Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Warren Spector: “We Are In Absolutely a Golden Age Right Now.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 12, 2010

Warren Spector was the producer of many games well-loved by members of this community (like Thief, Deus Ex, Ultima Underworld, etc…)  He’s been interviewed by Portfolios.com, and has some great quotes about the past and present of the games industry, and of his own career (now with Disney). I particularly loved this quote about project costs back in the day… which really doesn’t sound like that long ago, but I guess it was:

The first [Computer] game I worked on, on my own, it was called Martian Dreams and it was budgeted at $225,000. I had a team of about a dozen people, which was enormous. I remember I got reamed by the VP of product development for that because I spent $273,000 total, from start to finish. And the reality is, I don’t even have to work to spend that much in a week now and we used to spend that much on an entire project. It was a completely different business back then.

And the title comes from the money quote here, which I wholeheartedly endorse.

The most important thing and the coolest thing about the game business right now is that there have never been more ways to reach an audience or more audiences to reach than ever before, ever. We are in absolutely a golden age right now. And anybody who doesn’t see that isn’t paying attention. I make big triple A games, that’s all I really know how to do and it’s all I’m kind of interested in doing … But there is room in the marketplace right now for four guys or gals in a garage making an iPhone app for kids, or doing an ARG (alternative reality game) to promote a movie, or doing something for the iPad, or doing an XBLA (X-Box Live Archade) game, the small team-low cost, downloadable. There are people doing episodic content that you can only get by downloading it. There are so many ways to reach so many audiences, that there’s absolutely room for entrepreneurs now.

Heh. The funny thing is, when I met Richard Garriott, I think I shocked him by almost immediately asking if he could introduce me to Warren Spector. Yeah, screwed up priorities, who would be more excited to meet Warren Spector than Richard Garriott? But I was a total Wing Commander junkie at the time…

Sigh.

Anyway, check out the entire interview here:

Warren Spector Interview at Portfolio.com


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 5 Comments to Read



  • Ruber Eaglenest said,

    Warren Spector is the only designer I’m a fan, because the Thief Series.

  • Rigor Mortis said,

    Oh, I’m sure you did LB’s bloated ego a favor by showing him how he’s second banana in some gamers’ eyes.

  • Calibrator said,

    Regarding the Thief series, Spector only had minor input until Thief 3 (Thief: Deadly Shadows) when he was studio chief.
    You can thank people like Greg LoPiccolo, Tim Stellmach and Ken Levine among others for the “spirit” of the first two Thief games which, I may add, are much more successful with the modding community than T:DS.

    Spector was always more of a manager with the games associated to him until the first Deus Ex, which was more or less his baby (he was credited not only as producer but also project director).

  • sascha/hdrs said,

    Does LB has a bloated ego?? I didn’t know!

    What Warren misses to tell is that back in the heyday of home computers, with a 2-4 man team you could more easily create a fortune with your game because there wasn’t too much competition and there weren’t publishers that could spend a couple of million $ just for advertising.

    Today the toolchain has become more comfortable and great tools are even freely available in part (e.g. Unity) but the effort threshold to create a game that can mess with a triple-A title has also raised astronomically. And then there’s the problem that the market is flooded with games today and it becomes ever more difficult to get people to even know that your game exists.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    @Calibrator – Yeah, that was pretty much his role on the Ultima Underworlds and Wing Commander series, too, but I still felt indebted to him for doing what it took to pull those games off.

    @sascha – Painfully true. Up until the late 90s, games were pretty technology-bound (and we game PROGRAMMERS were KINGS!). Nowadays, they are content-bound. Its no challenge to put all those polygons on the screen anymore… it’s about creating them and making them look good.

    Though Jeff Vogel has stated that his budget for an RPG (using the old technology of the Avernum / Geneforge era, with small upgrades each time) is around $120k per game, now. And at that, his games generally break even after about 1 year. That’s sustainable. And comparable to the kinds of budgets Spector was talking about back in the day.

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