Warren Spector Quotes

The Wii U is pretty cool, and the thing that I'm most intrigued about it is it's the first gaming platform that actually is exploiting the second screen.

I don't even make multiplayer games much, so dealing with multiple characters is something new for me - or, rather, something I've had to recall from my days as a roleplaying adventure designer where the party was everything!

For most developers, that kind of situation - a player figuring out how to do something that the designer didn't intend - to most developers, that's a bug. For me, that's a celebration.

Every game has to teach you how to walk, run, talk, use.

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.

The fact is most computer roleplaying games that offer a zillion highly specialized skills end up with nine-tenths of a zillion skills that every player quickly realizes aren't worth the experience points to buy.

The reality, for me at least, is that the finest recreation of a paper game, played on computer, pales in comparison with the actual, face-to-face experience.

I'm a huge fan of e-books, but the more I buy and download, the more I worry that someone could just take them all away from me.

I remember having some problems with [the Deus Ex theme] when I first heard it and I was trying to figure out how to tell [Alex Brandon] I wanted changes. But then I noticed that I couldn't get it out of my mind. I was whistling or humming it to myself all the time. So I just kept my mouth shut and let it be. I think it's a highly addictive tune

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.'

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.

Third-person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development. Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it.

The concept of emergent gameplay is really exciting. That's when players are really crafting their own experience. So if you're clever and creative, you can do things that even developers of the game didn't know were possible.

Gamers are everywhere, coming in all ages and genders, and developers have grown up, too.

I would love to take 'Ultimata Underworld' and literally update the graphics.

I remember on Deus Ex there was one programmer - Alex Durand, a guy who still works for us - he decided he was going to get through the game without ever using a weapon. I would never think to do that. And that's fine.

I have been the last space marine between earth and an alien invasion. I really just don't need to go there anymore.

Honestly, there have been some pretty good Marvel games, but I don't think there's ever been a great one.

$200, 300 million games, I'm a little scared about that; there aren't a lot of companies that have the resources or the courage to spend that much.

I want my little corner of the world where I get to make games where you're not trying to win or lose; you're not trying to get a higher score - you are having unbelievable amounts of fun as you learn about yourself and the world. That's what games can do!

The 'DuckTales' ensemble is clearly critical. There's the core set of characters - Scrooge, Webby, Launchpad, Huey, Dewey and Louie ... Plus there's Gyro and Duckworth and Mrs. Beakley and so on. The cast is huge.

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.

Good stories are constructed, not found,

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.

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.

The Junction Point journey is over. To all those who've asked, or want to ask, I'm sad but excited for the future.

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.

We're not going to do a Facebook game aimed at 35-year old women about farming.

In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.

I want content that is relevant to my life, that is relevant to me, that is set in the real world.

I conceived the original 'Deus Ex' and was the project director on the game.

I've got friends who are literally working alone on indie games that have no prospect of profit or commercial success. I've got guys working on iPhone games.

Anyone who says they want to make a game that becomes a cult classic is kinda screwy, right? I mean, you want to reach the largest audience you can.

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.

I kind of get a next-gen game machine, but competing for the home entertainment business? We'll see how that goes.

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.'

My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.

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.

The only morality I'm interested in is the morality between your ears, between each player's ears, because that's the interesting thing to me.

I 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.

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.

I'm a big believer in pushing things too far and forcing people to pull you back.

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 amazed at how the life of a freelancer differed from running a remote studio for another company. I thought I knew what I was doing in 2004 when I left Eidos because I had run Ion Storm Austin, which was my own independent studio. I had run a business unit inside Origin, but being part of a startup is crazy.

In the electronic game world, I know I have a reputation for doing the cyberpunk thing, and for doing the serious epic fantasy thing, but if you go back to when I was a kid, I've been a Disney fan all my life.

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 was an independent developer and started Junction Point in January of 2005.

As the story unfolded, the cast of characters changed to match it.

I'm sad but excited for the future.

I will not support any game that doesn't express what I think is worthwhile.

I'm sure a lot of the hardcore folks are going to be up in arms and I'm really looking forward to getting into that discussion with them. I don't believe I'm compromising on my gameplay ideals at all. [But] any artist who doesn't want his or her work in front of the largest audience possible is nuts.

Kids, adults, men, women, everybody has a relationship with Mickey Mouse.

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?'

Half-Life is the finest implementation of a game on rails anybody has ever done

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!

We live in a world of virtual goods where none of us own the 0s and 1s. What are you going to do?

Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while

Everyone at Junction Point has been inspired by the creative folks at Pixar and Disney Feature Animation to make 'entertainment for everyone.'

The heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I've been doing since the '80s.

Hey, if we didn't overcharge for our product - guess what - people wouldn't have to buy used games.

In papergaming, players can look at a character sheet of their own creation and see all of their skills, right there, in black and white.

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.