Chris Avellone Quotes

We are at the point where game designers have become celebrities due to the size of the market they serve.

We tried to just convince big publishers like EA or other people to make games like 'Cloud'... It's just almost impossible.

This is the entertainment industry, so game designers have to have a creative mind and also have to be able to stand up against the marketing people at their company - otherwise they cannot be creative. There are not that many people who fit that description.

I remember early on, in the first couple of years especially, I would run into some people that would try to put Kickstarter under the 'social good' label. And I actually had this very visceral reaction - I just didn't like that at all.

Video games seem to be mostly a boy thing - viewed by young boys and created by big boys. I believe that if more videos games were created by women, the violence in these games - especially against women - would be rapidly toned down.

'Syndicate' is technically the first game I worked on.

It's nice to stay up nights worrying about the material, and not about the investors who gave you $10 million to do your musical.

I'm a big gamer. I know the lead time and how long it takes to develop a game and how hard it is to get it right.

On everything I do I'm always taking someone's money, whether it's a movie studio or a record label. Somebody's paying for it, and I'm always respectful of that. But I'm never going to compromise.

If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that.

I've also been busy doing stuff for Steve Jackson Games.

At Sir-Tech I went through the ranks, almost like an apprenticeship. I was very fortunate. The industry was smaller then, and I was able to work alongside some amazing game designers.

I often get painted as the guy who's trying to tell other people what to make and what to like, and that's really not my goal, but I believe so passionately that games can be more than a lot of people think they can.

Gotham Games called me, and I could not be more thrilled. I've been waiting to be in a video game forever, so when they called there was no hesitation.

I've always said - I've been making games for twenty years, and from the first day I got in this business, I've been saying, 'All I have to do is sell one more copy than I have to, to get somebody to fund my next one.'

There was a time when all the actors were saying, 'We should get residuals on videogames.' I just kept going, 'You don't have any idea what goes into making a game, do you?'

I really like Kickstarter because you don't have to be a Medici to fund the arts and sciences or to get behind a big idea or a person that sparks your imagination. It's a type of microfunding directed toward creators.

Our developers will make great games for whatever high-end platforms exist.

It was, like, two mobile games I released. They did pretty well, and after I made those two games, I was like, 'Man, I want to make another game, but I want to make this game for PlayStation and Xbox and PC.' I was like, 'You know what? Forget making the video game for Xbox, PlayStation and PC. How about I make my own console?'

We were happy with funding 'Rage' on our own nickel for years. We intended to do the same with 'Doom 4'. We had offers early on for 'Rage'. People offered us X million dollars. But we carried the risk, and when we finally signed a deal, it was X plus $10 million.

Gaming goes in trends, and for a bit of a too-long stretch, it focused on huge productions.

Platforms are going to get bigger and bigger. Minecraft and Microsoft are just the tip of the iceberg. You're going to see more and more action in this space. Not just from Microsoft's Project Spark and Sony's LittleBigPlanet.

In the past, I worked for HAL, and when working there, I had limitations and had restrictions on what I could create. They wanted me to make the next 'Smash Bros.' and the next 'Kirby,' and that wasn't the place for me.

We've always operated under the belief that you could run a video game business as professionally as you could run a consumer packaged goods business, and you wouldn't diminish creativity.

Why is 'Borderlands' different from every other game with respect to DLC? It's because we haven't really worried about what the past models are. We just thought about what would be fun for us to make and what there would be demand for if it were to exist.