Top 55 Warren Spector Quotes

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.

Unfortunately, the rights to ‘System Shock’ trademark and copyright are both up in the air.

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.

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

From a gameplay standpoint, I’ve said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that’s really what I’m interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.

For me, the cool thing is doing things that could only be done in gaming.

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’m a Nintendo geek, so I’m a pretty big Nintendo fan.

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.

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!

When you’re dealing with a new platform, the real trick is just getting the game running.

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

The basic idea for what became ‘Epic Mickey’ began at the Disney Think Tank.

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

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

Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I’ve ever done – for me, at least. I’m now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I’ve dabbled in.

I have never been assigned a game, I have never made a game I didn’t want to make. I’ve never done anything just to make somebody some money.

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.

The reason our games generate so much revenue is because we’re stupid enough to charge $60 for a box or $50 for a download or something. You need used games because most people can’t afford those prices.

My greatest joy is seeing parents and kids playing Disney ‘Epic Mickey’ together, handing the controllers back and forth, helping each other out.

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

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 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.

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.

Used games allow more people, specifically younger people, to become game fans because of the lower price point.

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.

I’ve made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don’t affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don’t. It’s demonstrably true that they don’t, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.

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?’

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.

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

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

I think there’s always room for more innovation and new things.

I gotta do what I think is right, and if enough people like it, I’m a winner. And if they don’t, I’ll open a bookstore.

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 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.

I make M-rated games for adults, you know, with guys wearing sunglasses at night and trench coats.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 have got no problem with used games. I’ve bought plenty of used games.

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.

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 more people who game, the better for everyone.

Before I got into electronic games, I was making table-top games.

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.

The transition from the original Xbox to the Wii wasn’t a big deal for my team. The business hadn’t changed fundamentally.

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.

$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 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.