When you’re as busy as we all are, with so much going on around us, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. You get so preoccupied with the screwed up economy, squabbles between publishers and developers, indie opportunities and freelance opportunities and start-up opportunities and the half dozen cool ideas that you never…
It was early May, 1998. Nearly all of Ensemble Studio’s employees were in San Jose, aboard the Queen Mary. We had just been awarded a pair of Spotlight Awards from the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, including “Best of Show.” The statuettes looked like miniature Klieg lights, and someone had plugged them in on one of…
Brenda Brathwaite: Let’s start with your design philosophy. When you make a game, what are you trying to accomplish? John Romero: Well, it begins and ends with the player—always has. While I am making the game, that’s the role I take. I might be in coding mode or level design mode or whatever, but the…
It almost always sucks. There you are, flogging your guts out on a project that is progressing when all of a sudden the word comes down: it’s canceled. Everyone is milling around in confusion. What happens next? Will we get let go? What the hell happened? The letdown is palpable, and the lack of knowledge…
In my decade or so as a paid game developer, I’ve often been asked two different questions by people inside and outside the industry. The insiders want to know how I can justify making video games for a living given the beliefs I profess, and the outsiders want to know why on Earth I would…
Tom: So we’re in the middle of this press briefing with all the big press when all of a sudden, out of these beautiful, highfidelity, surround-sound speakers, one of the dev’s starts yelling: “You wankeeeer!” Jake: I’m there to talk to the journalists about why Sims 2 is going to be so much better than…
I know people who are highly educated and use their brains on levels of analytical depth that are alien to me. On a daily basis they use vocabulary no ordinary person of daily grind has to face. The thing is, they also seem somewhat detached on a personal level of communication. Everything is questioned, referred…
I am met by a large, bodybuilder-type fellow sometimes referred to as “The Arms.” More conventionally, he is known as Andrea Pessino, the Vice President of Technology for Ready at Dawn Studios. Andrea seems genuinely uncomfortable with the title (VP of Technology, that is) since he and the other principals at Ready at Dawn would…
The job title “producer” has no consistent meaning in video game development. Ask anyone who works in the industry and you can be sure they’ll have their own unique idea of what a producer is and what he or she does. To some, “producer” is a title worthy of great respect and admiration. To others,…
If you get a hundred game writers into a room (and I’m not entirely sure that there are a hundred game writers), the one thing they will agree on is that writers are often brought into the development process too late. I hear about far too many scenarios in which the developers have all but…