Warren Spector
For me, the cool thing is doing things that could only be done in gaming.Collection: Cool
In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.Collection: Movies
Gamers are everywhere, coming in all ages and genders, and developers have grown up, too.
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.
Kids, adults, men, women, everybody has a relationship with Mickey Mouse.
I think there's always room for more innovation and new things.
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.
If anything, game development is even more of a team effort than making a movie, so for individuals to get credit for making a game is absolutely insane.
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.
I have never made a game that wasn't explicitly about empowering players to tell their own story.
Unfortunately, the rights to 'System Shock' trademark and copyright are both up in the air.
Here's the thing: I left Ion Storm and Eidos in the spring of 2004 frankly because I felt out of place at that company.
I was an independent developer and started Junction Point in January of 2005.
I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.
Whatever adults don't understand, because they didn't grow up with it, is the thing they're going to be afraid of and try to legislate out of existence. It happened with videogames, it happened with television, it happened with pinball parlours and rock and roll.
Before I got into electronic games, I was making table-top games.
I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons!
As far as the timing, well, I'd write that off to luck as much as anything - I happened to be out looking for a development deal, and Disney happened to think my team and I might be the right people to make a Mickey Mouse game.
Whether it's as the hero of an adventure story, as teacher and friend, as icon on watch, shirt or hat - everyone knows Mickey Mouse.
Everyone at Junction Point has been inspired by the creative folks at Pixar and Disney Feature Animation to make 'entertainment for everyone.'
My greatest joy is seeing parents and kids playing Disney 'Epic Mickey' together, handing the controllers back and forth, helping each other out.
Finney is about the best writer of time travel stories ever, and I adore time travel stories - have to make a time travel game someday!
Ray Harryhausen's 'Sinbad' picture was the first film I remember seeing. I was two years old when it came out, and it changed my life forever. I had nightmares about dragons and stuff for years - and loved it!
It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.
The heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I've been doing since the '80s.
I like Disney stuff. No-one looks at 'Toy Story' and says,' Oh, that's just for kids.' Why is it that games can only appeal to a certain audience, but movies and books - I mean, how many adults read 'Harry Potter?'
The Disney archives, it's 84 years of history. The one way in which I feel I'm a kindred spirit with Walt Disney is that neither one of us ever throws anything away. He never threw anything away.
I make M-rated games for adults, you know, with guys wearing sunglasses at night and trench coats.
I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question.
I'm a big believer in pushing things too far and forcing people to pull you back.
Oswald is an interesting character. Disney lost the rights to him in 1928 to Universal, who was distributing the cartoons and basically handed him over to Walter Lantz.
I will not support any game that doesn't express what I think is worthwhile.
We're not going to do a Facebook game aimed at 35-year old women about farming.
I gotta do what I think is right, and if enough people like it, I'm a winner. And if they don't, I'll open a bookstore.
Seriously, I don't know if people would really tell you this. But in my dream world, the people who work for you would say, 'Wow, I didn't know I could do that until I started working with that guy.'
Honestly, there have been some pretty good Marvel games, but I don't think there's ever been a great one.
My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.
I've loved cartoons all along. Most people outgrow that when they hit 10 or 12, I guess, but I never did. I'm not sure why.
I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
I don't want to make games for 12-year-olds. I have no interest in that. I haven't been 12 in a long time.
I've always said - I've been making games for twenty years, and from the first day I got in this business, I've been saying, 'All I have to do is sell one more copy than I have to, to get somebody to fund my next one.'
We set up a situation and let you interact with it and see the consequences of your choice. That's what gaming does.
Hey, if we didn't overcharge for our product - guess what - people wouldn't have to buy used games.
Used games allow more people, specifically younger people, to become game fans because of the lower price point.
I have got no problem with used games. I've bought plenty of used games.
The reason our games generate so much revenue is because we're stupid enough to charge $60 for a box or $50 for a download or something. You need used games because most people can't afford those prices.
I conceived the original 'Deus Ex' and was the project director on the game.
On the small scale, 'Ico,' I think, actually delivered a small new thing: holding a character's hand and really feeling like your job is to rescue this person, and establishing a personal connection.
I don't care much about hardware. Nintendo games are some of the best games in the world, and from a more graphical standpoint, the Wii can't do what a PS3 or 360 can do.
Once we can do Pixar-quality graphics rendered in real time with interactivity, I could see games costing $200 million to make, and all of a sudden you have to sell a lot of games just to break even, so I'm a little worried someone's going to do that.