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Hey, if we didn't overcharge for our product - guess what - people wouldn't have to buy used games.
Warren Spector
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.
The Junction Point journey is over. To all those who've asked, or want to ask, I'm sad but excited for the future.
Used games allow more people, specifically younger people, to become game fans because of the lower price point.
I kind of get a next-gen game machine, but competing for the home entertainment business? We'll see how that goes.
The more people who game, the better for everyone.
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 often get painted as the guy who's trying to tell other people what to make and what to like, and that's really not my goal, but I believe so passionately that games can be more than a lot of people think they can.
Everyone at Junction Point has been inspired by the creative folks at Pixar and Disney Feature Animation to make 'entertainment for everyone.'
I have got no problem with used games. I've bought plenty of used games.
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 want content that is relevant to my life, that is relevant to me, that is set in the real world.
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.
Dude, I turn into a six-year-old when I come to Disneyland. It's amazing. My eyes glass over and my blood pressure goes down. I'm just like everybody else. I turn into a big kid when I come here. It's the happiest place on earth, right?
I have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords.
Honestly, there have been some pretty good Marvel games, but I don't think there's ever been a great one.
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're not going to do a Facebook game aimed at 35-year old women about farming.
Before I got into electronic games, I was making table-top games.
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!
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.
I said to myself as Junction Point embarked on the Epic Mickey journey that, worst case, we'd be 'a footnote in Disney history.' Looking back on it, I think we did far better than that.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
I make M-rated games for adults, you know, with guys wearing sunglasses at night and trench coats.
I used to teach animation history classes at the University of Texas, and I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons. I just love cartoons.
My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.
The basic idea for what became 'Epic Mickey' began at the Disney Think Tank.
If we're going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be.
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.
I've done a pretty good job of hitting 18-34-year-old males, and not such a good job of reaching kids. Disney has done a great job of reaching kids, but maybe not the 18-34-year-olds. I figure I can learn a lot from Disney, and maybe, I don't know, they can learn a lot from me.
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.
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.
I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons!
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.
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.'
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 will not support any game that doesn't express what I think is worthwhile.
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.
When you're dealing with a new platform, the real trick is just getting the game running.
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.
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 would love to take 'Ultimata Underworld' and literally update the graphics.
I think there's always room for more innovation and new things.
Kids, adults, men, women, everybody has a relationship with Mickey Mouse.
I'm a Nintendo geek, so I'm a pretty big Nintendo fan.
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