen that everybody has had something to teach me and, strangely, it's always something relevant to what I'm going through at that point.
— Cory Barlog
I love movies.
At its root, 'God of War' was always the promise of adventure.
God of War' was a 40-60 person team. It was a lot of very different, very passionate, very crazy people.
Whether you have a small team or a large team, you'll always have a percentage of people telling you to do the opposite of what you think you should be doing. Then you'll have a percentage of people telling you to do the opposite of what they're saying. It's a constant sea of doubtful voices. You have to navigate through that.
I don't think I've ever worked on anything that wasn't way bigger than we expected. That's all the way back to working on fighting games at Paradox. Everything seems to balloon when more and more people get involved.
I wanted to experiment with more deliberate combat but I never wanted to lose that DNA of what 'God of War' is.
As a writer, you understand how hard it is to build up backstory for characters, so you can have impactful moments. You have to build toward something and then pay it off.
I'm trying to be better for my son. And regretting every moment that I'm not spending with him.
Having a kid motivates you to really take stock of yourself and how much of yourself you want to be reflected back in the actions of your kid.
I'm very - I love talking about games, I love talking about movies and TV shows and love what I do at work. But after work, I don't want to talk to anybody. I'm super private. I stay home.
I'm not a competitive player at all, but I don't want competitive games to go away, because for some people that's why they play games, to compete.
Find your own way into your story. Find your own way into your game.
You have to have this straddling balance of realizing that games are incredibly complex. You can have an idea of where you want to go with something, the structure of something, but the actual moment to moment figuring all this out-it unravels over the course of, in 'God of War''s case, about five years.
Do not make decisions for your kid. It's not going to turn out well.
Working with George Miller was an education. It was eight college degrees in character development and directing all at once.
I had this idea that I didn't want to have kids until my career was at the right point, until we have a house, until we have savings of at least this much ... None of that came true. It just happened.
For me, human beings have a very difficult time changing. It's one of the hardest things to do.
Staying in a hotel, I get zero interruptions and sleep all the way through the night. It's amazing.
Every creator has to follow what they believe. That's the message I would love for every single executive to get, to clearly understand, and every single producer out there.
I used to animate. I started in animation, and you'd end every day with at least one substantive contribution.
A game director, in my mind, is somebody who makes everybody on the team miserable for the duration of the project.
When you pitch a half-baked idea it's so easy for someone to pick it apart and hate on it.
