Video game developers

"A game is a series of interesting choices."

"The irony is we thought we were behind the curve, that the industry had already peaked, and we were just trying to catch up."

"SimCity inspired Civilization in a way. The first prototype of Civilization that I did was a real-time game like SimCity, in that you placed cities and moved things around, but cities grew without you. You basically seeded the world in a kind of SimCity-esque way. Instead of zoning, you seeded things, and you said I want a city over there, and why don't you do some farming over here. What I didn't like in that version of Civilization is that you did a lot more watching than you did playing. So SimCity, Empire, Railroad Tycoon, and the Civilization board game were the different ingredients that we stirred together to get to Civilization."

"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt."

"While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins."

"One of the things stressed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect to each and every player character in a campaign. In AD&D it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT."

"Hello Fry, it's a ... *[stops mid-sentence, throws a D20 and a D6]* pleasure to meet you."

"One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy!"

"Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game."

"The idea that a game is anything more than a game… You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard."

"In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while."

"The new D&D is too rule intensive. It's relegated the Dungeon Master to being an entertainer rather than master of the game. It's done away with the archetypes, focused on nothing but combat and character power, lost the group cooperative aspect, bastardized the class-based system, and resembles a comic-book superheroes game more than a fantasy RPG where a player can play any alignment desired, not just lawful good."

"The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally."

"I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

"Pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play. In the same way, the computer is a more immediately accessible way to play games."

"The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things."

"There is no intimacy; it’s not live. [he said of online games] It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better.""

"I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and "wisdom" and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents."

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them ... He really enjoyed that."

"It has to be well timed. It needs to have the right components that maybe contain emerging technologies or something like, say, when Doom came out -- the Network play -- there weren't many games like that. There was a really great 3D world that a lot of people hadn't seen. It was light-years ahead of Wolfenstein. It was shareware, so it had Internet distribution. We used the Internet to get it all over the place. So it used a lot of stuff that was just becoming popular at that time. id just capitalized on it."

"Doom 2 is just such a bigger, badder, better version of Doom"

"Design is Law"

"John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch."

"Suck it Down."

"Twenty-eight years ago, I created my first game on an Apple II in my bedroom closet at a time when the interactive entertainment industry was taking its first baby steps. Today the games business has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry and we are just at the tip of the iceberg. I'm thrilled to have been a part of this successful journey and I'm extremely honored by the Academy's Hall of Fame induction."

"Stealing is OK as long as it's done well."

"Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii - the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement."

"It almost feels like a zombie at this point; it's the walking dead. It's such an abrupt end to what was E3, which had been this huge escalating arms race....Right now we're in this kind of dicey, do we have an event, what event is it, which one do we go to? I think we're in an uncomfortable transition zone when really the real E3 died a couple of years ago.""

"In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space."

"When it comes to computer games, many academics seem to be one step down from judges in their lack of engagement with the real world."

"I'd take over World of Warcraft and I'd close it. I just want better virtual worlds. Sacrificing one of the best so its players have to seek out alternatives would be a sure-fire way to ensure that unknown gems got the chance they deserved, and that new games were developed to push back the boundaries. Er, I would get to do this anonymously, wouldn't I?"

"If anyone samples this for a hardcore techno dance track I shall expect a royalty."

"I only included things that everybody likes, like violence, flowers, children, women, friendship and death."

"The testers who tested this game went nuts. At first it was easier, but when the testers said "this is too difficult", I made it even more difficult."

"I no longer can figure out what the hell they're trying to do with the numbering, and I don't know which one is which. I don't know what they're trying to do with all of these spin-offs, so this includes Nina: Death by Degrees as well. I don't think it even needs saying, but people should stay away from Tekken. Nothing left to say. I just don't want them to disappoint me any more. It's so annoying. Please don't annoy me any more."

"If I made a similar game as a game I made in the company I quit, people would say, "What an idiot, can't he make anything else?" Well, that is more or less the opinion I have for, uh, that Bayo-something game."

"Covered in hair, is she? I dunno, Mr. Kamiya must have a lot going through his head. Well, in any case, I would first recommend laser eye surgery. I'm sure he's not that strapped for cash, right?"

"I think a lot of people may take some heart from this: a lot of the math, the heavy math in projective geometry, [...] took me a long time. There were many many years, a decade, when I was considered this graphics guru genius, when I really couldn't do from scratch [...] the mathematics that underpins a lot of that. But slowly, eventually, with a couple decades of experience, most of it did eventually sink in on me."

"Everything is an interpolation problem if you have enough data"

"In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers."

"These are things I find enchanting and miraculous. I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.""

"Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are my 'gold standard', and it has been quite a while since I have had to report a problem to them, and even their brand new extensions work as documented the first time I try them. When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault."

"The situation is so much better for programmers today - a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want to shoot for."

"The speed of light sucks."

"I'm good? Seriously?"

"It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies."

"It's done, when it's done."

"It's a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well..."

"[A]t its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior."

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

"Personally, I’ve always been of the sleek and minimalist design school: make sure the core play is consistent and strong, then let that idea play out against different environments and challenges, this tends toward focusing on bio-mechanical twitch responses, audio-visual awe, and leaning more toward general strategy and tactics development over specific puzzle solving."

"Sharing the code just seems like The Right Thing to Do, it costs us rather little, but it benefits a lot of people in sometimes very significant ways. There are many university research projects, proof of concept publisher demos, and new platform test beds that have leveraged the code. Free software that people value adds wealth to the world."

"Advances in technology won’t be as significant as they have been in the past, most games won’t be materially improved by simulating every drop of water in the pond you are wading through. More resources can be profitably spent to make the creation process easier. How things will play out with respect to connectivity and where the data resides and processing takes place is still a very interesting question. The overlap and convergence between desktop computers, consoles, laptops, handheld gaming devices, and cell phones is also interesting. It is all still quite exciting."

"Helping people directly can be a noble thing. Forcing other people to do it with great inefficiency? Not so much. There isn’t a single thing that I would petition the federal government to add to its task list, and I would ask that it stop doing the majority of the things that it is currently doing. My vote is going to the candidates that at least vector in that direction."

"The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion."

"A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in."

"I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offense after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly."

"Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems."

"Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours."

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."

"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."

"Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later."

"This is a bit more expensive than my previous turbo-Ferrari habit, but not too bad."

"The biggest problem is that Java is really slow. On a pure cpu / memory / display / communications level, most modern cell phones should be considerably better gaming platforms than a Game Boy Advanced. With Java, on most phones you are left with about the CPU power of an original 4.77 mhz IBM PC, and lousy control over everything."

"The Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've had on PC."

"Honestly, I spend very little time thinking about past events, and I certainly don't have them ranked in any way. I look back and think that I have done a lot of good work over the years, but I am much more excited about what the future holds."

"But realistically, we don’t have that many problems at QuakeCon. If it was a football convention or something, there would probably be a lot more incidents."

"When he was young, John Romero made a game for every letter of the alphabet. That was wise."

"I’m going to turn on every damn light in protest of Earth Hour. Lighting the darkness is fundamental to humanity's climb."

"I do hear sometimes from programmers who are kind of sad that they don't have the opportunity to write game engines from scratch like I did and have it matter or make an impact...here's where some perspective really helps - I can remember when I was a teenager, I thought I had missed the Golden Age of 8-bit gaming, that I was never going to be Richard Garriott...time went by, and I got to make my own marks in things after that. And, in that time, I also see so many opportunities that have come by. The 90s PC wave was great - I was happy to be there, and I'm glad I took a swing and knocked one out of the park with that. But since then, we've seen mobile games, and web games, and free-to-play games, the Steam revolution...and now . And all of these are amazing! So, yeah, the opportunities that I had aren't there for people today - but there are new and better ones. And personally, I'm more excited about these than anything that's come before. So, thank you very much for this honor, but I'm just getting started."

"It is hard for less experienced developers to appreciate how rarely architecting for future requirements / applications turns out net-positive."

"No medium is particularly better than any other medium for tackling pressing social issues. But, yeah, it really depends on what options I can do. Games happen to be the medium I'm most familiar with."

"Success comes on God’s terms, in His time, and in His way. God only allowed me to have success after I’d been broken after I’d stopped seeking success for myself, and after I’d come to terms with the idea that my labors for God might not ever bring me a penny. It was only after I’d lost everything that God was able to get my heart right to the point where He could trust me with success."

"Make sure that you are next year's big success story. Don't fall into the pit of people who have given up on making something of themselves, and make sure you take everything out of yourself. I'm getting too old for this. And when I retire someday, I'm going to want to sit down at a computer and play your games, read your stories, and watch your videos. Don't fall in with the people who have already given up on themselves. You are tomorrow's next big thing."

"I’d made a family-friendly game about a beaver before this, when I went to put it online it got torn apart by a few prominent reviewers. People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal. I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself- I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that."

"Imagine countless wiki editors all using each others work as basis for their own, reasoning what must be true from what they already assume is. Wouldn't that make for a weird reality?"

"Mansplaining is a sexist term designed to silence men via gender shaming."

"Selectively choosing what gets condemned and forcing people to join sides while hiding behind semantics is pure evil."

"David Eddings:‏ I'm afraid that ignorance, hate, racism, and violence will be exacerbated by silence. If speaking out is not an answer then what is? Markus Persson:‏ Reading up on history, thinking for yourself, and not being an idiot."

"Privilege is a made up metric used to silence and repress. We are all different, and that is ok. We listen to individuals and help each other based on individual strengths and needs. We do not generalize based on skin color, bigot."

"A one-world government is an absolutely terrible concept, because it sets up a system of an ultimate prize to be claimed by the most ruthless, most determined, and most power-hungry individuals. The hypothetical process of getting to that point is bad enough, but if the global governance enthusiasts ever succeed in establishing it, it's going to make the historical institutions of slavery and medieval serfdom look like freedom in comparison. The only peace it will bring to Mankind is the peace of the grave. The most effective way for individual Americans to respond is to continue to insist on the restoration of their Constitution and to remain steadfast in refusing demands that they give up their national sovereignty."

"Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse. But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet."

"I am a Christian who wrote a novel in a specific literary tradition. I did not approach the process as a representative of modern evangelical culture, hoping to collect a few crumbs fallen from the medieval feast described in excruciatingly painstaking detail on the secular table, but as one of the legitimate heirs to the literary kingdom who is castigating the usurpers."

"The truth always forces its way through the lies and deceit that cloak it over time. All of the lies that Americans have been told by their immigrant invaders, from “the proposition nation” to the “huddled masses”, the “melting pot”, “we are the world”, and “diversity is our strength” are going to be disproven in a conclusive, and possibly cataclysmic manner by the geopolitical rivalry with a unified and confident nation."

"There is a reason that truth is considered to be a fundamentally different category than the beautiful or even the good. Sometimes, the truth can be ugly indeed, but even the ugliest truth is of intrinsic value."

"Remember, debts that can't be paid, won't be paid."

"Pursue that which lasts. Live for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True."

"Racism is entirely laudable, as racism is nothing more than the attempt by a people whose identity is under assault to preserve their unique status as a people, and the term is used in a pejorative manner by those who are attempting to destroy all independent aspects of identity, language, blood, religion, and culture in that group of people. This is neither theory nor speculation, it is simple historical fact."

"Christian Nationalism is literally the highest form of civilization ever known to Man."

"The humiliating retreat from Afghanistan is just the punctuation mark. What we’re witnessing is the end of the US empire, with all the alien rulers, corrupt judges, illegitimate government, incompetent generals, foreign profiteers, and hordes of invading migrants, moral degeneracy, and declining religious faith, morale, and national confidence that customarily accompanies such events. If history is any guide, this is not going to be turned around, so it is time to stop thinking in terms of “preserving” and “conserving” and “restoring” that which is destroyed, and start thinking in terms of building anew with the benefit of the lessons learned from the decline and fall of the United States of America."

"Judeochristianity is, and has always been, an ahistorical deception targeting naive American Christians. Unlike Europeans, most 20th-Century Americans knew nothing about Jews or their history, which is why the post-1945 propaganda campaign to convince American Christians that they shared a common faith heritage with Jews rather than a completely antithetical one was mostly successful."

"The West had three components: Christianity, the European nations, and the Greco-Roman philosophical legacy."

"It appears vaccinated travellers brought it to Botswana rather than picking it up there. This observation is further buttressed by the fact that people from as far away as Australia have already been identified as carrying the B.1.1.529 variant of the virus."

"What sort of “safe and effective” vaccine needs to be injected four times in a single calendar year in order to not prevent people from being infected with the disease being “prevented”?"

"Literally every argument for the Covid vaxxes has proven to be false. They don’t provide immunity. They are not safe. They don’t prevent hospitalization. And now it has been demonstrated that they now increase a Covid patient’s chance of dying."

"The conclusive verdict is in courtesy of a very large and peer-reviewed Brazilian study: Ivermectin is, and always was, a much safer and effective approach to combating Covid-19 than the various vaxxines."

"The Christian church is absolutely not there to remind people to pursue certain specific material goals. The Christian church is there to worship Jesus Christ, to care for the flock, and to spread the Gospel."

"I have tended to consider Guns, Germs, and Steel to be little more than an ahistorical concoction that combines pop history and science with illogical speculation and political correctness."

"Most, though obviously not all, vaccine mandates were nothing more than a bluff. Remember, evil always prefers your consent through submission. Threatening consequences, but not following through on the threat, has proven to be a moderately effective way to obtain compliance among the weak-willed and weak-minded. Learn to recognize the patterns. Pattern recognition is prediction."

"How anyone can look at the ongoing collapse of the USA due to its evil policies of mass immigration, free trade, and free speech and conclude that the failing state provides a functional model worthy of imitation, much less an ideal model that morally requires installation by force, completely mystifies me."

"The unarmed society is a defenseless society, which is why the body counts are usually much higher in places that are gun-free zones than in places where people are able to defend themselves by legally carrying arms. And, as always, it’s vital to keep in mind that gun violence is primarily a racial issue, not an availability of weapons issue, as the newly-adulterated nations of Europe are beginning to discover in the aftermath of Merkel’s Migration."

"Mailer’s work will not be any great loss; he is part of the Boomer-era literary decline that saw the elevation of mediocre writers like Bellow, Kerouac, Roth, and Mailer himself at the expense of people who could a) actually write and b) had something to say about the human condition that didn’t revolve around narcissism and sex with mediocre women. But his cancellation is not without significance, as it demonstrates that evil will always cast even its most celebrated servants aside as soon as they cease to be useful."

"Francis Fukuyama, the only predictor whose track record is worse than Scott “I did NOT see that coming” Adams, is convinced that history is still in the process of ending, it just didn’t end when he said it did."

"While his peers are dodging sniper bullets and IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Shapiro is bravely urging them to invade five more countries in the establishment of global empire from the safety of his Harvard dorm room."

"It is entirely possible that my WND colleague [Ben Shapiro] has a perfectly good reason for not serving his country in its moment of need. For all I know, he may have a weak heart, a wooden leg, a predilection for San Francisco bathhouse sex or some other condition that prevents him from joining the military. But devoting two columns to criticizing a single word [Chickenhawk] strikes me as a lady protesting a bit too much."

"The Littlest Chickenhawk [Shapiro] wouldn’t serve in the US military while he was calling for the US to invade the Middle East and establish an empire there. It’s fascinating to see that despite all his endless squawking about Israel over the years, he won’t even lift a finger to personally defend it either."

"It’s not exactly news that the Littlest Chickenhawk is absolutely terrified of anyone who isn’t a college student, and therefore, is capable of unmasking what a mediocre little midwit he is"

"the Torah is not studied in order to better obey it, but rather, to better determine how to “legally” work around it. It’s very much like the Constitution, whereas the Talmud is akin to the growing collection of case law and interpretation that takes precedence over the black letter law itself. In the same way lawyers are able to justify violating Constitutional rights despite the clear language of the Constitution, rabbis are highly skilled in their ability to justify various activities despite the clear language of the Law of the Old Testament. Which is why there is a specific warning in Isaiah against those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. If you can imagine ten thousand Ben Shapiros deciding what is right, what is wrong, and constantly redefining both over time as desired, that’s pretty much the situation."

"As a Generation X suburbanite, I was given the opportunity to grow up with one of the more idyllic childhoods ever known to human history. But the unique factors that made the American suburb possible in the first place have been systematically eliminated, thereby rendering them, like the USA itself, unsustainable."

"Suburbia was a wonderful place to live, even if it was a consequence of American atomism and the geographic dispersion of the American family."

"The reason the Great Depression happened was the same reason that the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Everyone was overleveraged and the total amount of money being borrowed collapsed."

"There is no such thing as “judeo-christianity”. America is not, and never was, a “Judeo-Christian nation”."

"Tattoos are social signifiers and they signify three important things: 1: Short time preferences. 2:Poor judgment. 3:Susceptibility to social influences."

"The reason the Great Depression happened was the same reason that the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Everyone was overleveraged and the total amount of money being borrowed collapsed. That is why an average of 1,287 banks failed every year from 1930 to 1933."

"Real war is existential and attritional. Doctrine doesn’t matter, elan doesn’t matter, technological advantage doesn’t matter. Four things are relevant: industrial capacity, numbers, societal morale, and leadership."

"The second of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism [Dennett] has died at the age of 82. He will be remembered both for his own philosophical works, for the critique of them in The Irrational Atheist, and for providing one of the great atheist memes ever to grace the Internet."

"There are very few, if any, actual scientific studies that have been performed on vaccine safety. Not for any vaccine, not for any age group of recipients."

"I had zero experience at the time, but I wanted to create something that no-one else was doing. It was that absence of anything like Mafia that really motivated me. I was really proud to finish it and even more proud that the final product was almost identical to the original vision."

"I grew up during communism, when comics books were prohibited as capitalist decadent propaganda, western movies were censored, any book that could be in conflict with socialist ideology was prohibited and you went to jail for saying what you think. So I am allergic to any kind of censorship in the name of any ideology. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I would like to give all the ideologues a piece of advice – If you want something to be made, do it yourself. Everyone will be happy."

"Over the last decade, media were taken over by people who think that their ideals, opinions and way of life are superior to others and so they have the mission to tell others how to live, what to think and what to do. Those people have learned that there is a very easy way of manipulating others with guilt and fake goodwill. They will tell you that you should be ashamed, because you are privileged. You are white, you are healthy, you are rich and it's your fault that there are others who are not as lucky as you. So you must redeem those crimes by doing what those social justice warriors think will please those who are not privileged enough. And if you don't, they will jump on you and give you a hard time. Nobody wants to be called sexist, misogynistic, rape culture supporter, and everybody kind of agrees that it's great to help people who were not as lucky as them, so for some time this works. The problem is that this is not enough. At the same time, these people persuade those that are not so lucky that they are victims. They make enemies out of people. They ostracize different opinions."

"It’s quite controversial for some, but it’s very human. Everybody remembers it and people love it. It’s not because there’s great combat or there’s insanely complicated gameplay, but it’s because there’s a very interesting story where you have a lot of choice that include tough moral decisions. This causes intrigue into how the story will end and that’s something I’ve always wanted to achieve. Putting people into situations and letting the player experience them, is ideal in my eyes."

"I wouldn’t call other games or studios our rivals. We will see what happens as we monitor the market, and we’ll salute everyone’s fame and success. In fact it’s more a motivation to also create a great game that maybe even surpasses them."

"Demon’s Souls wasn’t doing well,” he says. “The project had problems and the team had been unable to create a compelling prototype. But when I heard it was a fantasy-action role-playing game, I was excited. I figured if I could find a way to take control of the game, I could turn it into anything I wanted. Best of all, if my ideas failed, nobody would care – it was already a failure."

"We don't really feel our games have created a standard. I have no concern over others making similar games, it just shows that players wanted games that were like this, that are difficult, and wanted other studios to make challenging games that achieve the same level of satisfaction. We enjoy those games and their approach to creating them are never the same, anyway. We enjoy seeing the differences. We're totally fine with seeing more games come out that borrow aspects. Our main focus is keeping game creation fresh for ourselves."

"“Personally, a world that is happy and bright is something that just doesn’t feel realistic to me. It may sound like I have a trauma or something,” he said with a laugh, “but I believe that the world is generally a wasteland that is not kind to us. That’s just the way I see it.”"

"While making this game I rediscovered my love for making poison swamps. I know how people feel about them but I suddenly realize I'm in the middle of making one and I can't help myself. It just happens."

"I was honestly concerned people might have forgotten or given up or whatnot, but the reaction so far has been very positive. I'm very overwhelmed, very thankful, very grateful. I also feel like those fans and their passion has helped me and the team to continue moving on, heads down, to keep pushing and working hard. That's fueling our motivation at this point."

"Comics were the source of my entertainment and interest. But they’re the kind of standard Japanese stuff that Japanese kids enjoy. When I got to university, there was a layer of culture shock that hit me. I began to learn about modern and abstract art. Until that time my drawings were more realistic in style. Then I was opened up to abstract images. I was encountering things I’ve never paid attention to or recognized before. I liked that, behind those abstract images, there was always an idea. That set me thinking about art in terms of ideas, rather than depictions. What could I make that had a clear idea behind it, looked unique, and yet wasn’t alienating? All of that led me to the aesthetic of my games."

"I don’t play a lot of video games outside of work because for me video games are work. There are a lot of things I choose to do with my free time besides play games. But whenever I do hear about something interesting – if there is a new game that has a particularly interesting hook – that is something I will want to spend some time playing. But when it comes to genre, I definitely don’t specify one particular genre that I’m interested in. I’ll absolutely play anything in regards to genre."

"it is a big challenge to localize a game of that size with voice acting in particular. But always, from previous titles in the series, actually being able to allow fans to experience The Legend of Zelda in their own language is something we really care about and something we've regarded as an important thing to achieve. Of course we have our localisation processes in place and having talented staff to work on that was very important, and we're very happy to have achieved that goal, so Zelda in various different languages will be a reality for fans when they play the game."

"I recently posted about Oculus/Facebook and their data collection. Let me go more in depth and this isn’t just about today this is about the future of XR. At the heart of the matter are these points where their and actions differ from other XR companies. FB tracks and stores all device movement and location. They also have wording to allow them to track all communication and interaction with their services. They have been caught capturing call and sms data on android phones through their FB app using similar language. FB doesn’t have a Hardware guy in charge of Oculus Hardware – instead, they have Boz – an ad guy, a data guy who recently made thoughts on your value as a FB user very clear. And if you are still confused, FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. Why care that they track this data? Think the future, not just today. When there are XR apps and devices that you use regularly outside your home. Where natural feature tracking means cameras and microphones strapped to your head recording and saving everything. ... So it isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom."

"V has come to be my last Metal Gear. It has been an honor and a joy to have been given the opportunity to work on Metal Gear for nearly twenty amazing years. Tоday's computer graphics, technology, and hardware—compared to those of twenty years ago—have evolved so significantly. As a result, the art that can be created has dramatically changed. However, the process of conceptualizing and creating a character by understanding their personality, their habits, their backstory, and the role they play—this has fundamentally remained the same. Refining ideas and doing countless sketches over and over are tasks that at times feel formidable and complex. At the same time, they are very fun and gratifying."

"Go out to the last few grains of sand, the smartest of the smartest of the smartest, times a thousand. It makes sense that people would be a little odd out here. But you really have to wonder why we all end up in jail."

"I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could with his life."

"Wearing a cape doesn't do much for your social life."

"When life gives you lemons you squeeze them, hard. Make invisible ink. Make an acid poison. Fling it in their eyes."

"How do you take over the world? I've tried everything. Doomsday devices of every kind, nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological, gadgets that fit in a shoe box and that were visible from space. I've tried mass mind control; I've stolen the gold reserves in Fort Knox, only to lose them again. I've traveled backward in time to change history, forward in time to escape it; I've stopped time altogether to live in a world of statues. I've commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies. Fungus army. Army of fish. Of rodents. Alien invasion. Interdimensional alien invasion. Alien god invasion. Even a corporate takeover, Impossible Industries, LLC. Each time it ended the same way. I've been to jail twelve times."

"When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world."

"I have to say, even though I received this award, let me state that I will not retire. I will continue to create games as long as I live."

"Storytelling is very difficult. But adding the flavor helps to relay the storytelling, meaning in a cut scene, with a set camera and effects, you can make the users feel sorrow, or make them happy or laugh. This is an easy approach, which we have been doing. That is one point, the second point is that if I make multiple storylines and allow the users to select which story, this might really sacrifice the deep emotion the user might feel; when there's a concrete storyline, and you kind of go along that rail, you feel the destiny of the story, which at the end, makes you feel more moved. But when you make it interactive — if you want multiple stories where you go one way or another — will that make the player more moved when he or she finishes the game? These two points are really the key which I am thinking about, and if this works, I think I could probably introduce a more interactive storytelling method."

"If the player isn't tricked into believing that the world is real, then there's no point in making the game."

"What I really wanted to do was just have this sonic boom, with a flash, and have the level change on you instantly."

"I have never consciously separated casual users and hardcore gamers when I design a game. For the past 20 years, I have always been trying to make games so that anyone -- as many people as possible -- can enjoy them... I cannot help but say that I love my job of making games from the bottom of my heart."

"It was really fun.I had just joined the company,so rather than just working along with the designs.I'd ask what the conditions were and have fun working within those constraints."

"I think it's good that we put in lots of new things back then."

"I think New Super Mario Bros. Wii firmly established the idea of everyone in the family playing together."

"Yeah.I want to keep heading in that direction so the games are a tool for family bonding.However,I want the games to be a tool for expanding upon previously existing good elements rather than for making something different."

"Aerith and Tifa are both heroines in this game. We kind of made them both represent Eastern and Western styles. We designed Tifa to look more fit and athletic. From the moral committee among our staff, they said that if she's going to be doing a ton of action and movement, we wanted to give her clothes that would fit naturally, hence the change in a double layered tank top."

"When I was starting in the game industry, it wasn't common to be the only woman on the entire team...I always felt welcome, but it still felt awkward. In my years at Nintendo, I have come to discover that when there are women in a variety of roles on the project, you get a wider [range] of ideas."

"The Senran Kagura series will continue to run non-stop. That is the calling of a NINJA. They run faster and jump higher than anyone. They can easily jump over people’s expectations.These games still have the potential to grow big and large. Just like the girls’ chests.Tits are life, ass is hometown."

"When I was a kid I wanted to become a manga creator, but over time I realized video games are special due to how the player has direct control of the action. So, that became very appealing."

"Even if my place of work or the nature of my titles change, what I show won’t change and I don’t want it to. I’m a game fan at heart; I tell dirty jokes and make irresponsible comments (laughs), but I’ll work my hardest to make games."

"The way I think about puzzles is a real puzzle, is something you may not ever figure out."

"I can complain about games for my whole life."

"You know, in college, I never got either degree, but I was a double-major in Computer Science and English. And English at Berkeley, where I went to school, is very much creatively-driven. Basically, the entire bachelor's degree in English is all about bullshitting. And Computer Science, which was my other major, was exactly the opposite of that. You had to know what you were doing, and you had to know what you were talking about."

"A long time ago, I used to write fiction, short stories mainly. And I reached a point where I had honed my style so that it wasn't totally atrocious, and I kind of knew what I was doing when writing, and then the question was just, "What do I write about now?" And I couldn't really find anything that I felt was important enough to write about. So I just kind of gave up on writing."

"Finally, Braid was the thing where I felt that writing could enter into it. But the game design also is a different kind of writing. It's a different kind of idea communication. One of my main interests in writing stories was in finding truth, like fundamental truths of the universe, or finding important things. But the problem is that writing isn't a good venue for that. Because as I said, you can write anything the fuck you want down on a piece of paper, and as long as you're clever enough with your language, and your flow of logic from one sentence to the next – the better you are at those things, the more you can fool a reader into believing you. Even if what you're writing down is total bullshit. But, you cannot do that in a game – or at least it's much harder – because in a game, you have to create a simulated universe that works according to some rules. Especially the way Braid is constructed. It has to be intact as a place that has laws, and consistency. And because of that, there has to be a kernel of truth in Braid. I can't write down any old bullshit that I want. I can't make any puzzle that I want that has any arbitrary answer, because it won't work in the context of the rest of the game."

"Well, it's very personal to me, because I have that kind of personality. The same sort of thing that drives somebody to study physics for 30 years, so they can discover a new particle. Just so they can know something more about the world. I have that same personality, but I didn't end up in physics. I ended up in game design. What does that mean? What is my outlet for that? I have gone on record as talking about game design as a practice, like a scientific study, or like a spiritual practice, like yoga or tai chi. And that's part of what I'm doing when I design a game, is that I'm exploring the universe in a certain way. I'm trying to understand true things about it, or to uncover things about it, in ways again that are less bullshitty than just writing words on a paper. Because somehow, and I could be totally fooling myself about this, but I believe that somehow, there is something more meaningful about creating a system. Because the universe is a system, of some kind. And writing is not a system."

"There's another interesting thing, that I think that's interesting about game design is that game design is kind of a game by itself. I've made a bunch of puzzle games, and I've found that looking at a situation and saying "how do I make an interesting puzzle out of this?" is itself a really interesting puzzle. So there's this huge irony going on, that the companies that are making these social games [like FarmVille] that basically have no gameplay value in them are actually themselves playing a much more interesting game than the game that they're making for you to play. The game they're playing is this huge multi-dimensional optimization problem where you're trying to gather data and make the best decision and all that and the game they're making for you to play is like clicking on a cow a bunch of times and you get some gold. So that's very strangely humorous. And as I visualize that happening, somebody at one of these companies, they're doing their A/B testing, they're kind of tweaking something for Europe and tweaking something for America and tweaking something for Canada and then going over here and like "oh this A/B test is done, let's look at the graphs of the results and let's write a report on that" and stuff. It's a little bit like planting trees and rearranging a garden and minding livestock and all that. So you could say that the people making FarmVille are not only playing a game, but they're playing some kind of like ur-FarmVille that is way more interesting. And so the sad fact of what this all comes to is you've got these people—you know, FarmVille has a wide demographic, it's not just computer nerds who play it apparently, anymore—so you've got all these people who think that they're playing this cool game where they mine their cows and pigs and feeling like the boss and getting all this gold and getting richer and their farm is looking nicer. There's all these ways that they feel like they're progressing. But what's actually happening is that someone is farming them. So you know there's all these imaginary farms out there where you gain imaginary money but then there's a real farm with real money that pulls money from you over the internet and you don't ever see it because it's all behind your head while you're typing on the computer."

"I think a lot of game designers are irresponsible. When we can make something that affects so many people's lives—a AAA game these days, a hit one, is 10 million copies or more, probably. When you are making something that affects that many people, and you're not thinking about exactly what way you're affecting them—like seriously, not just like "oh, I'm giving them something fun" but like really introspecting—I feel like there's something wrong. If you think really hard about it and then you come to the conclusion "oh, what I'm doing is great, this is totally good", that's fine. But I feel like there's a lack of serious thought in the industry. People go and they spend three or four years of their life making a game, working very hard—it's very hard to make games, even when you have a hundred people helping. Because it's that much of your life, you would think it's very important to understand it and spend that time well but I think often the opposite happens psychologically—it's like "oh, I'm spending—I'm putting so much of myself into this". The thought that "it could be a bad thing when I thought that it was a good thing" is almost unbearable. "So I'm just not gonna look at that." I'm not saying that all game designers are like that. I've encountered what I perceive to be that attitude. Whereas other game designers, who make games where you just run around killing a hundred dudes or whatever, I've had totally reasonable discussions with them and they're just like "no, I've really thought about it and here's what I think". And so, it's complicated."

"So, let me say something that may—I mean, some people get a little nervous when you talk about things like meditation and I'm gonna say something even worse than that. So if you're about to embark on a long project, you might ask yourself the question, "How do I know this is the right idea?" Right, if I'm gonna spend years on this project, how do I know it's the right thing? How do I know I'm gonna stick to it and get it done? So I came up with this thing that I sort of facetiously called the Cry Test, which is just—imagine you're in a very safe place, with somebody you care a lot about—very intimate relationship with this person—you're very comfortable with them. And you start explaining to them what this project is that you wanna do. If you're not in danger of breaking out in tears, not even necessarily in sadness, not even necessarily breaking out in tears, but having some involuntary upwelling of emotion. If that's not going to happen in that kind of situation, this probably isn't a project that you're that committed to. Because to do a really long project, that drive needs to be very deep. It needs to come from your core. If it doesn't then what's gonna happen is you start working on this thing, six months later—oh, I have a really neat idea for a game, it's got a grappling hook and stuff. That sounds neat, and you start working on the grappling hook and stuff and it turns out to be harder than you thought. And not as good as you thought. And six months later you're like "Well, what if I had a jet pack instead?" And it'll just go like that. You'll drop one thing and pick up another thing and drop that thing and pick up another thing in a chain, because you're not that committed. To succeed in a long and difficult project, there has to be love in the idea. And I don't—you know, in English we toss around the word "love" all the time, like we say like "I love pizza" or something, but I don't mean that. I don't mean "I love this idea" as in "oh, it's such a great idea". I mean, "I love this idea in the way if I don't do it, I'm gonna feel like I'm not doing the purpose of my life." It has to be that strong. So the problem is that most people don't know how to find something that strong in game development. You certainly don't get taught that in school, so—at least, not any school I've ever seen—so I'd just encourage some deep introspection, just try—ask yourself what you really care about, really, because usually that answer will be very different from—usually, if you ask yourself what I care about, you'll come up with some answer, and then if you ask yourself "Really? Is that what I really care about?" Not really, it's usually some kind of politically correct answer that we tell ourselves. If you iterate on that, if you keep asking yourself what you care about, and not accepting the previous answer, you just ask again, ask again, eventually you make it to something you really care about."

"So what are the ideas? Are they anything? Not really. What they are is an exploration of the things that can happen when you’re in a simpler version of the world we live in. So you have light and shadow, and you have colors and shapes occluding other shapes, and there’s an exploration of ‘Let’s make this as simple as we can and look at it with the greatest degree of focus that we can and see what we can see, and what is that like?’ Not even necessarily in a high-minded philosophical way, but let’s experientially look with fresh eyes upon this activity of walking around in a world from day to day, before you even add in other people that send you off into a weird mental place and all that. And then some of the panels are even more primitive. The first ones are more abstract, they’re pre-spatial. So here’s the black and white spots, and you need to figure out that you need to draw a line separating them. That’s an attempt at engaging whether there’s some kind of Platonic idea of category or space that precedes what you get when you have a full 3D world-like space that you can walk around. This is a rambling answer, but the point is that those things all work together on a few levels. On one level it’s just, ‘Hey we’re getting the player into the mindset of looking with fresh eyes upon a world.’ Even if they don’t understand what’s happening, that’s fine, that’s just what we’re doing. But then also it’s metaphorical. There’s a metaphor for being a person in the real world just trying to understand ‘What is the truth about where we are? Are there investigations we can undergo in games that get us closer to the truth about the world we live in?’"

"People have this reaction, ‘Why would I be interested in a game where you just walk around and draw lines on a bunch of panels? Why is there even a world there? Why is this not just a cheap iOS game or something?’ There are very good answers to that, but you don’t want to give people those answers because you then spoil the game for them."

"I feel like we don’t yet understand what games are capable of as a medium. And there’s not enough genuine interest throughout the game industry in dealing with that, because people have figured out how to make money. And that’s great, at least people have figured out how to make money for now by employing old gameplay discoveries in a continuously refined way, and-or borrowing things from other media."

"Video games are in a weird spot now. I feel like we’ve been living through this time of anti-intellectualism across the culture—for the past few decades at least, but in video games especially. I mean crazy anti-intellectual. Part of that is because so much of the intellectualism we’ve had in video games is actually really pretentious and dumb. I feel like we’ve seen a lot of people just trying to be the person who says smart things about games, instead of doing the work to understand gaming well and discover things and then explore what those discoveries entail. And I think people have rightly reacted negatively to that sort of behavior. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people doing that work and genuinely figuring out what games can be and pushing them forward. I just hope that eventually we can get to a stage where that work’s more broadly celebrated as part of the medium, say in the way that film does."

"I'm not really in the indie scene, that's the thing. I'm off by myself. I don't hang out with game developers, either indie or AAA, except for—there's a small number of people who I consider my pure circle and most of them don't live near me so I have to go fly to visit them. And if I add up the number of people total, it's certainly under ten people that I know of that I can talk to seriously about game design, it's probably about six people in the world. So those are the people I talk to about game design, and the rest of the industry is just doing its thing. And that includes the indie thing. I don't know."

"Here's a thing I like to point out to people—I'm not really anti-piracy, I'm not really pro-piracy. I pirated stuff when I was a kid because I didn't feel like I had a choice. My mom wouldn't really buy video games for me. I actually—one time in like a Waldenbooks or something I stole a physical copy of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? from the store. And it wasn't even a good game! I was a little—I did some bad stuff when I was a kid."

"Some people wanna be indie developers because there's a community of happy people who do the kind of things that they do and they can hang out with those people and it's just not—I don't really get nourishment from that, I'm not even really—ideally, I wish I was a community person, I wish I could find my community out in the world but I never have. So I'm the kind of person who—I have small numbers of friends who I have quality time with, and that's just how I do it. And so when you speak of the "community of game developers", even in the late '90s, when I was going to—in the first few years I was going to the GDC I didn't really feel like part of that, and it's so much less of a community now than it was—back then it was people working hard to make real games for the most part, and now you go to the GDC and it's like how to catch the whales using your shitty IAP whate—are we allowed to say that?"

"Right now, if you're coming out of school—is the generalization of the age of people who happen to be coming out of school, usually—it's a very valuable time where you're kind of in your prime in terms of learning new stuff and adapting and having energy and inspiration and all this. Or at the last, you'll probably match any later time in your life, whether those impulses decline or not—very good time right now. And sort of one of the worst things you can do is go work at some company that's kinda big and bureaucratic and slow, at that age, because you're still learning and you wanna run the engine fast, you wanna learn things quickly because learning is like compound interest and the more you learn, the more you'll learn from your later experience because you can handle it better or whatever."

"As you get a game closer to done there are more graphical assets, and they get bigger and bigger and it takes longer to do things like load them or process them if you need to do some automated processing on them or recompute the lighting for the world, and it gets to a point where it becomes very sluggish to just try to get new things done and that was a real drag. And it's especially a drag when there's so many things to do and you feel like you can't do them very fast because of the computer. And part of that was programming in this programming language C++ that most engine programmers use to build things with, and I just had this very fatalistic attitude toward it like "Well... we can't do anything about that so I just have to like deal with this and get the game done". And then at some point I just changed thatI was like "Wait, is that really true? I know that that's what everybody thinks but is that really true?" And I was like "Yeah, no, it's not true". Like "I shouldn'tlike, we should finish this game in C++, but I don't have to accept that this is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. I can actually change this and do a different thing", and that's what led me to work on this new programming language. But as soon as I decided to do itas soon as I said "This is actually not an unfixable problem; we can do something about this", I became much happier, immediately, because I was no longer in jail; I was no longer in C++ jail for the rest of my life. So I try to use that as an example for other things as well. WheneverI know that feeling now; I know smaller versions of it, like when it comes to the way a game is designed, like "Oh, I realize I'm having this 'I'm in jail' feeling like I don't like this part of this game's design, but I've assumed that it just has to be the case." And I just go back and look, "Does it really have to be the case? Well, I mean, I decided that because this but we could make that decision differently if we're willing to pay the cost of making the decision differently. Is that cost worth me being happier with the game because it's a better game? Well, yes." So once you learn to revisit those decisions it becomes a very good thing to do and so that C++ instance I think was the biggest one, but I've learned to do that more often from that example."

"[In games], a lot of the problems that we need to solve [are] global state manipulation problems. And so pretending that it's not, by saying "look I have a functional language and I'm going through seven layers of things so that I can avert my eyes sufficiently from the fact that I'm actually just manipulating globals at the end of the day" - that's just an obfuscation, it doesn't actually solve any problems."

"If what you're objecting to is the flavor and attitude and the nature with which Casey was expressing his criticism, then there's a little bit more of a point there, however, again, you eliminate that at your peril. It is well-known that many of the greatest contributors to society—not just in software, but in all science and technology and the arts everywhere—many of those people have been hard to work with for one reason or another. And partially it's because they care tremendously about what they are doing. They care tremendously about the form in which they are working. You might say "oh but that guy doesn't need to be crotchety and mean about that thing", but you can't take away that part of the personality and have everything else, because that part of the personality is quite likely an integral part of what made the rest of the artist or the scientist as good as they are. You can't just decide "Albert Einstein should have had a different personality but he should've still done all the cool relativity stuff and figured all that out and then I'm going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos and I'll criticize Einstein for not being a good person in some certain way that a hundred years later I decide is the right way to be, but I will take all the stuff that he contributed because it helps me eat Cheetos and that's great". That is so—it is important for us to see that kind of lazy, bloated, fat, social criticism of others as being as toxic as it actually is, and as being as unproductive and decay-inducing as it actually is. That's way more toxic than a programmer saying angry things—that kind of criticism, because that kind of criticism that's in vogue in places like Twitter right now at a large scale will destroy human society, whereas the crotchety programmer thing on a large scale built a large part of the human society that we have right now. So be very careful with that stuff, and on my part, I feel that one of the better contributions I can make is to not tolerate that kind of criticism. I just won't put up with it. If you come to this channel with that kind of thing I'll just ban you because it's stupid and I don't have time for it. There's too much of it. It's cheap, all it is is posturing so that the person making the criticism can feel better, can show other people that they are a good person, and it's gross, it's really gross. And it's destructive. We don't need it."

"I’m probably asking for trouble by doing this, because Blow’s known for skewering theorists who’ve gone looking to excavate ideas from his other game, Braid. (A game he’s said he had specific ideas about while crafting, but that no one’s yet pieced together fully.)"

"There is no help within The Witness for those struggling to meet its challenges; as he did with Braid, Blow declined to include a hint system in the new game. If he has sacrificed approachability, he has remained true to his personality: logical, stubborn, unsuffering of fools. Written profiles of Blow tend to have a certain reverence of tone. In part, that’s down to the scarcity of people like him—game designers whose artistic ingenuity is matched by a thoughtfulness in words. But it’s also because he is something of an iconoclast. Blow has been an outspoken critic of other game designers, once referring to the mindless yet irresistible quests of World of Warcraft as “unethical.” Following Braids release, he publically chastised those reviewers who had incorrectly guessed at the game’s deeper meaning, saying that they had “obviously overlooked many prominent things.”"

"If I could only pick one game, I would pick Phantasmagoria, as I enjoyed working on it immensely and it was so very challenging (and I love to be challenged!). However, in my heart, I will always love the King's Quest series and, especially, King's Quest, I since it was the game that really 'made' Sierra On-Line."

"I just couldn’t stop. It was compulsive. I started playing it and kept playing. I had a baby at the time, [who] was eight-months old; I totally ignored him. I didn’t want to be bothered. I didn’t want to stop and make dinner."

"Programmers, authors are going to be the future new entertainers ... It might be presumptuous to say they might be new Robert Redfords ... but to a certain extent [they will be] idolized. Tomorrow's heroes."

"It does help if you can absolutely convince yourself that you're destined for greatness. It's not even an ego thing--it's just a way to prevent doubt and insecurity from hindering you."

"I've always been obsessed with creating stuff, I spent my spare time doodling, making music, writing... basically all the different aspects of making a game. I just didn't know at the time that I would find a way to combine all those things to bring a cohesive vision to life."

"You should be free to work yourself to the bone, but not to force someone else to do that for you."

"There’s a balance you have to have between being very critical of yourself and your work while also maintaining a strong faith in your own ability. Your unique voice and perspective matter and if you can find a way to bring that out then you will create something special."

"There is no "secret" to being successful, you just need to have great dedication and perseverance and adopt a "can do" attitude."

"My strategy with the community is simple: no strategy at all. I think that, as an indie developer, you should just be yourself and be a real human. I try to act online like I do in real life: treat everyone with respect, and be as honest and straightforward as possible."

"I think it's a lot easier to stay driven when you're doing your own project, knowing that there are no limits to how far you can go."

"I just persevered and forced myself to learn. You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t. You realize why and you improve on it. And that’s just an endless cycle."

"It’s very important to me that I make good on my promises."

"Making art, making video games, is my way of sharing who I am with the world. My goal, deep down, is that I want to connect with the rest of humanity, and maybe have them connect with me in some way."

"My whole goal as a game creator is to create these moments where I want people to feel something, like actually feel this connection to something deeper than you would normally feel like in a video game. I want to go deeper, and connect with people in a real way that’s memorable, that they’ll take with them for the rest of their life. I think music is integral to that."

"I’m just making music, I’m not even thinking about what it’s for, and it gives me ideas for the game. It will make me think of a particular scenario or environment, and then I really envision it through the music and put that into the game. That’s my favourite way to develop, actually."

"Music is somehow pure, you don’t think of it in terms of symbols. It just exists, it’s like magic. It feels like a way you can almost directly interface with the transcendental or divine."

"If you’re creating music from the heart, you're basically tapping into this supernatural power."

"It all goes back to human nature and what we're meant to do as humans."

"What really makes me feel good, makes me feel like my life has been totally worthwhile, is the fact that Stardew Valley has brought such joy and happiness to people. People describe it as a therapeutic game. Because I know that this little game brings so much positivity to the world... that really feels good."

"It feels like my life has been worthwhile because of Stardew Valley, even if I were to die tomorrow. It feels good to see it manifest in new ways, and see people appreciate it."

"I want to create a collection of games during my career, so that when I’m on my deathbed I can look back and see that I created all these wonderful things that brought people joy."

"On a very practical level, we were striving for a deeper and more engaging sense of story and emotional character development for games. We brought character development, production design, animation, and effects from the film industry. We wanted to feel like you were playing not just a challenge, but someone’s fate – someone that you had to be responsible for. On a more philosophical level, I wanted to take the most pop of pop culture, and convert it into meaningful modern day myths that would have great appeal to a wider audience. We also believed that people could find more empowering messages through gaming. So we targeted the anti-hero as our main character. Abe wasn’t the muscle-bound superhero that you wanted to be – he was the rather pathetic chump that you actually are. It was about rendering the journey out of the more powerless beings that we see ourselves as and at the place we most typically are, which is at the bottom of the global corporate food chain."

"It was film that was the key inspiration, but from games the most fun I personally had, aside from pure racing and arcade-style games, was the great early side-scrollers like Prince of Persia, Out of This World and Flashback. I loved those games, but most importantly those games made me feel like I was controlling a lifeform more than a piece of art in some challenge contest."

"I think the game served a lot of people who wanted to see deeper and more developed characters in games that had more real world relevance to them. I believed, and still do, that the audience wants richer entertainment than they are currently getting. I also hear a lot of people in the business claim the game inspired them to want to start making games. But I have to say the most intangible rewards were the heart-breaking and inspiring fan mails from people whose lives the game so deeply affected. It’s uncanny the impact the game had on some people, but it was why I personally wanted to make the games."

"A couple key ingredients. One was studying fan cultures. Trying to figure out what builds strong followings for people. Why people feel more attached to one film versus another– or one property versus another. When you analyze that, one property usually has more depth. It usually has a more resonating meaning. A deep universe, well fleshed out feels like you know it better than your reading, or your viewer knows it. They feel like they’re uncovering something that a creative team is really ahead of them on in terms of the believability of the universe. There are so many factors. What makes people want tattoos of a motor cycle brand or a rock band? What brings people to feel so passionate about properties that they’re willing to make life long commitments to something that they didn’t even create? I was fascinated by that and came away with a lot of takeaways. The other factor was, I always had a different outlook on life. Maybe because my dad was in the nuclear submarines as I was growing up throughout the cold war. Or serious global issues. My favorite fishing places, in Vermont, had died as a result of acid rain. These were the most gorgeous lakes and there was no fishing in them anymore. They looked clear; they were absolutely beautiful, but all the fish were dead. I was realizing there were cold plants in the midwest; and they were also mentioning cold plants merging in China. This was in the 1980s. I was seeing this big impact on the environment. At the same time the media was basically silent and people were ignorant of what was going on in the world in an environmental level. In my own circles, people just weren’t aware of these things. If you talked about things like the meat raising practices of fast food companies burning the lungs of the planet in South America for cheaper grazing lands and cheaper meat, people thought you were a conspiracy theorist. They were really uneducated. Even educated people had no idea what was going on on the planet. That was very stressing for a kid spending a lot of time in the woods connecting with nature. I found that really disturbing. I wasn’t looking at it as a business venture. I was coming at it as, “what if stories are richer? What if we could get connected through characters that are more like we are?” I was feeling pretty helpless in a world that makes decisions and screws up our abilities independent of our control; independent of our vote. Since that time we’ve seen the rise of the 99 percent. At that time people were saying capitalism is great. That was disturbing. So as an artist, people reinterpret what they’re seeing in the world. What makes that message resonate is A. there’s substance to it. B. it’s told beautifully. C. it has respect for the audience. My point is, when you see these things in the world, I felt more and more people were feeling more isolated. And I felt more and more people were headed for the third world. If you look at the 2008 financial crisis in the United States; what happened to the middle class and how it’s now basically poverty class. It’s all around us, and it’s pervasive, and it’s got a lot of momentum. In the ’80s people were still riding high. Global Warming– Al Gore hadn’t made his film yet. It took something like that to get people to start paying attention. If I agree to what many other climate scientists are saying is a whole other issue. What I think we can agree on is that human impact on the Earth has been substantial. When I started making Oddworld, that’s what made my heart heavy when I went to sleep every night. When I’d travel the world and see different places that’s what would break my heart, the continued impact of the environment and what that probably meant for our future. But who wants to see a documentary game?"

"It feels like the gamers are finally in charge of our games. I like that. I trust that crowd so much just because of our Kickstarter campaign. We never approached our audience this way. Usually we make a game and it’s like we gift it to the players. But this time the players gifted us with the ability to make the game. And like all of my successes, PencilTest and the Kickstarter backers lifted the ceiling off of me. I hope I’ve done everyone right. I really want to honor the investment people have made in this game. It’s important that it succeed and it’s important that this model work for other games and developers too."

"Work hard. That’s the thing that most people who love games and animation may not realize about what they’re seeing. It requires an ugly amount of work. You have to dedicate your life to it, but I believe almost anyone can learn how to make games and animate at a competent level. I don’t believe in following your dreams and going into too much fairy dust about the arts. Sure, it’s fun, but there are many times it’s not fun and you still have to do it."

"I have very strong opinions on that, and it's kind of my area of expertise. The reason why I got out of video games, or am at least leaning away from video games (I just contract for them,) is really that a video game is a terrible place to tell a story. It's really because the reason we go to a game is different from the reason why we go to a more passive form of entertainment. And really a great story can be there, but it's optional. What must be there is good gameplay. And that's why at its core, I think it's inaccurate to call it some kind of sequential storytelling medium when, at its core, it's not necessary. If you get a guy who just good at drawing wacky cartoons, you've probably got in the wrong guy if your next game is going to see some Gothic horror. Yeah, I think in a way video games have gotten a really bad start with how expensive it became to develop in such a short amount of time. You know if you look at the budgets of what it cost to make a film in the first year that film was invented versus the fifth year or the 10th year the budgets didn’t go up astronomically. But if you look at video games, they went nuts and the original developers were working with this primitive technology and most games were done with under eight people in under a year for three quarters of a million dollars if you were lucky."