Warren Spector Interview
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Q: First, you left Ion Storm and Eidos after the releases of Deus Ex 2 and Thief III, both of which were considered disappointments. Looking back what lessons did you learn about game development from working at Ion Storm?
A: Well, first let's be clear about one thing--both DX:IW and T:DS could have been better, sure, but that's true of every game any of us ever make. There's a great quote my wife, Caroline (a wonderful writer whose latest book, Scars, is available on amazon.com.) dug up that goes (A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.) That's totally true. And, for the record, I don't consider either game a disappointment both teams took big chances, tried some really hard stuff, achieved some big goals, fell short of others. I can't look back and feel disappointed in any significant way. Okay, that out of the way. You learn something from every development experience and, mostly what I learned was that running big projects is not the same as running small ones, and experience gained on smaller projects doesn't necessarily scale well. So you better have people around you who understand big software development projects. Oh, and communication is everything on a really big project. Getting everyone on the same page, making a coherent game, is very, very hard!
