Eugene Jarvis
Arcade game designer and programmer, most famous for Defender, Robotron, and the Cruisi'n series of games.
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I personally object to episodic games where you play one screen of Space Invaders and one screen of Breakout and one screen of Galaxians and one screen of this and one of that. To me, that's not a game. It's just taking five bad games, putting them together, and calling them one good game. I'm philosophically against that.
As you get all this money out there, there’s a tendency for more conservatism and sequelization. So we’re doing ‘Madden 38,’ but now the shoelaces have shadows! And when you step on the turf, the grass is just pressed a little bit, and springs back in just a couple of seconds. Unfortunately, it’s kind of the death of creativity when you make a big deal about really trivial features.
That game, just the brutal simplicity. It’s amazing as a game designer you want to have the latest graphics, and you want the Chicago Symphony playing your background music, and you want Harrison Ford and Matt Damon as your starring characters. But if you have an incredibly addictive game, you don’t need any of that crap. You just need blocks.
I think managers have realized that most software people are slightly brain damaged, that they're off on their own planets.
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