The distance between the people who made the games and the people playing them wasn't that big. It was the spirit of independence. The programmers were a lot like you.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.
In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.
I'm not really big on video games at all, I played a lot at the arcade as a kid. I didn't have a system growing up at my house.
Initially we both did a bit of everything towards making each game but as we began to hire people and the business grew we naturally went in different directions, and away from the coalface of development.
There are too many games being developed by people that have no business creating games.
I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, so that's what made videogames so important. They played back. I could do them myself. Solitaire can't surprise you; there's no AI. But videogames play back with you.
Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.
When we started EA in 1982, our goal was to make games as big a media as visual entertainment or movies. That was how big we dreamed at the time.
Only in about 2007 or so did it become clear to me that games could stand proudly beside other storytelling mediums, and that's when I became more, shall we say, evangelistic in my position. Prior to that, I don't know how enthusiastically I would have admitted that I game.
The great thing about games is that it's tremendously collaborative, and it opens you up to this other world of thinking and storytelling and how you construct those stories.