Warren Spector
Warren Spector
Warren Spector is an American role-playing and video game designer. He is known for creating games which give players a wide variety of choices in how to progress. Consequences of those choices are then shown in the simulated game world in subsequent levels or missions. He is best known for the critically acclaimed video game Deus Ex that embodies the choice and consequence philosophy while combining elements of the first-person shooter, roleplaying, and adventure game genres...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGame Designer
Date of Birth2 October 1955
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!
I will not support any game that doesn't express what I think is worthwhile.
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.
For most developers, that kind of situation - a player figuring out how to do something that the designer didn't intend - to most developers, that's a bug. For me, that's a celebration.
My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.
Seriously, I don't know if people would really tell you this. But in my dream world, the people who work for you would say, 'Wow, I didn't know I could do that until I started working with that guy.'
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 have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords.
I have never made a game that wasn't explicitly about empowering players to tell their own story.
I'm a Nintendo geek, so I'm a pretty big Nintendo fan.
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.
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.
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.