Legends of Game Design

I'm also very glad to be moderating this panel on the legends of computer gaming because the great thing about being a moderator is that you can get fame by association. And it's a real privilege to be with these giants in computer game history and computer game future. And I'm really excited about the chance to interview these gentlemen in front of you. But I have to start off with some ground rules and just point out that very obviously no list of computer game legends can ever be exhaustive. And if you know we wanted to talk about people who possibly had done some of the most thought-provoking games if not most commercially successful, we would have to talk about Chris Crawford and the and the contribution that he made to computer gaming. If we're going to talk about multiplayer gaming, we'd have to talk about Danielle Berry and the push that that she had from the very beginning whether it was in Cartels and Cutthroats or M.U.L.E. or the Robot Rascals game or whatever, there was always a concern with

multiplayer gaming way anticipating the idea of online gaming. And if we were going to talk about role-playing games, I think we'd have to insist that Lord British would be a part of this picture. So if we were to talk about strategy games in specific, we'd have to make Sid Meier a part of this picture. And I'm sure that each and every one of you could think of about three or four people that you would like to have on this panel. But you know, you have to start somewhere. This Hall of Fame starts way up here. And I'm very pleased to be on here with Nolan Bushnell, the video game pioneer. Yes, we're Chris Roberts who most of you know because of the phenomenal success of the Wing Commander series, but you know, a lot of people don't realize that even some of his games that get less attention, like Times of Lore that pushed us towards some iconic interfaces

and and like Bad Blood that that was even pushing Richard in some of the areas of object-oriented programming. And and Strike Commander that caused many people to upgrade to a 486 even if they eventually didn't like it. And of course later on we'll talk about the Wing Commander syndrome and how it's killing the industry. But And then without a doubt, you know, the person who proved to us that shareware was viable and wasn't second-tier minor league anymore, the person who proved to us that first-person perspective was the real logical way to immerse people as quickly as possible into games, the person who is probably most responsible for giving us the id interface that gamers complain about if it's not in everybody's first-person game,

and without a doubt and proven many times over again, the world's foremost Doom and Quake player, John Romero. So the ground rules are no softball questions. I'm going to try to ask some tough ones. I'm going to try to bait some of these guys here. And then later on we're going to go out Phil Donahue style into the audience of those few of you who got in the multimedia theater and we're going to give you a chance to ask questions and see if you can stump the panel. So I'm looking forward to this time together and so without any further ado, let's move right along. Nolan Bushnell, a lot of people think of you as the founder of the video game industry, but basically you really started making your bones in the coin-op industry where you were substituting uh Space War and then Pong for uh for uh pinball machines. In fact, they

uh they say that not only was Atari Games really successful, but that you owned your closest competitor, something called Kee Games, and that sometimes those games were delivered in the same truck with just the sign changed. Is that true? It's absolutely true. We uh there were two major distributors in each town. And we found that when we sold to one guy, they wanted an exclusive. And so, I really didn't want the other guy selling somebody else's game. So, I felt that I should have THAT, TOO. YEAH, I BET THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE HERE THAT WISH THEY COULD OWN THEIR top competitor. So, it was Atari Games and Kee Games. And um then all of a sudden, the console revolution uh came across and uh and you led out in that with the 2600. But, the scuttlebutt is that uh there was a time where you were about to pull the plug on the project, and that uh Al Alcorn came in and talked you into going ahead. And the rest was history. It was actually uh before that. The uh

the Pong was originally a dedicated chip. It was a N-channel uh MOS chip. And uh it just had all kinds of bugs in it and various things. And that was when I almost pulled the plug. And then, you know, it's it's funny that people think that pioneering is easy. Um but in fact, we couldn't sell the Pong game. Uh we went to all the toy companies or the toy distributors uh retailers. They said, "No, it's too expensive." cuz we were going to sell it at $99. Uh And then later on, we said, "Okay, we'll go to the TV distribution." And they didn't want it because they said, "Gee, we'll have to finance and it looks like a fad." And literally, we tried to market it for almost 3 months. Not a taker. Not a taker. And it wasn't until we happened to call

the buyer, the sporting goods buyer, at Sears and Roebuck. And uh we called him, told him what he had. He says, "Okay." And the next morning at 8:00, he was on our doorstep. Said, "How many can you build?" We thought 25,000 maybe, standing on our head. Uh so, we told him 75. And uh and he came back with an order for 150,000. And as we say, the rest is history, except for one thing. Uh we had to price it before we had the foggiest clue about how much it cost to manufacture. And uh and we also didn't have enough money to build it. Other than that, it's no problem. Uh but uh we just said, "Hey, in order to do this, we're going to need to to get a line of credit." He says, "Not to worry. Sears Bank." You know, so it was a partnership made

in heaven. And uh so, we pushed it through. See, a lot of people don't realize that games on a TV is a really stupid idea. And that uh and that the company started with $250, not because I wanted it that way, because nobody would invest. They thought it was a stupid idea. They they confused the frivolity of the activity with the frivolity of a business. They said, you know, "How can you make money on fun?" And this was a long time ago. Mhm. Well, they're still asking that question today. Exactly. Different reasons, though. So, uh since somebody took a chance on you, you took a chance on a whole lot of people. A lot of folks think that uh after you left Atari that uh Chuck-E-Cheese was uh your primary interest, but you had like uh a half-dozen high-tech companies that you lumped under the Catalyst Industries

mark. And uh Actually, there were 17 in the Catalyst umbrella. Ah. That's good. Did any of them make money? I I the one I watched, Androbot, I don't think did, but uh Androbot was a sore disappointment. That uh that was probably That you might want to explain to some of the younger folks what Androbot did. Androbot was a little guy that ran around and you know, got you beer and sang songs and told jokes. It was the idea of a personal robot. And it was one of those things that I just you know, you can't read Isaac Asimov without thinking that there's going to be a real robot in the future. Um so, I decided to build one. Um and the neat thing about it is we got it going, we got some of the things working. But the damn thing um was a mobile computer. And a mobile computer at that time in in static electricity environments was not

a pretty sight. Um cuz if you stop to think about it, syntax error or a frozen cursor is one thing. But if you get frozen in a robot with FFFF, all of a sudden you're full speed right into the wall. Uh in fact, in a robot lab that I was playing around with at uh at Stanford, I actually saw an end effector on a program bug thrown right through a uh cinder block wall. Um you know, FFFF, boom. Um So, robots were kind of an interesting thing, but it was one of those areas where we were so trying to solve too many things. Power problems, static. I mean, this was 1983-84. But, more than that, uh we really got screwed by one of the big investment houses. Um in which they agreed to raise all kinds of money for us.

Uh 2 days, the the thing was totally oversold. Totally oversold. Uh you know, people were calling saying, Nolan, can you get me stock? Can you get me stock? And some executive at that unnamed jerky company uh rolled over one day in the morning and said, we don't want to do development stage companies anymore. And pulled the plug on it. Not because of the sales of the thing, not because of the company, because of a woman's fancy of an elephant. So, if you ever get in, you know, the stall with an elephant, you got to be careful. Cuz they can get rolled over on. So, what happened in that case is that since everyone knew the company was oversold, they said, ah, must be something wrong with it. And it sort of tainted it, dried up the sources of capital on the thing, boom. Had to sell it for I had about $17 million in the thing, sold it for two. Not a giggle. Anyway, um Magnum Microwave uh is doing a couple hundred million now. Um E-Tech, you guys all know that,

automobile navigation, just sold to Sony for a couple hundred million. I sold it to News Corp for 50. Too soon, too fast. Um That was when John Evans was there, yeah. Pardon? That was when John Evans was there. Yeah. Um E-Tech, there's there's quite a few of them. Closed several real turkeys down, though. You know, certain things that looked like they were a good idea. We had an automatic uh color shade matcher called Iro in the cosmetics business. Never go to Technologies in the cosmetics business, fish out of water. You don't want to do that. Um Great. good some some good fun. Okay, well, I got got to hit you with one embarrassing question before we move on to one of the others and then we'll come back and let you talk about the exciting thing that you're doing now in the games area. Okay. But um you know, um I happen to be at the LA press conference that was part of the CDTV launch and um and uh basically uh you made a very interesting statement there that I

thought you might want to clarify uh before all these uh game developers and uh that was that the educational potential of the CDTV was sort of to make up to the world what you'd inflicted upon them with video games. Well, you know, CDTV was one of those things where I consider it on one way a huge success. Um not in what you sold, but but basically I like to say that I proved for $8 million in an 8-month what it took Trip Hawkins $200 million 3 YEARS TO SELL. I THAT I'M SORRY, I couldn't resist that. Uh the uh I actually still believe that if we look at the future that we control a lot of power in video games.

We we control power to communicate. We we can focus attention. We can do things dynamic dynamically and excitingly. And I think that we somewhere along the line do always need to give back to society things that we have prospered by. And I think that truly we can and will solve the educational crisis in the world. And then in some ways if we call it ET not extraterrestrial but educational technology I really believe it's going to have more power in the world than biotechnology. And I believe that the people sitting in this room have a lot of that power. And that if we can train people 100, 200, 300 times faster and more

efficiently through using the tools that we take for granted, I think we're going to really change the nature of the world. And because right now we are seeing people holding on to the future by the tips of their fingers. And that's because the technology we have is so powerful so wonderful such an enabler for a great life. And yet it's it's held by the priesthood and not by the congregation. And I think that it's our goal or it should be to steel ourselves for creating the tools by which we permeate technology into the masses. If we do that then we've really accomplished something. Anyway. All right, at this point I want to move to Chris Roberts and if we had the the

slide from my computer up, it would be a quote from my favorite review of one of Chris's products. Okay. I would think that would be a quote from one of John's I don't know. Normally you would think of it as a quote from one of John's products but long long ago in the bad blood days one of our reviewers took exception of one of those skinks like puzzles where in this case you had to kill this little turtle like creature and and get the blood out of it vampirically in order to survive. And you know, I guess this was the nascent animal activist in Charles and he thought it was morally reprehensible. And I know the folks at Origin were quite upset at us for a long time over that review. Uh, but I want to talk to you about some of the the more exciting things. For example, um I remember when you first came over from from England and you were working on Times of Lore and Richard was trying to describe the Times of Lore interface to us and he was all excited and he made

the mistake of calling it a Nintendo-like interface and saying that we're changing everything to that, you know, and it just, you know, panicked those of us who equated the Nintendo style game with being shallower than the than the PC game. And yet when we saw the game, it was extremely deep and it surprised us and uh we did notice that the influence went on toward iconic interfaces. Um What do you think the the most important contribution, whether it was in interface or whether it was in interactive sound or whether it was in object definition in games? What is the most important contribution in all your tenure at Origin, do you think? Um Well, I mean, the the biggest thing I always try and do in everything I do is I want to immerse the player in the environment. And so I think that what I'm proudest of with Wing Commander or what I've done in the past is anytime that I sort of remove the feeling of interface. So, you

know, like when it's in Wing Commander, instead of, you know, you going over and going on file and save, you click on a bunk bed to save or you, you know, click on the airlock door to exit the game. And I mean, I guess the coolest thing from my standpoint is from putting it into something like Wing Commander and then seeing that sort of graphical immersive interface sort of permeate other people's games, which is kind of cool. But I mean that's for me, all I want to do is I want to build an experience that I get lost in a world for 2 hours, 20 hours, 40 hours. And have a good time. And so I guess that's what I like the most. I think your contributions to interface have been very important cuz I've seen it across, you know, lots of different game companies. I just like John's contributions to interface have been very, very important at a later period. There was one thing that you tried in Wing Commander, the first Wing Commander, I thought was extremely important and extremely significant. And yet it turned out that

when the gamers got hold of it, it was something of a failure. What were some of the reactions that you got from people about the losing track in Wing Commander? Well, I mean, the fun the funny thing with interactive fiction is that you have to give everybody choices so they don't feel like they're constrained to any one path. But the problem is that you spend, you know, say 50% of your time on the paths that aren't the optimum paths in the game. And then at the end of the day, you know, you're there going, "Hey, did you play down this track? Did you do this? Did you do this?" And I was like, "Uh no, I didn't." And you're like, "I just spent a year on that. What's the deal?" And I I I I think I think that it really came home to me when I was sitting and I was talking to one of the Dynamics guys about the Rise of the Dragon. I was saying, "Yeah, I really loved that. I played it all the way through and I did this and I did this." And he's like, "Oh, did you go to this level? And did you do this? And did you meet this character?" And I was like, "Uh no." And he's like, and he was like heartbroken. And so I mean, I guess it's

one of those necessary evils cuz you have to do it so you feel like you have choice and you feel like that you know, the world reacts to what you do. But you're I was sitting there working on it going, "Well, I know about 50 or 60% of people aren't actually ever going to experience this." And um I don't know. I mean, I guess you need to do it so everyone feels happy about they've gone the losing track. And they haven't gone the losing track, that is. So, necessary evil. Right, but it seems like you shortened the losing track and progressively progressively. And of course, with the filming, that made it very necessary. Um the great thing about the Wing Commander series I thought was that it pushed upgrades at every new release. You know, um that is good, you know, when you're in a magazine that's advertising driven, you know. But it it's also good for the whole industry as a whole because people have a tendency to buy more games when they buy new equipment because they want to find stuff that shows it off. And

certainly in the era of the the Wing Commanders, the Wing Commanders showed off new sound cards with Wing Commander 2. They certainly showed off new graphics cards with Wing Commander 3, which is one of the few FMV games that's ever spoken well of. And um and they showed Electronic Arts how to spend lots of money in Wing Commander 4. Uh well, um I mean, I will say that the the process that got me there is a long time that you mentioned Bad Blood and Times of Lore. So, I came from England and I was used to programming on Commodore 64. And back in those days in England, it was tape drive, there was no disk drive. So, I was really proud about Times of Lore because everything fit in 64K. And there was this huge world you adventured around and you know, the game came out and it came out over here and you know, people didn't go, "Oh, well, it's really great because it can fit on in 64K." They went, "Well, you know, it's cool and

everything, but I'm playing this other game and it comes on four disks and it doesn't have as much of that." And I was sitting there going, "Hmm, I don't know about And about the same time, MicroProse came out with F-19. I remember going up to MicroProse cuz they distributed our stuff over in um Europe. And they would they were showing me F-19. I was like, "Man, this is the most incredible 3D simulation I've ever seen. You know, too bad it only runs at four frames a second on a 386 25." Which back then was like a $10,000 machine. I was like, "Nah, no one's ever going to be impressed or like this cuz you know, no one's got this machine." And it comes out and it's it's absolutely huge hit. And I'm sitting there and I'm going, "Hmm, well, I I guess there's a reason not to compromise in everything." So, that's really what happened with Wing Commander. I said, "Okay, well, screw it. I'm going to use every single opportunity and tool I can get on the maximum available hardware right now to make the gaming experience as good as possible um because my personal belief is that people aren't very objective about it. They're they're subjective. They go, "Is this the best game I've seen?" And they

don't go, "Oh, is this the best game I've seen that runs in, you know, 128K?" They don't go, "Is this the best game I've seen in CGA?" They just go, "Is this the best game I've seen?" So, after I I sort of made that decision point in Wing Commander, in other words, was pretty much driven by, "Okay, let's make the best game possible, no holds barred from there on." Luckily, it seemed to work out. So. In the creative process, as you were going from Times of Lore, which you basically wrote, you know, virtually all yourself, uh to to Bad Blood, which you must have split off, you know, some of the programming on to the Wing Commander series, where, you know, more and more things were being done by by other people. Uh can you describe for a little bit how your role changed from uh from game to game? And uh is starting your own company some desire to get back more hands-on yourself? Or Well, I mean, I think it is a desire. I mean, actually, the one sad thing about game development nowadays is that in the old days, you could do everything yourself. And you could totally control

the look, the feel, the sound. You know, you'd you'd do the writing, you do the programming, you do the artwork, you do the sound, and you it could be a one-man affair, and it could be a absolute single vision. And now, because of what everybody expects in terms of the quality of the product, you just can't afford to do that. I mean, it would take you 20 years, and by the time it came out, it would be old technology. And so, you know, the sad thing is that you don't get to have that 100% level of control over the product. I mean, the good thing is that you get to work with a lot of other really talented people, and they, you know, in a lot of ways make your work better. Um so, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, my role sort of moves more to being creative shepherd and sort of evangelist of exactly how it's going to work, and, you know, more away from the actual technician that's building all the building blocks of it. And um I guess what I tried doing with Digital Anvil is I have felt a little bit recently that, you know, in the huge industry expansion, that it's kind of gotten away from a little bit of that sort of core vision on how

products are built. And so, what I trying to do with Digital Anvil is have a company that focuses on building great products, has less people on the teams, and allows the team the time they need to do the product, and gives them the support they need to do it. Um so, we'll see if it works, but I mean, it's a good theory. It's something that me and a bunch of, you know, my peer group have been talking about for a long time, and we figured, "Okay, time to put up or shut up." Well, I'm pretty excited about what you've told me about the new project, and we're going to come back to it later, and let you talk as much as you feel like you can about that. But, we want to move on to to John here. I I don't know how many people know, but um John was at Origin, uh and and worked with Chuck on um uh 2400 AD, and uh and and moved over And actually, you know, Chris Roberts stole the idea of Wing Commander from uh Paul Neurath and John uh when they did Space Rogue, which was sort of, you know, Wing Commander with tunnels.

But anyway, then John moved from from there to to Softdisk Corporation where he was virtually doing a product like a product of the month, weren't you? With Softdisk? Every month. We had to well I started out um after I left Origin, which was in June of '88. I got there to work on the was it Apple II to Commodore 64 port of 2400 AD. And while I was working on that um Softdisk reviewed the Apple II version and that one was canceled, right? No, well, no, the Apple II version came out. Um I don't know how many copies it sold. It was a I liked it. It was a fun game. Um so I was doing my very first Commodore programming, converting um the Apple II version of 2400 AD to the Commodore 64, which I had to learn pretty quickly. And uh um it was probably 3 months through the conversion

when Paul Neurath really needed some help on 20 on Space Rogue. And cuz he had to get the game done. It'd been going on too long, so I was I was there to do the NPC code for him. Um it ended up that uh he actually didn't use my code in the game because I uh I left pretty soon after that to kind of co-found another company and he ended up getting someone else to program the NPC stuff. But I uh when I went out of the the next company, it was a a conversion house called Inside Out Software just down the road from Origin in New Hampshire. And I worked on the Might and Magic II conversion of the Commodore 64 and I worked on various other ports. And uh and I finally decided to leave uh Inside Out to go to Softdisk because it was an Apple II it was an Apple II magazine, but it also did PC work in the and this was in 1988 where the Apple II market was really dying hard.

And I needed to actually learn the PC cuz it was it was you know, the market. So I just called up the the president of the company. I told him, you know, who I was and what I had worked on and stuff and told him I didn't know anything about the PC at all, but I really want to learn how to program it and he's like, "Come on down." So that was that was really cool that he he let me come down and and just learn how to program the PC knowing nothing about it. And while I was at Softdisk, I was doing utility work and some of my games I was porting to the PC and I had to get something done every single month. And about a year and 3 months after going to work at Softdisk, I was really tired of not actually making real commercial games. I was doing these little month-long things. And and I told them that I was going to leave and I was going to like apply at LucasArts and like actually get into making real games. And and so they said, "Okay, we'll start a

monthly game disk." So we needed some people, you know, we needed we got a few people in there. John Carmack was one of the guys that we got a he he had submitted some Apple II stuff. And so we got him as a programmer. We got Lane Roth who was an Apple II guy and I had worked with for a long time. And Adrian Carmack was an intern, an art intern. And so he got on the team. And and so we started doing games every single month. And Tom Hall, who's a was a co-founder of id Software and I and Storm, he was in the Apple II department and he wasn't having as much fun in there as he was coming in at night helping design all of our games. And we could use all the help that we could, you know, handle because we had to get these things done every single month, which is pretty hardcore. And so we made games every single month for about a year. And they're on the the hit anthology on the vintage CD.

Anyway, we were at we were at soft we we started this Gamers Edge thing. And did some games for probably a few months when um Carmack did this really awesome technology demo thing and left it on my Tom Tom and Carmack stayed up really late at night and did this you know, duplicate Super Mario 3 but on the PC. And they put it on my desk and I came in and I saw it and I was just shocked and I I couldn't work for at least 3 hours cuz I've never seen anything like that on a PC before. And I knew that that was it, we're out of here. And uh This is we could It was It was pretty funny. It was you know, you see something like that and you just, you know, nothing like this is been done before on the PC. So wait a minute, before you were out of there, you know, you know, didn't you have sort of a fan club that started uh there was there was a lot of things happening at the same time. Um

you know, he did the tech demo and and at the same time I had done some some games that I ported from the Apple 2 to the PC and it got published. And and I was getting these these letters, um you know, handwritten back then before email. And I was getting these letters from you know, supposedly a lot of people that that liked this one game that I did and uh they're you know, they're like, oh, you know, I think I found a bug in your game, write me and my here's my address, my phone number, you know, please write, I'm 67 years old and you know, all these different letters and and uh I was reading a PC games article and it was talking about Krazy which was a shareware game that Scott Miller did and uh he had started Apogee. and um I get I I was reading all about it and and I got to the end of the article and I saw the address and stuff and I was like, "No, I know that I know that address." And I'm sitting there and I just like look up on the wall right next to me. I'm like, "No way." And all the letters, like about eight of them,

they're all different different names, but the address was the same and I WAS LIKE, "NO." I THOUGHT I had a lot of fans. So, I was I was Oh, I was I went nuts. Carmack said you were upset because you found out that it was one guy and it was a guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Oh, I couldn't believe it. I Anyway, I wrote this really evil letter back to him. And and I calmed down like the next day or two, I I calmed down. I kept that letter. And and so I wrote him back another letter saying how pissed I was when I found out that he did this. And um and I sent him the original one just so he could see how mad I was. And he didn't even care. He was like, "Whatever, you know." So, he calls up he gets me on the phone and was just like, "Oh, you know, this game was so great. I really want to um I really want you to do a game just like that for me and put it in the shareware market." And I had never even heard of shareware, but I was like, "Sounds

great. I could spend time actually more than a month and make a game." And uh and so um I I said, "But, you know, that game I did that's that's crap, you know. You You check this out." And I showed you know, I showed him a demo of something we're doing and he totally went nuts and um you know, he's just if you do you know, do a game for me and and uh we'll publish it and all this stuff. And I was like, "Well, you know, if you're if you're serious about it, um you know, you'll have to advance us $2,000." And wow. Yeah. 2,000 bucks. So, well, he had 5,000 in his bank account. So, was and he sent it to us. So, that was a that was a pretty huge commitment on Scott Miller's part. And we got the $2,000 check. We're like, "Wow, THIS GUY'S HARDCORE." SO, SO WHAT WE DID WAS WE STARTED taking the computers home from Softdisk at night and especially on the weekends. And we we started be careful of the litigation that yet

occur. Yeah, well, that's that's another part of THE STORY. AND SO, WE WE WE TAKE THE COMPUTERS, you know, home on the weekends and everything and we're we're we're writing in our first Commander Keen trilogy which which when we when we told him we'd do a game for him, he wanted to know what the game was about. We're like, "Dude, we'll just do a cool game." And uh And he's like, I you know So, I see your design documents haven't changed. And he he's he goes, "You know, well, I want you know, I'll give you 2,000 bucks. I want to know what I'm paying for." So, So, Tom Hall was in charge of the creative design of the game. So, Tom wrote like one paragraph that described Commander Keen. And we just sent it to him, faxed it to him. He's like, "Okay, good. Go." He just wanted something. the high concept they wanted. Yeah, he just wanted something. So, anyway, we worked for 3 months after work and on weekends and we did the first trilogy. And you know, we had to make it fit on a 360K PC disk. And so,

we had you know, we had to link stuff into the executable and do the LZE XE on it and you know, just compress the hell out of the game. And uh on December 14th of 1990, we released our very first episode of Commander Keen, Marooned on Mars, into the internet on the BBS's back then. And uh And then the next very next month, you know, we continued working at Softdisk. You know, we're doing our game a month and we're working on this thing at night. So, it's That was That was our life. And um anyway, 1 month right after we got done with the game and the very first month's profits came in, um we got a check for $10,000 and we're just like, "This is enough for all of us TO LIVE ON." WE FIGURED WE'RE GOING TO GET IT EVERY MONTH, TOO, SO SO, WE UH WE JUST TOLD SOFTDISK, "LOOK, you know, we're sorry you we started this product

this product line 6 months earlier and we're like, we got to go. This is too cool." And and so they did you know, they threatened to sue us and everything and we worked out a deal where we would um continue to make games for them while they got an in-house team up to speed. And so, the first um the in 1991 February 1st of '91 is when we formed id Software, the four of us. And um in the very until until about um August or September, that's what we did at id Software was we're getting money for our first game and we weren't even working on our next product. We were having to fulfill this Softdisk thing. And so, we did um a whole bunch of games, which was every month again, you know. Um but we learned a lot from all that. We actually did uh the very first our first 3D engine, which was Hovertank 3D. Um we did lots of cool side-scrolling games. We experimented with some different with puzzle games and you know, a lot of stuff. And we did a

prototype of the Commander Keen the next Commander Keen trilogy's uh game engine for them. And then uh we did the second Commander Keen trilogy in 6 months, which was um 3 months for Keen 4, 2 months for Keen 6, which we did right after 4 because it was a retail product we had to get out real quick. And then uh Keen 5 took 1 month and uh got that out um December 15th of 1991. And then um we started working on Wolfenstein right after that. And uh Wolfenstein took 6 months. Um we told our distributor we told them what we were doing and they're like, "Don't stir up that World War II thing, you know." And we're just like, you know, we're you're you're mowing down Nazis with a chain gun and stuff. It's really cool. And they're just, you know, they went and they they couldn't believe, you know, it was made major controversial and they they you know, they were really scared, but they we did really good with our other games, so they're like, "Okay."

You know, so we did Wolfenstein in 6 months and then immediately worked on Spear of Destiny, which took us 2 months. And uh and Wolfenstein was released on May 5th of 1992, which was actually 1 week after Ultima Underworld II, which was you know, they they Paul Neurath likes to talk about that because he wants to make sure that he released the first texture map game out there. And, you know, and I tell everybody, yes, he he totally did, you know, 1 1 week before we did. And actually and actually the only reason that Wolfenstein 3D is texture mapped is because of Paul Neurath. I kept in touch with him since he had started Blue Sky and uh I called him up while we were at Softdisk and and uh he he told me he was working on this new game that he couldn't tell me the the name of it, but they're using this really neat new technology called texture mapping. And uh and after the phone conversation I told Carmack, "Hey, they're doing this texture mapping thing." And uh and he looks up in the air for about 3 seconds and he goes, "I CAN DO THAT."

BUT THAT WAS, YOU KNOW, WE HAD DONE IT AFTER THAT WE did a texture map game called Catacombs 3D, but it was an EGA, so it wasn't real popular. You know, VGA you know, Wolfenstein was in VGA, so it got really popular and that's where everyone goes, "Oh, yeah, you guys did this first action game in uh in VGA and and everything which was pretty it was it was where the market was going. Um So, right after we finished Spear of Destiny, we started working on Doom in December of '92. And uh you know, during the entire year we did we finished it and then it was that was a lot of work actually. It took us a whole year for that game. But we we released that on December 10th of 1993. And Doom 2 took 8 months. That was released on October 10th of '94 and at the same time I was working with Raven on Heretic and that got released December 23rd of '94 and then

then worked on Hexen and Quake at the same time. It took about a year and a half for Quake. Do you remember the year that Wolfenstein 3D won the best action game award at the at the at the Software Publishers Association and when Jay and and you got up to accept it and you said, you know, thank you. This proves that shareware is high quality and all of a sudden everybody looked shocked because they didn't realize that point they had voted for a shareware product. Yeah. And we also said, hey, we'll be back next year and we weren't anyway, but We were working on Doom. We thought we'd be there next year, but it took a year. That was also where Jay told me says, we've got, you know, we took a lot of heat for, you know, killing all those Nazis in the game, but this time we've got it licked. You're killing demons. Nobody can complain about that. Yeah. We actually got a lot of comments about killing dogs, which was pretty funny. You can kill people, but not dogs. So, that was you know, and I think Quake bothered

some people that there's, you know, Rottweilers in there and you can kill the dogs and you feel sorry for them. So, anyway. Okay. Um So, Nolan, it seems like things have come full circle with with Playnet. You started out by putting machines in bars and restaurants, you know, where you know, people would pay as they play and now it seems like you're putting machines in bars and restaurants and people are going to pay to play. Why are you going the route of the you know, discrete hardware the that route? I mean, isn't that a pretty expensive way to go when everybody's saying just web web web? Well, I believe that whenever you pioneer, you want to find low-hanging fruit. That is, how do you get into a marketplace in positive cash flow or as close to positive cash flow as you can? And when you push on technology, what you really want to be able to do is

control things as much as possible. And right now, if you really look at the web and latency, it's really horrible. Um and everyone who says that they've got some kind of a silver bullet, you know, it's it's still the LA Freeway at at at rush hour and even though you can create some passing lanes and things like that. Uh there's a lot of problems with games over the net, particularly when you want to do massively parallel things. Um so I felt that the coin op world gives has a lot of advantages. One, you can have a target hardware. Two, you can choose an intranet solution if you want to since you have total control of the whole structure. This The next area is that when you move into a new area, you want to be able to merchandise and and make changes.

I mean, it it really started from a decision I made when I turned 50 to get back into the game business. I'd been fooling around with a lot of other areas, sort of going on the five year and out theory. That do something for five years and then do something completely different for five years and that way you have a very interesting life. But uh And and I did, you know, venture capital and restaurants and and uh telecommunications and microwaves and and mapping and all that sort of stuff. And each one of them was interesting. But I decided that games were really heck of a lot more fun. And so when you turn 50, you say, "Okay, um I can reevaluate what what's going on in my life and go back and do something that I've already done before." And so the fact that Nolan Bushnell was going to get back in the game business, I didn't think that anybody was going to be on bended knee welcoming me in my return. So I felt that there probably would be a uh that I had to

come in, create a nice place and then move out from there. Turns out there's never been a failed consumer game that was successful on the coin-op side. And I felt that the coin-op business was just horribly managed because it was becoming very very insular. The the business was collapsing in on itself because the games were getting to have such a high threshold of um or or such a difficult learning threshold that people were leaving. I mean uh one year it was uh 6% of the market was giving you 90% of the revenue, then four, then three, then two. Um 1983, the coin-op business was $18 billion coin drop. Last year it was six. Um that's a huge collapse. And it was really because people were getting a life and the games were getting so complex that unless you had a

PhD in Mortal Kombat, a typical person going into an arcade had no chance. So I felt the business had to have a big reset. The big reset I decided had to couldn't be in an arcade because the arcade getting a person from their home into an arcade was a lot different than getting them off a bar stool to another bar stool. And so, I felt that So, I felt that a the right place was in bars and restaurants. And so, I created countertop game Play Net. It runs on a Pentium. Uh graphics assisted 1.2 GB hard drive, touchscreen interface modem two telephone handsets um and 32 megs of RAM running on NT and uh we're off and locked and loaded. The basic strategy is this. Download a game You're talking about a game a month. We're downloading a game

a game a week. And um so, constantly renewable content you don't have to blow up the theater every time you change the movie, which is sort of the point of model right now. Um that it's not then it's connected to the net. We're also doing tournaments cuz it turns out that there are a lot of states that allow games of skill to be prized. And so, we can now have prizes and cash and what have you. We have chat, but not chat with typing cuz Bubba don't type. Uh And so, uh But Bubba does spill beer all over the touchscreen. That's okay. It as long as he's put a quarter in first, he can spill it wherever he wants. Um We take but quarters, that's one thing. Credit cards are another cuz since we're on the net, now we can do credit cards and cash. Our machine takes ones and fives. And so, um

the objective is to have games, multiplayer games, tournaments, chat with handsets. Now, we use the protocol of um of a chat room, but with voice files. So, now one jerk can't can't dominate and that sort of thing. And plus, we can now have audio chat on top of games over the network. Now, this is where I do my imitation of the Statue of Liberty. Um because give me your tired, your worn, your humbled, huddled programs longing to be free, because we're going to have an open platform. And anybody who wants to publish, just write it to NT, we'll give you an API, and uh we'll give you a percentage of the coin drop. And it's real easy. It'll be real fun. Brings a whole new idea to shareware. And then, of course, if people are playing it and having fun in bars and restaurants all over the world, uh

clearly there're going to be people that are going to want to do it at home. So, we see it as a good way to merchandise games, to get trial, and also to be in this wonderful network. We've got this thing called CollegeNet going, in which we'll have all the colleges all over the nation, all over the world linked up for massively multiple player games. Um and um I mean, just think of having a Doom engine. Okay? With a sphere of influence so that you can only see a few people around you. But we're going to want to have 10,000 in the same game. Big arena. It's collapsing. Costs you $5 to enter. Three shots. You can take three hits, but then three hits and you're out. Last guy standing gets 10 grand. Does Does sound fun? Boy, I want to do that.

Um then we'll add add one other little you've done the research, how many states allow skill-based contests like that? How many states allow skill-based contests like that? There's about uh 23 that allow it for sure. There's another 15 that uh we're going to try, you know. It's better to ask forgiveness often than permission. Uh and then there's several that, you know, you just go to hard jail. Uh And uh but, you know, there's all kinds of fun sociology. Imagine if you could now choose your jersey colors. Now, that says that now friends can locate other friends in cyberspace. And so, they say, "Okay, you wear the green and the blue and and all that." Because you figure out, "I'll watch your back, you watch my back." And so, what we've introduced is cyberspace gang warfare. And so, the sociology of the thing could

get really fascinating. Well, I I think it will, but uh I don't know if you can take credit for introducing it because there's a lot of Quake clans out there that uh are pretty well uh they're beating people up. But But can't do 10,000, right? Not yet. But we work on that. I got the platform, you write the code. Uh so, what do you think, John? Do you think uh Daikatana death matches uh are going to be possible uh over this system, or are you going totally a different direction? Uh well, Daikatana is using the Quake technology, so you know, it it it'll probably go up to 32 players. Okay, we'll do 32 and then 32 and then 32. We'll partition We'll put doors We'll put doors between them, you know, partition them on servers. That'll work. Yeah, you could like have like small groups of games, and then whoever wins there can and on to the next phase, and just kind of get everybody together. You do that. That's got to be fun, isn't Oh, yeah. Well, we we had talked about the possibility of

uh when we were doing Quake, we would have um you know, New York versus LA and we'd have these gangs and you know, Yeah. and which is what clans kind of turned out to be. But, we were we were envisioning, you know, some huge numbers of players and um and that's kind of what it's you know, our original idea was we'd have a some some New York um there'd be all these clans in New York or groups of players and and the best would form a team and they would they'd have their own little competitions and finally create this core team of like six players or something. And uh then we'd have LA do the same thing. They have their own little set of tournaments and get down to a core group that that's their killer group and then you'd have um you know, towns, you know, big cities, major cities fighting each other to see who the best city in the US is and stuff like that. And they're just they're doing that um they're starting to organize clan warfare stuff with the clan, you know, war council, North American war council and stuff like that. So, it's happening by itself.

That's for sure. So, Chris, what model do you see in the future for for multiplayer play? Do you Do you think this collapsing arena idea is the approach that you'd be interested in or persistent universe or what? Well, um I guess considering one of the projects we're working on is uh hoping to have, you know, the ability to have, you know, 10,000 people online at at the same time, then I would I would definitely say yes. I mean, there's uh there's a lot of technical issues with uh getting enough people at one time in the same space and action. So, I mean, I guess, you know, the way that we're looking at handling it is very much, you know, let's get 16 or 32 people in one space and action and but everyone sort of um on the equivalent of this huge virtual chat server that's dressed up to feel like the world and universe that we put you in. So, everyone has a reputation, everyone has an affinity with a house

that we're calling in this game we're working on. So, it has it has some similarities to what they've done with Quake World, although we're trying to do something that's a much more persistent universe that sort of, you know, just exists for a year or 2 years and is modeled What What I've noticed is that there seem to be a lot of different tiers of of customers with regard to latency. There are those who only play games where latency doesn't really affect much. There are those who will play Quake free as long as and put up with the latency as long as it's free. There are those who pay a little bit more for for Dwengo or attend with a you know, a low latency solution. And then there are those who just give or somewhere in between. What are you What are you planning on doing with this project? Are you going to design so that latency doesn't matter? Or you Do you have a latency solution? Or Well, I mean I I think we have as much of a latency solution as everyone else does, which means that as good as you can and you know, you do

things like predictive, you know, intelligence on emotions stuff. I mean, I will say that the one thing I have noticed with online is that and it's the problem that we wrestle with and I'm sure everyone else wrestles with is that, you know, if you want to get a mass audience, it has to be free online. So, you have to figure out, you know, how you can how you can afford to do that for free. But I mean, I know I know for, you know, me when we were like, for instance, Diablo is a great example with Battle.net, right? You know, we all got Diablo in the office and we spent, you know, 2 3 weeks, you know, killing Diablo about three or four times until, you know, we killed him on every difficulty level with all our of And that was just very cool because the first time it felt like the multiplayer experience that I get at the office because, you know, we've all got high-speed pentiums. We've got a very fast network and it's cool to play games at work, which, you know, everyone in this room it's okay for, but the rest of the world doesn't get that experience. Um you know, it's like, you know, I go visit Ion Storm and they're all like

Quake matching. I phone them up and they're like, "And here is God damn it!" And I'm like, "All right, okay, so." Um you know, and so actually for me, you know, the coolest thing is seeing games come along now where finally that experience that's so cool for everyone in the industry that's been playing multiplayer games for years um is becoming available at home. And you know, whether or not your internet is perfect and you know, I know it isn't, but it's the best way to get that experience at home, which is cool because I just want people to, you know, have the same, I guess, sense of satisfaction that I do when, you know, I blow someone away or I, you know, I take their base out at C&C or whatever. So. Right. And then besides the internet, which uh gets around the problem in the small group with your collapsing arena idea, are you going to design around latency or are you just going to put up with it or do you have a We have a whole bunch of projects that don't, you know, that are that are we call them latency adverse, which we really don't care that much about.

We're actually targeting a market which doesn't care about that as much because most of it are people that are pretty well lubricated with alcohol anyway. So you want latency basically So so latency helps, you know, latency is our friend. But And and really adults. And And And one of the things that I I want to point out is that don't forget that demographically right now teenagers are the smallest group that there that's been in years. It's called a baby bust. And so, to if you want testosterone to fundamentally lubricate your business plan, it's a it's not a good idea right now because everybody's getting older. And so, the real uh the real area that you want to focus on is how can I get women to play? How can I get older business people to play? How

can I enfranchise kids who are uh you know, under under 10. And um the other markets are fun and and you know, they're really exciting and the the 8 to 18-year-old male, 8 to 35-year-old uh computer jock. That's one thing, but um we really want to focus and try to broaden our demographics um to people that maybe have uh you know, CPU processing times that are equivalents to old uh 386s instead of a super pentium. In terms of I mean, if we talk about us as being a 60 hertz massively parallel computer, you know, some of us I think have dropped down to about 40 now. I don't know. Well, I have one last generic question that I want to ask you and then I want to make sure that if we have some questions at least here in the audience that we get a couple of them out. Uh so, uh I'm going to ask each one of you in turn uh what is the biggest mistake you ever made in game design?

And uh I'll since I started uh before one way, I'm going to start the other way. John, what was the biggest mistake that you can think you ever made in game design? Um She's probably not spending enough time on Quake's uh single-player game. That's probably it. Um my current game is, you know, I spent a a lot of time on my current game's game design. And and Quake is a really great multiplayer game, but uh I really like to play single-player stuff and I really wish that I had spent more time doing doing uh better design on the single player game, but it was it was, you know, the situation and everything. Um that was probably the biggest mistake. Chris? Uh I think it was Times of Lore and I built this sort of Gauntlet style top-down view game and I was really cuz I I love Gauntlet when I was playing in the arcades and so I wanted to do something that had more depth and and you know, you could go around you could talk to people and um

you know, so I was really in love with this sort of mono scale, but you know, instead of just being Gauntlet on these contained maps, I wanted this huge world and so I built this huge world and then you know, I would leave a town and I'd walk for about 20 minutes and nothing would happen. Finally, I'd get to the other town and you know, I'd be going, "Hmm, you know, that's not so much fun." So, that point I started, "Okay, well, I'm going to sort of invent random monsters here, so as I'm walking from the towns, I've got something to do." And about that point I said, "Hey, you know, look, next time I'm doing something like this, if there's ever a point where I'm making a game and I'm putting stuff in the game to get around something that isn't fun, maybe that shouldn't be there in the first place." And so, you know, interestingly enough, I was like, "Okay, well, I think at that point I, you know, I was spending a lot of time to make it fun between the cities and so I was like, "Well, you know, next time I should probably have like an overall map and then I said I'm going to go from this city to city and and sort of scope the action to, you know, where I had the areas of interest in the game." And so, it was pretty funny because that's the way the Richard had his ultimate

design originally and then he moved to mono scale with Ultimas later on and you know, I I'd be there on like Ultima 7 and I'd be spending, you know, two years with the level designers making sure every little single part of the map was interesting because even though that wasn't part of the main story, you could wander off over there and so I guess, you know, for me, um I just felt like it was very important to focus on what the fun aspects of the game were and then sort of exclude the rest of them. And that sort of actually drove Winky cuz Winky was just very much focused on okay, I want to do space dog fighting and that's it. And so I guess you learn from your mistakes. Well, the smart people do. No one What do you think your biggest mistake was in the game biz? Oh boy. I got so many of them. Um I don't think I can limit it to just one. The probably the one technically that was the biggest blunder was not was deciding to save the cost of a

uh connector that had a couple of extra pins in the Atari 2600 cartridge slot and not having a read write line. That really cut I mean This will sound funny but we really thought that that the 2600 was going to play about 16 games. And that that that was all. You know what I mean? Because we thought it was really clunky. I mean we only had 128 bits RAM. Um you know, so that's not bytes. Those are bits. That's uh And so by not having read write line it really said that the RAM the ROM cartridges couldn't be augmented with that real bad thing. The other part um was a product called video music. Uh we built 150,000 chips. We built 75,000 units and we sold six. Uh

And that was really that was It was a little more than that but at full price, you know. Um If only there'd been infomercials then you could have done the miracle thing. But the but the real thing in the game business that I regret is selling Atari. I think um you know, it was a thing where I was To Warner or selling it period? Selling it to Warner. Well, you know, I mean, boy, nobody could have screwed it up as bad as they did. But It's Maybe maybe THE TRAMIELS. TRAMIELS. NO COMMENT. WELL, YOU KNOW, WHEN YOU START A COMPANY, it's sort of like your baby. And even though you've sold it, you kind of watch it and you hope it doesn't go to prison and and various things. And uh And it's And it's been really disappointing to see my baby hacked up. Uh

you know, through just blunders. And I kind of feel like I mean, there's you know, one of the things that people don't realize. Imagine the Atari 800, which was technically superior in a lot of ways, a lot of things. But remember And and you Some of you young guys won't even know this happened. But can you imagine a company that actually said, "If you write software for our platform, we'll sue you."? How to gain influence and win people. But essentially in the the Atari 800, after I sold the company, I mean, we we had all this stuff designed and created pretty much before I left. But then the Warner marketing got a hold of it and said, "Well, this is clearly a closed platform. Work in the video game business." So So not only did they not

release the the specs or any authoring tools or anything like that, they said, "Hey, we're not going to let you distribute and you clearly and we're going to take you to court." So while Jobs was out evangelizing, Atari was saying, "Thou shalt not." And of course, the history is is history, but you know, Atari could have had it all with just a little bit of intelligence. Or absence. Uh my biggest mistake tonight was not watching the clock, so we're probably only going to have room for like uh two questions from the audience. So uh let's see uh just uh you can uh all right, question right here. Yeah. The products of these two gentlemen, I'm sure have greatly influenced everybody in this room. I'm very interested to know which products have greatly influenced them. Oh, excellent question. Since your products have influenced so many people in the room, which products have influenced you? So uh you've been in the middle all the time, Chris, so you start off this time.

Okay. Uh well, I would say that the very very early days uh when I was programming over in England, a game called Elite, which came out on a machine called the BBC Micro. Uh when I came over here, um there was a game Larry Holland did, which was Ball Hawks 42, uh which was fantastic. Um most of the you know, all the Infocom early adventure games I used to play like crazy. I still play adventure games. I love them. I love the the LucasArts games. Um recently, I would say I kind of split my time between playing a lot of multiplayer um strategy games. C&C is the one I still play now, even though I was playing it 2 years ago, mainly because I think it's for a multiplayer game when you're a good player at it, it's the best. And it's actually better balanced than even Red Alert was. Um and I think it's better um for like fast-paced multiplayer action

than some of the other stuff, even though they're all they're all great games. Um I was very impressed by uh Diablo recently. Um I thought that that was the best application I'd seen with uh integrating multiplayer over the internet in a product that was just incredibly slick. Um So, I guess that's kind of my playlist. John? Um well, the very first game that really impressed me a lot was Pac-Man. Back in jeez, I think it was '82 or something. Um cuz it had color and it had a very different game design. It was not shooting things. It was you know, staying away from things, which was very very interesting. And that's that really got me interested in in designing games because I I could actually from seeing from from watching that game, it really looked like there was a endless possibilities to game design because it wasn't they they they weren't following trend,

which was was shooting things, shooting aliens. Um after that I was a real big Apple II guy and uh probably Castle Wolfenstein was a really was a really interesting game because it was very different. Um played a played a lot of Infocom stuff and those guys were great. Um LucasArts was also a really big influence. Maniac Mansion and uh some of their adventure stuff. Um and definitely Diablo was a was a big influence. It was just it was very different. Um I didn't get into the real-time strategy stuff as as much. I mean, it was fun and everything, but I really I like first-person action stuff. So, I I kind of didn't eat it up as much. Um and I really like I really like first-person action thing. So, I really watch

my genre and take notes and try and improve and push it further. Um but there really there haven't been too many things that have really impressed me a whole lot. Um, just a just a few different games. Noel? This is a little bit harder, but in terms of sort of standing on shoulders, I think uh Steve Russell's programming on a PDP-1 of uh Space War Space War was a uh very important game for me. Played a long time ago in the arcades. Yep. It's uh Big though. And um and a come and a game called Chicago Coin Speedway, which was a driving game before video games, which used which is a real Rube Goldberg of uh uh slide projectors and various things. But over the years uh games that um I've particularly liked have been um There's one that you don't hear very much, but um

Fool's Errand, I thought was a very interesting uh collection of little games that were were pretty clever. Uh of course, Tetris was something that was very important to me. Um I've been I've been a Doom big Doom player. Um I currently uh am playing with my son's uh a lot of Warcraft II. Um which uh I I can say that I have a 7-year-old that is a Warcraft II level editor. I think that there's a game that is uh not on anybody's list here, but it's one called Pajama Sam from Humongous, which uh I think is for my uh 2-year-old is absolutely a uh a uh super hit, and it's a it's got depth and humor and and really some pretty good stuff. So, if any of you have kids, I highly recommend it. I thought of some other games.

Um the Ultima series, which was which I really liked a lot. Um, and a lot of Squaresoft's games, like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy III. Um, that stuff is it's I love Squaresoft stuff. Um, I think those that I just wanted to kind of mention the the RPG side of of of things cuz I really like that that genre and and we're planning on on hitting it. Um, Okay, go ahead. Is it one more question? The first real hand I see. And if not, thank you very much for attending and No, here's one. There is one way in the back. Oh, well, there's one right here. Okay, go. Say has success changed your lives at all? What? Nolan already told you it was 5 years and out. The question was has success changed

your lives at all? Uh, we will start with Nolan. Absolutely. Um, I've been rich, I've been poor, rich is best. Um, it's uh The thing that you have to do though is there's only so much eating and drinking and living money that you have. Rest of it's sort of poker playing money. And it determines how big a game you can get in. And um, and I think building in the final analysis is the most fun. And uh, if you can build better and more efficiently, I think you have a good life. Um, and I think that that there's sometimes when uh making a lot of money, you can become insufferable for a while. But um, then you have to get whacked in the side of the head with a few slings and arrows and turns you back into a real person. And I think it helps, uh, both ways. Okay. Mr. Fly Yellow Ferrari?

Well, um, I have some cars and uh, basically, um, I, uh, I don't know. I I like cars, so I got to buy some cars and get into cars, um, you know, get a cool house. Um, and basically, I really spend a lot of time playing games and making them. I really don't spend too much time doing anything else. I don't watch TV. I I rarely go to movies. So, I'm still doing what I want to do, but I can really spend time doing it all, you know, constantly now because I don't have, you know, I'm working and I'm making money doing what I like to do, and that's that's what I do most of the time. Um, uh, I think it's cool that my parents really get a big kick out of it because they're they always tell, you know, people find out that they that they're the parents of the guy that wrote Doom, and so they they can they

talk to a lot of people because of that cuz they got Doom shirts AND EVERYTHING. BUT, YEAH, MOSTLY, UH, I I YOU KNOW, I CAN GET involved with a lot more things now just because of, you know, the stuff that I've done and everything. But, what I really spend a lot of time doing is still making games and playing them. And Mr. Microbrewer? Uh, well, I mean, I definitely think it's, uh, cool that I don't have to listen to my dad asking me when I'm going to go back and finish my degree and and get a job that has a little longer lifespan. But, I mean, actually, I got to say, I mean, you know, like, you know, success is great and everything, but the the coolest thing, if you really love what you're doing, is that it just enables you to do what you want, and, um, that's the important thing for me. That's the nice thing that I got from it is that I can pretty much in the software side making games get to do the games I want to make and um you know

you know I wish I wish that upon everyone here because it's cool when you get there and it's really tough when you don't and I remember when I wasn't there and I used to have to beg and plead and tell them that you know yeah okay well times are looking so very well but come on you really got to go through this week commander thing cuz it's going to be cool and you know you need to like give me an artist so I can do that and um you know that takes a lot of energy so it's nice not to extend that energy and that's what I like about success. I I do not understand that I missed somebody in the back. So if you'll be honest and jump up and ask that question. I have a question about you talked about a lot of great solo player games that you all are into but you talked about a lot of new projects that are multiplayer. Uh question is uh talked a lot about multiplayer projects where are solo players going? I mean Chris? Yeah I mean I I I think um in the future there's going to be two get style of games. It's going to be immersive single player games that are primarily story driven. Um you know I know I'm still interested

in making those. You know an adventure game sort of you know Monkey Island's a good example of that a Wing Commander is a good example of that. Um It they're they're just they're different kind of environments. I think right now um you know myself and a lot of uh you know I know John and a lot you know it sounds like Nolan are very enamored by the whole social computing aspect of being in a world and environment with a bunch of other people that are real people because at the end of the day um you know no matter how great we are programming our artificial intelligence just doesn't cut it to the unpredictability and the intelligence that a real person has and so you feel a real satisfaction from playing a one-on-one game or a one-on-20 game against other people and so I think that's you know very attractive and interesting. But I mean I I think at the end of the day, I mean, you know, the solo game, I mean, I know I just, you know, recently played Instinct 76, had a cool storyline, had a cool look. You know, I played it for a week or two. I had fun. I mean, it was worth the $50, it cost. And, um you know, that's the

experience I can do myself and um in my own time. And, I think that's always going to be there. So, I mean, I think, you know, multiplayer is going to become a much stronger portion of the market. It's not going to take away from uh the solo game. I think multiplayer is really just going to expand the marketplace and give a new kind of experience there. And, I guess what you're seeing is a lot of sort of heat and passion because it's the new thing and we're all sort of enamored of it. Um but, at the end of the day, you know, I still like stories. And, if you want to be involved and have someone tell you a story, um it's very difficult to do that in a multiplayer game. And, I know because I'm going through that whole design problem right now. And, so, at the end of the day, I still like to play adventure games and you know, I'll play those solo and have a lot of fun. I'll invite you to join me sometime. I feel the same way. I love I love single-player games, of course. I love multiplayer games, too. But, um actually in multiplayer, I don't like so much the whole clan warfare where there's like a million people in one

game just destroying each other randomly. I I really like the one-on-one game where you you have a map that's that's that's interesting and you hunt the other guy down and you really get paid back for your knowledge of that area. Um it's it firsthand. It's a lot more fun to me than just the random violence that happens in just complete, you know, huge multiplayer environments. But, uh I really like the single-player game because it's it's custom. It's it's created for the the player to go through. And, you know, when you're done with that, then you can spend all your time in multiplayer. And, in nowadays games, you know, we we have to make these games that have so much stuff in them. We have to we have to have a really great multiplayer segment of the game. We have to have a really great single player segment. We spend a lot of time and money developing both of these and we really have to we have to look at it and say, "Well, these are really almost two different games. We're creating one game for one person to go through to follow a story and and have a certain experience, which is very different than a multiplayer

game." And uh now it's almost like developing two games nowadays cuz the expectations are so high for these like multimedia extravaganzas that we're creating. And uh it costs more money to create them, too. So um the the multiplayer thing is definitely getting stronger, just like Chris said, but there's I can't see it taking away from the single player game. When I was when it when I got Dark Forces, I played it, I loved it, got finished with it, and I did not feel bad that it didn't have multiplayer because that's not what it was all about. And uh it's it's really your fault there's a multiplayer expectation. Yeah. That's true. Well, the thing is every game doesn't have to um do the exact same thing as the last game. Um as long as enough games come out and everybody's satisfied, that's cool. You don't have to say that one game comes out and it is better than everything else before it. Yeah, I I agree. I think there's going to be both markets. Uh in fact, I think the single player market will continue to be the dominant and actually the bigger for quite some

time. I always set little bogies for myself and one of the things that I'm trying to do is I want to displace every game of solitaire that's being played in the business class on airlines. And if I can do that with one of my games, I'll consider that to have been a a suitable uh bogey to have achieved. That's cool. Well, it's been a real pleasure for me, and I hope it was a real pleasure for you. And I'm firmly convinced more than ever that these really are legends of computer gaming.