Rock, Paper, Shotgun

An micro-inter-RPS debate today was this august publication’s coverage of one W. Spector Esq. Leaving aside issues of platform prissiness, how justified are we in continuing to cover the bepullovered fellow’s words? He has moved to Wii development for the time being (although platforms for Ninja Gold, his still-unseen kicksplode collaboration with John Woo, remain undeclared), but at the same time there’s a big, tall, wobbly chance that RPS simply wouldn’t exist had the games Spector is most commonly associated with never come to pass. He’s a hard man to ignore here.

So let’s tip the collective hat one more time, mouse ears or not. Here’s Warren holding forth at the PAX conference, providing entertainments other than Duke Nukem’s thrusting denim-clad crotch. The question of the moment: why won’t gamers accept games for non-gamers?
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Warren Spector has been making some interesting comments at GDC Europe, regarding the differences between games and film. And more specifically, developers who are trying to make the former like the latter. Stop it, he cries. “If you want make your game as a movie,” Develop reports the Epic Mickey developer saying, “you should be making movies”. He then goes on to discuss what games should be doing differently. But I’m not sure I agree.

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Don’t tell anyone, but the real reason I wrote this story was purely so I could use that headline.

Yes, King Of Immersive Sims Warren Spector is to hold a keynote speech at GDC later this month. I’ll be in the crowd, which’ll be exciting. Maybe not as exciting as when I had a wee next to him at E3 once, though. Obviously Warren has broken our fragile little hearts and gone on to make some Mickey Mouse platformer for the Wii, but the theme of his speech is something we’re all likely to thrill to/howl at.
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Variety have been interviewing Warren Spector about the Wii-Epic Mickey game and amongst the information that’s irrelevant to THE WORLD’S MIGHTIEST PC GAMING BLOG a couple of facts came to light. Specifically, some more details of the two games which Junction Point were working on before they were acquired. One was a fantasy game, but the other was basically Deus Ex with the serial numbers filed off because Eidos wouldn’t sell the IP to him. “There were and still are ‘Deus Ex’ stories I would like to tell. That story is not done for me,” he says in the interview. Most crucially, the rights to the two games went to Disney with Junction point and aren’t dead. In other words, we could still see Spector’s Bioshock, if you follow my metaphor. As he said to me a few years ago, it’s possible he’ll only work on three more games before he retires. Epic Mickey, Not Deus Ex and incarnating a Fantasy World his wife and he have wanted to do for fifteen years would be a fine way to round off his ludography.

Interesting timing, this. I was chatting to a journo-chum yesterday about how disappointingly tedious the Wall-E game was, and how odd and sad it was that a film studio as accomplished as Pixar would be happy to let such turgid nonsense be officially associated with them. Why do Pixar not start an in-house development studio of their own for these titles? Surely shared in-house digital assets would make the art and graphics a bit easier, and they’d be able to ensure these were proud counterparts to their celluloid output rather than let themselves undermined with shoddy cash-ins. The phrase I used was, I believe, “Pixar could be the Blizzard of kids’ games if they wanted.”

Suddenly, it sounds like this very particular dream may come true. WARR-EN to the rescue…
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Gamasutra have posted a brief interview with one of our favourite developers-with-beard, Mr Warren Spector. In that interview he talks about the fall of the long game.

“Game costs are going to be $35-40 million, even $100 million, and the expectations are huge. You have to differentiate yourselves. One-hundred hour games are on the way out… How many of you have finished GTA? Two percent, probably. If we’re spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!”

But do you, the player, care if you don’t see the last level? Aside from the fact that GTA is a really bad example to use in this instance (given that people use it more as a playground than as a story), do we agree with Mr Spector’s statement? Games with huge play-times seem to me to be very much healthy, and staying. Perhaps if anything, as Kieron suggests, it’s actually the middle ground that is being lost. Games are either going to be very short, or endless.

What do you think, interbrain?

Readers from the distant past known as last week will remember many things that’ll now be bewildering to modern readers. Remember when Jim was away, not Kieron? And talking at length about Audiosurf – what was that all about? And those trousers we wore! What were we thinking! Anyway, those bearded veterans will also remember us linking to a series of interviews Warren Spector performed with various luminaries, which immediately disappeared.

Those following the comments thread will have seen a sharing group emerged to distribute all thirteen files to anyone who wanted them. News reaches us, via spokesperson LocalHost, that they’ve assembled a 3 gigs (aka Many, many Peggles) torrent file of the whole bunch. You can download it from here and I suspect many of you really, really should. Like, really, really, really, really.

EDIT: Site is 403ed. Comments thread is now a list of who got what and what to do with ‘em.

Wow. This appears to be the motherlode. If you read our Warren Spector interview last month, you’ll have probably been excited by the section where he describes interviewing twelve gaming luminaries as part of his University of Texas Master Class in Video Games and Digital Media. Talking to everyone from Richard Garriott to Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime to Id’s Tim Willits, in sessions you’d want to be a fly on the wall for. And now you can, as in a bandwidth-destroying move, the University of Texas has posted all thirteen lectures.

Get them now before the internet collapses.
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Just before Christmas, Eurogamer got me to travel up to Disney’s London headquarters to interview Warren Spector. The resulting piece covered all the big matters of the day - Deus Ex 3, Portal’s awesomeness and how when his new game is finally announced he’d be “vilified”. But there was a hell of a lot more. Starting with polite small-talk, and extend outwards to take in his admiration and identification with Walt Disney, being “Tech’s Bad Boy”, how best to approach The Icons, putting his money where his mouth is, Being In a videogame, the importance of teaching videogames, creating an oral history of games, what it’s like to be a 52-year old designer and JRPGs about Chopin.

The one thing we didn’t ask him why he decided to hook up with this Mickey-Mouse outfit…
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As readers of our comments threads will know, the day after we had our last – er -chat with Warren Spector, I was heading off to London to have a chat with Real Warren Spector. Luckily, he hadn’t seen our previous post. He was, however, in a fine mood. Unable to talk about what he’s acually doing for Disney, when asked about what the response will be upon its announcement he says…

“I don’t have to speculate. I know what it’s going to be. And I can’t wait. Oh my God. It’s going to be like the world came to an end. Absolutely. I’m going to be vilified. I’m going to be accused of selling out, yet again. It’s going to be glorious. Just glorious.”

He also gives his opinions on Deus Ex 3, Bioshock, audience reaction, what it’s like being a games developer in his fifties, how bloody hard it is making Immersive Sims, how he wants shorter games, Portal and how he’d like to try making an MMO. Fun stuff. Go read.