MORE Quoteables
by Al Backiel

Presenting a new series of quotes from some of this past year’s Classic Gaming Expo participants:

"The thought of playing games on a tv set first occurred to me while I designed a projection tv set at Loral in 1950….so that idea lay dormant for a decade-and-a-half."

-Ralph Baer (Good Deal Games)

"When Activision was looking to hire, there was no such thing as an experienced game designer. Being one if David's friends, I was recommended to be hired, and got my first programming job."

-Steve Cartwright (2600 Conn. #6)

"Activision had the top few game designers in the industry. Our talents were not all the same, so we played off of each others ideas and capabilities. A game wasn't good enough until it was good enough for everyone.”

-David Crane (2600 Conn. #12)

"It takes standing back and looking at a game and saying, "Is this quality or is it not?" And if it's not, let's take the time to make it such."

-Randy Glover (VGU Aug'83)

"It is amazing that new techniques can still be discovered over ten years after a machine's introduction, considering that present day computers only have a life expectancy of a few years."

-John Harris (Halcyon Days)

"A universally recognized image can be the cornerstone for a whole cartridge line or game console. Look what Walt Disney did with one little mouse."

-Arnie Katz (EG Mar'93)

"At one point there was a tv set (in Keystone Kapers). I took that out because it didn't make sense. The Keystone Kops were around before there was television."

-Garry Kitchen (EFG Apr'83)

"If ever a game system was gone but not forgotten, it is undoubtably the Vectrex."

-Bill Kunkel (EG Dec'92)

" The worst horror is when you are forced to save a wonderful project from company executives who know nothing about games."

-Sam Palahnuk (Good Deal Games)

"The main challenge with Defender was getting it to work and feel right using only the joystick rather than all those buttons. A number of people actually preferred this version (2600) because of the ease of play."

-Bob Polaro (DP #40)

"On January 11^th 1981, I reported for my first day of work as a game programmer at Atari, and changed my life forever."

-Howard Scott Warshaw (Intro to Once Upon Atari)

“I wrote this little routine… A side effect of that routine was we didn’t have to change the hardware (2600). So it was cheaper, it yielded better…the sprites are repositioned on the fly.”

-Joe Decuir (Stella At 20)

"The story and design (Quadrun) was my goofy idea. Marketing left me totally alone. Actually they always left me alone on all of my games, it was so cool to have total freedom."

-Steve Woita (Good Deal Games)

“Riddle of the Sphinx will always be my favorite. Just because it was my one and only cult game. I had very strange people writing me about Riddle.”

-Bob Smith (Stella At 20)

"While on their mission to lay siege to the Dark Tower, heroes battle brigands, face dragons, get hopelessly lost in uncharted territory, and have bands of warriors decimated by the plague."

-Joyce Worley (EG Premiere issue)

"Nowadays almost every movie --- successful or not --- spawns a video game."

-Mark Androvich (2600 Conn. #41)

"There were a lot of tradeoffs involved (Atari VCS). It was a very, very, very, constrained system. Anyways marketing calls me in and says, what's up? And I told them I could do better (Pac-Man) in 8K and from that day on there were no more 4K games at Atari."

-Tod Frye (Once upon Atari Ep. 2)

"If you take away the fancy graphics of today's games, most of the time you're left with a shell of a game that has been done to death a million times."

-Leonard Herman (gameovernet.co.uk)

"To me there are two kinds of impossible games. There's the kind where the skill level is just beyond my meager skills, and there's the kind that's artificially difficult because of bad design or controls."

-Joe Santulli (DP #42)

And finally a few words from someone who couldn't be here with us:

"The play's the thing."

-William Shakespeare (Hamlet Act II, Scene II)

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Last updated: Thursday, May 27, 2004 01:58 PM