products, they can still remind us of why games are cool and remind us of all the things
there are still to figure out.
The gaming press is sort of horrifying and marginally relevant at best anyway, but I
think if you honestly rated games they’d all get a .05 or something. That’s not true;
there are certainly games that do a pretty good job at giving you a pretty cool experi-
ence that is relevant.NBA Streetis a fine little street basketball game or whatever. But
when you start talking about realistic games or games with characters, I think you right
away notice, “Well, if that’s a 9.6, then what are we going to be doing for the next 100
years?” Because I think there’s a lot more than .4 left to go. So it’s just good to keep an
eye on the big picture occasionally and all the craziness that’s out there to explore that
isn’t a street racing game, a thug-based shooting game, or whatever.
In general, you seem to balance your time working on games with being active
in the game development community. What’s your motivation for that?
I think games are really interesting and I certainly have a lot of opinions about them and
some degree of frustration that we haven’t done as much as we maybe should have or
could have. And I think that as a community we’re obviously a much bigger community
than we were ten or fifteen years ago but it’s still a fairly small group of people, big-pic-
ture wise. So I think we have a responsibility to try to understand our media and do
interesting stuff. On some level we’re clearly a commercial media, fair enough, and at
the end of the day either we stay in business or we don’t, so that’s clearly top concern
and I don’t see anything wrong with that. But I don’t think that’s the be-all and end-all. I
don’t think there’s any reason not to also think about what the industry will look like in
five or ten years or think about where we could push and try to innovate or think about
what’s possible. So that we can all keep our eyes on what’s out there and stay excited
and stay involved. It just seems like the right thing to do.
Doug Church Gameography
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, 1992
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, 1993
System Shock, 1994
Flight Unlimited, 1995 (Consultant)
Thief, 1998
Deus Ex,2001 (Consultant)
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