Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think the first thing is that if you're going to make a game which is accessible and which draws people in, you've got to start from the beginning.
Don't recreate something that's already been created and is good. You want to have an idea, think of different idea. Don't think of someone else's idea.
Players will be able to adjust the volume from 1 to 100 in increments of 1. You could play the game 100 times and have an entirely different experience.
What the press hasn't realized is that I'm just a big kid showing off, and you've got to treat me like that. You know, you don't make big kids accountable.
I think that PC gaming is as healthy as it's ever been. I think there's probably more people playing games on their PCs, I just don't think they're gamers.
Having people disappointed with a game I've been working on, and my team has been working on, is one of the things that motivates me to make a better game.
In a way, I love being inspired by the production quality that TV and film have got - there's no question about the amount of skill they use to entertain us.
When EA acquired Bullfrog there were, like, 35 people, and within nine months there were 200. And any feeling of culture and inventiveness was diluted by that.
Why should the televised stuff be only about pro gamers? For me it's more fascinating to see who's going to be the next god of gods than watching some pro gamer.
We experimented with different monetization techniques in 'Godus.' We had some events that you could go on which were time-limited. That didn't work terribly well.
The thing about 'Fable' is that it was such a rich world. It was, well, what the name says it is. It's all about Fable and Albion and this idea of legends and humor.
What we found while making Milo, is that part of the skill of designing this whole new experience is in making people comfortable with the fact that they can be seen.
It's quite an unfair thought that Microsoft are trying to control our gaming, they're trying to force us to be online all the time. [People] didn't really think that through.
Consumers don't give a damn about what device they're playing on. They just want to play it everywhere. They want to be playing on the console and then take it off to the bus.
I'm looking forward to 'LittleBigPlanet.' I think Media Molecule are doing fantastic work on giving people the tools to create some amazing stuff. I can hardly wait to play it.
You know, the health bar in 'Fable III' was destined to be this pixel-high line at the top left-hand side of the screen. No one was looking at it! No one even knew it was there!
In the original 'Fable,' Albion was kind of run by heroes and heroes were the thing, and there weren't any lords or kings, there were just heroes, and greater and greater heroes.
There's a lot of pressure to release a game early. In Syndicate's case there was a lot of pressure from us on distributors Electronics Arts to release it in March '93, and I said no.
Well, the most incredible thing about 'Fable' is the fact that there are lots of examples where people play the game in a certain way and things happen that were never designed to happen.
I love my games and I love sharing them with people. It's this amazing incredible thing I get to do with my life, creating ideas and sharing them with people. The problem is, it just hasn't worked.
The major change was going from 'Black and White' to 'Fable,' because I was no longer programming, and I had spent most of my time designing through programming, and only working with people I knew well.
If you don't think of yourself as being someone who needs to go back to school, needs to reinvent yourself, then you're not able to do the thing you're passionate about. That's to create and invent and innovate.
I just feel that in today's world, where you've got computer games of all types - through Facebook, Android and Apple, for example - you put them all together and it's an incredibly important force in all the world.
That's what my objective was, to reinvent myself from a console designer to starting a new business and embracing multi-platform, relearning the skills necessary to make successful games. It's been an amazing journey.
With 'Black and White' we laid down the canvas for what's possible in 'Black and White' 2 and 3. We gave you a creature that you could nurture and build up and we focused an awful lot on that creature with the add-on disc.
When people reach age 12-14, they become obsessed with evil. The percentage of people who are good versus evil becomes reversed. It's part of the way that teens' minds are being reordered - it's just a developmental stage.
I am so honoured to be a part of the games industry, but I understand that people are sick of hearing my voice and hearing my promises. So I'm going to stop doing press and I'm going to stop talking about games completely.
In 'Fable 1,' the number of features was more important to me than what the features did. And as a games designer I've come to realize that it's not the number of features you have, it's the way that those features interact.
The whole point here, and the seed that JJ Abrams laid in my mind is, is the power of curiosity enough? What happens next? That dramatic construct is what has driven soap operas and serialised novels over the course of history.
I think what i've also learned, is that doing Kickstarter and Steam Early Access before you've got something which is defined and playable is a hugely risky undertaking that can be very destructive to the final quality of the game.
Imagine if you're playing at home and your girlfriend is badgering you all the time not to play. Wouldn't it be great to have a game you could play with her? Because then you can carry on playing the game and not get beaten up for it.
It was an amazing thing to see how Bowerstone, the capital of 'Fable,' progressed. It went from, in 'Fable 1,' to just 20 houses and then in 'Fable 3' it felt like a city that had districts. You could see that sense of progression in it.
With 'Black and White 2,' I want to put it in a setting where you're actually using the creature. I want the little people within the land not to just be a resource but actually be in conflict and fighting and battling against each other.
The biggest was me running Lionhead at its peak. That was about 305 people. I'd say that was, for me as a creative, one of the most hellish times of my life. Normally running a team is like herding cats. This was like herding the entire African plains.
When you're external to a publisher, most independent developers live on paranoia. The mainstay of every day is paranoia - every indie company believes their publisher in some way has these Machiavellian plans that will cause disaster for the game and the studio.
I think that games like 'Braid' show us that the 'new kids on the block' can do some really inventive, smart things with a genre like the side-scrolling platformer that has been around for 25 years. It's proof that people can 'come up' and surprise us all the time.
Things like engine technology used to be hugely restrictive. You couldn't have more than one baddie on screen, you couldn't have more than three arrows firing at once. Now, you can say, 'I want 20 monsters, and 30 weapons,' and there isn't a technical string attached.
When a society is really successful like America, throughout history there's been this trend for those societies to be obsessed about end of the world scenarios. You know, about meteorites and plagues and destroying things. And you can see that in the American fiction.
I love the mouse, I love designing games for a mouse-based system. I think it's still a way of playing games which, you know, everyone's really excited about the Wii and all that, but for me, the mouse is for the PC an awful lot what that pointing device did for the Wii.
You don't often talk about the cultural significance of video games in places like China and Korea, but it's a huge part of culture throughout the world, and very, very accessible too. Now that you don't have to be locked away in your bedroom to play them, it's gaming everywhere.
The temptation, when you go into Kickstarter, is that the first three days are wonderful, and you believe you're a god. You go in your spreadsheet and think, 'If every day's like day one, we're going to have suitcases of money arriving at the front door.' Then, it dips into this slump.
I'd been away for about 10 days, and literally the first thing I did, even though it sounds very... it just shows you what a boring person I actually am, because the first thing I did was kiss my wife and hug my kid, then I turned on 'Fable 2' just to see how much gold I'd accrued over 10 days.
That's what 'The Trail' ended up being, this delightful way of exploring and managing your backpack and crafting and collecting and trading with other players, doing all that in this really delicious way. When we finished that and released it on iOS and Android, tens of millions of people loved and enjoyed it.
I remembered a long time ago, Kit Williams hid a golden hare somewhere in Britain and wrote a book which was layered with clues about where the it was. This really fired my imagination, I read the book and it was way too cryptic for me to understand, but it seemed to fascinated people - it even got on the news.
I know Microsoft, I know they were only doing things because they thought they were long-reaching and long-thinking. But the world we live in now is that we have to realise, especially if you're a big corporation, if you make one step wrong, the world will leap on you, and unfairly, very unfairly, they will judge you.
We had this terrible thing, this awful thing with 'Black and White' happened, where the design of 'Black and White' was actually... was hijacked by the fan sites. Because what happened is, there were so many fan sites on 'Black and White,' the hype on 'Black and White' was just ridiculously huge. It was completely out of our control.