Tim Sweeney Quotes

Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Before I became a game designer, I was a software engineer.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

Game design is a funny thing. There are people out there who are really good at it, but it's not clear that they can teach it. It's a very intuitive process. It's an art.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

Sometimes it's not always about what you can see or hear but what's under the hood of a game that's most impressive. Between those thousands and thousands of lines of code, magic happens. Sometimes the most amazing feats of gaming wizardry happen without you even noticing.

My earliest interest in game design came when I was in primary school, and my parents bought a Commodore 128 computer. I taught myself to write programs in BASIC, and then I made my own games.

Coming from a programming background, I have a good sense of what's feasible and what's not feasible in a game.

Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.

The whole idea of how people will learn computer science, I believe will be through game development.

The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

I've always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn't matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is 'Tetris,' one of the greatest games ever made.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things.

With 'Scratch,' we want to let kids to be the creators. We want them to create interesting, dynamic things on the computer.

I kind of 'code-sketch,' where I get started with a project by actually writing the code for it and getting something up on the screen. Then I play around with it and see if it's any fun and change the parts that aren't.

I'm in the business to make games - I love entertaining people.

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

It's something special being able to build a program up.

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

When I was 11, I started building games for IBM PC XT.