Computer games seem to be one of the only art forms that have shifted from
being predominantly solo endeavors to being more collaborative efforts, at
least for commercial titles. How do you think that affects the final games?
It’s interesting. What
I’m doing right now,
writing film screen-
plays, reminds me
more of programming
than any other activity
I’ve done in a long time.
Like programming,
writing screenplays is
basically a matter of
closing the door behind
yourself in a room with
a computer and nothing
else. You’re trying to
create something from
scratch. If you write a
screenplay that gets
made into a movie, at that point, like a modern computer game, you’ve got the whole
circus, with highly specialized, skilled people, and it’s a creative collaboration between
hundreds or more, all of whom bring their own area of expertise. A big-budget movie,
for all the daily chaos of production, lives or dies on the strength of the script that was
written, often, years before. A modern game is a collaborative effort in the same way, on
a very tight budget, with money being spent daily, usually with a publisher who’s bank-
ing on being able to ship it by a certain date. There again, what makes it work or not is
the strength of the concept, the initial vision, which usually predates the whole produc-
tion. There’s just no time to change your mind on the fly during production about what
the game should be.
But that tends to limit what kind of game designer can be successful, doesn’t
it? One who needs to make radical changes throughout the project to find the
ideal gameplay would have been more successful in 1982 than now. Now he
wouldn’t be working at all.
He just wouldn’t be working on a big-budget, multimillion-dollar production. A game
likeTetrisI think is well within the means of anyone to dream up and program, and if it
takes them a year to find just the perfect combination of rules that’s going to make it
endlessly addictive, that’s fine, it’s not that expensive. But you can’t take on a project
with the latest 3D engine and forty artists at your beck and call and think that halfway
through you’re going to get to say, “Oh, now I realize what this game really needs, I
wish I’d thought of it a year ago.”
We’re at a pretty tough time in the industry. I’m not sure it makes much sense eco-
nomically to be a developer. I think it kind of makes sense to be a publisher, but even
then there’s only room for a few. This is a scary time because the number of hits is
340 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner
Karateka