Jessica Tams

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 have time to get to that you forget—forget—that you make games for a living—and that is freaking awesome.

Gamesauce is intended to get you to stop doing for a few minutes so that you might spend a little time thinking. Thinking about your place and your purpose and your passion. Thinking about your various opportunities to make a lasting impact on others. Thinking about some bigger questions than Where are we going for lunch today?

Ian Fischer

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 our tables. Sheets and sheets of stickers advertising an entertainment network called Berzerk littered the bar. We had taken to using them to replace the labels on our beer bottles and, as they became more numerous, to toasting “berzerk” and then just randomly yelling “berzerk.” Eventually, the people who actually owned the service approached us, cautiously, to ask if we worked for them.

By this point, we’d received a number of awards for Age of Empires (the game shipped in October of the year before), but this was the first award we’d been given formally. Officially. In a ballroom. Surrounded by hundreds of our peers. It was unbelievable. We’d also been informed of our updated sales numbers, well north of a million now, which didn’t hurt the mood any.

Brenda Brathwaite

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 only reason that I’m in that mode is because, just prior to that, I was thinking about what the player would like, what I would like. My process is highly iterative. I change, play, change, play, until it feels just right. Ultimately, I’m making the game for every player who likes the type of games that I like to play. So, in a sense, I am my games’ audience—or the ambassador for them, anyway. That way, I never have to guess what the player might like, because it’s always what I would like.

Brenda Brathwaite: A lot of designers say that their designs are “player-centric,” but can you go into it a little more detail and give us an example?

John Romero: Ultimately, the player—every player—wants to be a star, and in my games, that’s always what I’m trying to do: make you the star. I have succeeded and failed on occasion, I suppose, but it’s always at the forefront of my mind. Half-Life 2 did a brilliant job of making the player feel like an ultimate badass. The NPCs were in awe whenever you showed up. Valve nailed it.

Anonymous

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 of what actually took place is crushing. Rumors fly, the blame game and finger-pointing intensify. You hear (and utter) dark words in dark booths at the back of dark bars. Before long, it’s “them against us,” developers turning against those who did the canceling.

Then again, sometimes it doesn’t suck. Sometimes you have no confidence in what you’re making. Sometimes you have chopped and changed so much of what the game is supposed to be that you just want to do something—anything—different, something in which the course is charted and more defined. And sometimes you have been on a death march for months, working late and through weekends on a morale-sapping project from Hell. In these cases, getting canceled is more like a celebration.

Bill Slease

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 want to make games in the first place. At the risk of speaking for other developers with strongly held principles, the answer to both questions starts with the same observation. The obvious conflicts you’re thinking of aren’t the really problematic ones. In other words, the situation is actually worse than you think.

Tom Forsyth

Jake Simpson

Steve Theodore

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 Sims 1. I had a bet with one of the producers before I went in there that I could use the word “lesbian” in the actual conversation, get it into the article, and no one would be offended.

Steve: We’re all crowding around, trying to get our pictures taken with some college kid in plastic armor, while the richest man in the world is standing by himself, looking lost, holding a cup of fuzzy navel.

Ilari Lehtinen

It makes me wonder: Does using and knowing a great many words lead to a reduced level of empathy, to detached interpersonal communication? Going even further, will inherently “too sophisticated” and “out of their league” vocabulary simply create an emotional distance between the speaker and the audience? As your lexicon expands, do you become a sort of “textbook alien” who can no longer connect with people anymore?

Dan Magaha

The reality is that production responsibilities vary at every game development studio and at every game publisher. Producer duties can range from low-level gopher and note-taker to spreadsheet-wielding taskmaster to high-powered battlefield commander.

Kenn Hoekstra