Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Alec suggested we do Gaming Made Me – ooh – last Friday? Being RPS, we only got around to working out anything on Monday morning. It takes until Tuesday to realise how special it feels, and we should pursue it. Also, we realise that since there’s only four of us, it totally means we’re lacking a post for Friday. So we quickly drop a mail to a number of RPS contacts in hope that some of them could say something by Friday. And some of them totally did. In fact, some said so much we’re extending the run of articles until at least Monday. But here’s a punchier panel, where developers like Soren Jonson, Paul Barnett, Rod Humble and Erik Wolpaw and journalists like Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell and Quinns talk about their formative games. And, of course, more if any devs care to write in and share, do so.

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Via the big K, this latest Spore trailer sees producer Kip Katsarelis and designer Soren Johnson talking about the civilisation stage of Spore, particularly what they themselves enjoy about that planetary-struggle mechanisms of Maxis’ forthcoming evolve ‘em up. Lovely stuff.
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And the remaining fragments of my interview with Ex-Civ4-er Soren Johnson interview emerge as PCG republishes it online. Here he talks about influences, the future of games, Why Guns, Germs and Steel would make a rubbish strategy game and why he was attracted to work on Spore. He says stuff like…

“It’s a field where you’re writing the rules right now. Some day 100 years from now, they’re going to writing about the stuff we do now, because this is the crucial moment for games. Beyond that… well, 100 years ago, if I’d been born, I think I might be making board games. It’s not just games for me – I come from a real board game, strategy game backdrop.

This is what I’m about. I feel that games are such a broad category. You can do so much with games. People put it up and compare it to… well, are games like music or movies or books? I see games not like a new medium, but a new way of communicating – a new language, so much broader than a specific artistic medium.”

More here.

The Interview I did with designer Soren “Ex-Civ, Now Spore” Johnson in December could be roughly divided into two parts. The bits which were not about Civ 4 and not about Spore. We published these in January, where we talked about the future of the PC being Punk Rock. The second half were the bits about Civ 4, which we publish below, where Soren talks extensively about Firaxis’ desires for the project, why Civ multiplayer had never worked in the past, and the difficulties of moving the old warhorse into 3D.

The non-existent part where we talked about Spore will never be published, as it didn’t happen. Pay attention.
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Soren Johnson has many things to be proud about. Most gamers would argue that being the designer of the magisterial Civilization 4 heads the list. We’d probably agree. But if you go way-way-way down the Good-Stuff-Soren-has-Done document, beneath even things like buying an expensive round in a bar a few times and opening a door for an old lady, you’ll find that he was the first developer to ever mail RPS, saying that he’d like to do an interview. We’ll probably love him forever for that.

After some of RPS’ usual cheery incompetence, we finally got around to it after he’d returned from Brazil, visiting a games conference. The following hour long conversation wandered the entire expanse of PC Gaming – what’s important, online sales, how smart Introversion are, how ace Desktop: Tower Defence is, how PC Gaming relates to Peru Ubu, the Sex Pistols and Television and pretty much everything else which wasn’t to do with his current project, Spore.

How PC Gaming looks at the end of an exciting 2007, from one of the PC’s most interesting designers. It all starts beneath the cut.
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