People perceive games as being for kids, and I think that perception is going to change. Time is going to take care of that. I mean, we've already won. Games have won; it's inevitable.
— Warren Spector
The only morality I'm interested in is the morality between your ears, between each player's ears, because that's the interesting thing to me.
I kind of get a next-gen game machine, but competing for the home entertainment business? We'll see how that goes.
I want content that is relevant to my life, that is relevant to me, that is set in the real world.
I've got friends who are literally working alone on indie games that have no prospect of profit or commercial success. I've got guys working on iPhone games.
Anyone who says they want to make a game that becomes a cult classic is kinda screwy, right? I mean, you want to reach the largest audience you can.
The only thing I insist that everybody do is there has to be a basketball court in every game I do, and - with one exception, I let them get away with it once - you can actually shoot a ball through the basket in every game I've made.
I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!
From a gameplay standpoint, I've said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that's really what I'm interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.
When you're dealing with a new platform, the real trick is just getting the game running.
Dude, I turn into a six-year-old when I come to Disneyland. It's amazing. My eyes glass over and my blood pressure goes down. I'm just like everybody else. I turn into a big kid when I come here. It's the happiest place on earth, right?
Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.
The fact is most computer roleplaying games that offer a zillion highly specialized skills end up with nine-tenths of a zillion skills that every player quickly realizes aren't worth the experience points to buy.
Ideas are nothing. They're irrelevant. If you think your idea is so important, you're doomed. The reality is if you don't like one idea, I've got 299 more. If I tell you my idea, and you can execute better against that idea than I can - great; I get to play a terrific game.
I do not believe in the concept of good and evil in my personal life, in the real world. I just don't believe it. I never try to judge.
Gamers both demand and deserve novelty. They need something new. As a game developer, one of my rules is there will be at least one thing in every game that I worked on that no one on the planet has seen before.
In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.
I want my little corner of the world where I get to make games where you're not trying to win or lose; you're not trying to get a higher score - you are having unbelievable amounts of fun as you learn about yourself and the world. That's what games can do!
We live in a world of virtual goods where none of us own the 0s and 1s. What are you going to do?
I have been the last space marine between earth and an alien invasion. I really just don't need to go there anymore.
I have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords.
The Junction Point journey is over. To all those who've asked, or want to ask, I'm sad but excited for the future.
In the electronic game world, I know I have a reputation for doing the cyberpunk thing, and for doing the serious epic fantasy thing, but if you go back to when I was a kid, I've been a Disney fan all my life.
I was amazed at how the life of a freelancer differed from running a remote studio for another company. I thought I knew what I was doing in 2004 when I left Eidos because I had run Ion Storm Austin, which was my own independent studio. I had run a business unit inside Origin, but being part of a startup is crazy.
Third-person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development. Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it.
I used to teach animation history classes at the University of Texas, and I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons. I just love cartoons.
The Wii U is pretty cool, and the thing that I'm most intrigued about it is it's the first gaming platform that actually is exploiting the second screen.
I don't even make multiplayer games much, so dealing with multiple characters is something new for me - or, rather, something I've had to recall from my days as a roleplaying adventure designer where the party was everything!
My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.
In papergaming, players can look at a character sheet of their own creation and see all of their skills, right there, in black and white.
The basic idea for what became 'Epic Mickey' began at the Disney Think Tank.
I would love to take 'Ultimata Underworld' and literally update the graphics.
For most developers, that kind of situation - a player figuring out how to do something that the designer didn't intend - to most developers, that's a bug. For me, that's a celebration.
I have never made a game that wasn't explicitly about empowering players to tell their own story.
I often get painted as the guy who's trying to tell other people what to make and what to like, and that's really not my goal, but I believe so passionately that games can be more than a lot of people think they can.
I'm a huge fan of e-books, but the more I buy and download, the more I worry that someone could just take them all away from me.
If we're going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be.
The more people who game, the better for everyone.
I said to myself as Junction Point embarked on the Epic Mickey journey that, worst case, we'd be 'a footnote in Disney history.' Looking back on it, I think we did far better than that.
Kids, adults, men, women, everybody has a relationship with Mickey Mouse.
The transition from the original Xbox to the Wii wasn't a big deal for my team. The business hadn't changed fundamentally.
I've done a pretty good job of hitting 18-34-year-old males, and not such a good job of reaching kids. Disney has done a great job of reaching kids, but maybe not the 18-34-year-olds. I figure I can learn a lot from Disney, and maybe, I don't know, they can learn a lot from me.
The concept of emergent gameplay is really exciting. That's when players are really crafting their own experience. So if you're clever and creative, you can do things that even developers of the game didn't know were possible.
I'm a Nintendo geek, so I'm a pretty big Nintendo fan.
The 'DuckTales' ensemble is clearly critical. There's the core set of characters - Scrooge, Webby, Launchpad, Huey, Dewey and Louie... Plus there's Gyro and Duckworth and Mrs. Beakley and so on. The cast is huge.
I think plenty of games - from 'Thief' to 'Zelda' - have shown that sneaking around can be fun.
The reality, for me at least, is that the finest recreation of a paper game, played on computer, pales in comparison with the actual, face-to-face experience.
I remember on Deus Ex there was one programmer - Alex Durand, a guy who still works for us - he decided he was going to get through the game without ever using a weapon. I would never think to do that. And that's fine.
Unfortunately, the rights to 'System Shock' trademark and copyright are both up in the air.
Every game has to teach you how to walk, run, talk, use.
