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Warren Spector is a strong advocate for carving out your own space in existing franchises (side-stories, separate locations, alternate universes) to have some creative control — Ultima: Worlds of Adventure, Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Ultima Underworld all examples vs. Garriott’s mainline

Ideas are easy, ideas are irrelevant, don’t value them. Warren Spector has exactly 100 ideas for potential games sitting on his hard drive at home. But why work on a particular game, say Deus Ex? Because you BURN TO DO IT

The things Warren Spector was stubborn about with Deus Ex which he was told were impossible: mashing up too many different genres; his concept of sharing authorship with players

Ooh an update to Warren Spector’s classic 2000s “why can’t we make a game where you FALL IN LOVE!!” Warren Spector believes that games are good at “doing verbs” like run jump shoot blah blah, but still don‘t know how to do “being verbs” like being… in love! (Me: uh… what about loving?)

Warren Spector believes that if you’re going to make a game you should have something to ask via the game — a question posed to players, not just something to tell players

Warren Spector wanted to set Deus Ex in the present, but was so concerned with making everything realistic and functional that he decided to move it to 2052 so that the computers and phones didn’t have to work realistically

Part of the setting premise of Deus Ex is “what if every conspiracy theory you’ve heard of (in 1998) WAS TRUE?!”

Warren Spector believes that the idea of using a vertical slice to “find the fun” is total nonsense, and that if anyone says “find the nugget of fun,” you should run screaming in the opposite direction

Warren Spector’s Deus Ex team was all guys (but I will bet someone who wants to research it $20 that at least one of them has transitioned since then)

Warren Spector wanted Deus Ex to feature a massive war with thousands of soldiers on each side and a prison with a thousand prisoners, and now admits that having unrealistic goals was a problem for production

Harvey Smith told Warren Spector that his elegant skill system was terrible and sucked, and of course Harvey was right

Having a really good physics system allows for unexpected emergent gameplay, which is of course the most magical thing and tremendously rewarding for a game designer (like Warren Spector. Ok, like almost everyone)

Warren Spector approached Disney with a different game idea but they pitched him on making a Mickey Mouse game and he ripped up his other idea.

Folks on Warren Spector’s Epic Mickey team convinced Bob Iger to get the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit back.

Warren Spector put up televisions around the Epic Mickey team workspace that just played Mickey Mouse cartoons constantly

Warren Spector says you should never ride the rides at Disneyland with all the lights turned on because all the magic will be destroyed by the seamy reality of patches and acoustic tile and duct tape (me: but what if I think those things… are magic…)

Warren Spector was dissuaded from doing a grimdark mean Mickey by a focus tester who, according to Warren, looked like an ex-con and insisted that the character design not ruin his childhood

Warren Spector says it’s a good idea to find out where a (corporate creative brand guideline) boundary is by going way over it and then pulling back, because if you creep up to it until you get negative feedback you will always fall short

Warren Spector hates the Epic Mickey vertical slice, in which you could paint objects down to the pixel, and once again insists that vertical slices are total nonsense

Warren Spector has the quality of all good creative directors which is that he constantly says “I’m not smart enough to do this [thing that an artist, technical designer, programmer, etc he worked with] at all, I’m just lucky I worked with someone who was!!”

“Reward Observant Players” was a design motto on Epic Mickey, which differentiates one player’s experience from another

Warren Spector says Disney’s internal mandate was “we make entertainment for families” but Pixar’s was ”we make entertainment for everyone,” and being Warren Spector, he insisted on trying to do the latter with Epic Mickey and feels that he succeeded. <3

Notably Warren Spector’s personal anecdotes on who “everyone” is include a lot of stories about accessibility and people with disabilities who found the game moving