John Romero Quotes

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.

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.

I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question.

I'm not the expert on the great gameplay. I come in for the character design, monsters, atmosphere. I'm not the technician.

It turns out that a lot of gamers love design, love to create in digital.

I try not so much to create new characters and worlds but to create new game-play experiences.

I don't want to criticize any other designers, but I have to say that many of the people involved in this industry - directors and producers - are trying to make their games more like movies. They are longing to make movies rather than making videogames.

Well, for over a year now at my desk, a prototype program of Luigi and Mario has been running on my monitor. We've been thinking about the game, and it may be something that could work on a completely new game system.

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.

Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.

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.

There are now college degrees in game design and interactive media, so if I were starting now, I would probably do that. When I started, you had to break into design from QA or programming or art, but it's really not true anymore.

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

I don't just write a script, and then someone takes it away and builds a game. I am continually getting input in order to create a big suspension field to hold the gameplay together so that the gamers aren't doing arbitrary tasks, so that they are doing things that seem meaningful.

I have been wildly enthused about gaming since I was younger, and a career path I chose not to go down but did really consider was getting into programming and game design.

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

I would love to make video games.

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.

In video you are starting with nothing but a black screen. There's no game there. With pinball you at least start with that basic concept, but not with video. The challenge of going from no game to something today is only different because you have to create something so damn fun people will pay $1.00 every two minutes to play it.

I think you need to understand games to write them. There's a learning curve, just like there's a learning curve in anything. It's not precisely the same as film or television, but you're using the same muscles.

I was the lead designer on 'Portal,' and I really enjoyed making that type of game.

There's a misunderstanding that I've always tried to address straight on when this question comes up, which is that a 'Half-Life' story can somehow exist outside of a game. It can't. The story is created through the process of trying to figure out how to best use the features of the engine within the interesting set of constraints it poses.

If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.

I have a couple of games I've wanted to make in the 'Tobuscus Adventures' universe.

This is a whole new world to explore as a developer to go in and learn these new gameplay mechanics, to learn what it's like to actually control a character from a top-down, 'God's eye' view, and to figure out how the game camera can be controlled by the player's head.