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Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers
If you want to be successful in any area of game development game design, programming, graphics, sound, or publishing you should know how standouts in the industry approach their work and address problems. In Honoring the Conversations with Great Game Designers, 16 groundbreaking game developers share their stories and offer advice for anyone aspiring to a career in the games industry. You‘ll learn from their triumphs and failures and see how they dealt with sweeping changes in technology, including critical paradigm shifts from CD-ROMs and 3D graphic cards to the Internet and mobile revolution. The book presents in-depth interviews with a diverse mix of game professionals, emphasizing the makers of adventure games, role-playing games, and real-time strategies. It focuses on developers who have contributed to multiple eras or genres as well as those who have hired, taught, or mentored newcomers. Since the mobile revolution has opened up new demographics and new gameplay mechanics, the book features current developers of games for mobile devices. It also explores how indie game developers are making commercial-quality games with a small team mostly using free tools and funded with crowdsourcing applications. While there are plenty of resources available for aspiring game developers to learn the necessary technical skills, there is hardly any historical material on the culture that made the games industry possible. Filling the void, this book provides a historical and cultural context for the games industry. It takes you into the minds of the pioneers who blazed the trails and established the industry as we know it today.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2013
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85 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 16, 2019
This book suffers from exactly the same problems as Dungeons and Desktops - which is not surprising given they have the same author. Running interviews with important and interesting figures of the game industry is an honorable goal, and I fully agree that the game industry should be better at preserving its own history.
The book is not completely bad, but it fails at its self-set goal of preserving the history of the gaming culture and industry, because we don't get below the surface level and I felt that we could get a lot more from most of the interviews if they were done by someone more competent, perhaps a properly trained historian. So, just for completeness:
- you feel that the author talks to their childhood heroes, and that they fail to challenge them and just uncritically accept whatever the interviewees say, or agree with them.
- most of the interviews stay on the surface level. We get the recollections and the views of the authors, but they rarely get to defend or explain what they meant. If something, the author completely agrees with their subjects and further reinforces their views which does not encourage further discussion.
- multiple places sound like the author was basically trying to remember their favorite personal moments with the games, and they are remembering them with the designers of the game. These experiences are hard to transfer - and the author fails at doing so, if you didn't play the game, you're basically excluded from the conversation.
- the interviews lack a common framework or structure, so they are quite inconsistent in what and how is discussed. I agree that all people (and game designers even more so) are unique, but this way the book feels very inconsistent and it is hard to get any perspective on the field or the history.
In conclusion: I applaud the effort to finally start recording and preserving the history of the game culture, but I'd prefer it to be done by someone more competent at this kind of work. Perhaps Jaroslav Švelch, Steven Levy, David Kushner or any of the game journalists.
The book is not completely bad, but it fails at its self-set goal of preserving the history of the gaming culture and industry, because we don't get below the surface level and I felt that we could get a lot more from most of the interviews if they were done by someone more competent, perhaps a properly trained historian. So, just for completeness:
- you feel that the author talks to their childhood heroes, and that they fail to challenge them and just uncritically accept whatever the interviewees say, or agree with them.
- most of the interviews stay on the surface level. We get the recollections and the views of the authors, but they rarely get to defend or explain what they meant. If something, the author completely agrees with their subjects and further reinforces their views which does not encourage further discussion.
- multiple places sound like the author was basically trying to remember their favorite personal moments with the games, and they are remembering them with the designers of the game. These experiences are hard to transfer - and the author fails at doing so, if you didn't play the game, you're basically excluded from the conversation.
- the interviews lack a common framework or structure, so they are quite inconsistent in what and how is discussed. I agree that all people (and game designers even more so) are unique, but this way the book feels very inconsistent and it is hard to get any perspective on the field or the history.
In conclusion: I applaud the effort to finally start recording and preserving the history of the game culture, but I'd prefer it to be done by someone more competent at this kind of work. Perhaps Jaroslav Švelch, Steven Levy, David Kushner or any of the game journalists.
April 6, 2020
The book contains interviews with 16 game developers, interviewed by Matt Barton. The first 40% of the book are from people that worked at Interplay at some point. The book is several years old now and the topics are older than that. However, the book doesn’t become obsolete, and I don’t think you even need to have played the games or know about them to enjoy these interviews . I personally found the interviews entertaining enough but I wouldn’t say it is a must-read.
April 19, 2021
I had fun with it. It was even more retro than I realized, which was cool as some were before my general video game development knowledge. Too bad we didn't get much of the non-English developers of the era but I get why. I hope I can find a good companion piece for that area.
March 16, 2015
I'm a little surprised I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Other than a brief period in my teens when I was obsessed with Asteroids and Defender, I've never been much into video games; My kids kicked my butt at Halo and various EA Sports games for years until I finally stopped playing; And, although I created a few computer games last year - including the unforgettable Spinach Top series (http://spinachtop.azurewebsites.net/), I've spent only a small percentage of my life creating video games.
But I admire those who can create these games - the people with enough imagination to conceive of a great game idea and enough technical skills to execute that idea.
Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers put me in touch with those people. Video game enthusiast Matt Barton sought out the programmers and artists who worked on many of his favourite games and he asked them about their lives and their work. This book is primarily a transcript of those interviews.
Interviews include:
George Sanger, who composes and compiles music for video games, including 7th Guest. His main advice: "Be nice to each other".
John Romero, who built the influential first-person-shooter game Doom. Romeros was hailed as a rock star in the industry until his marketing department published a poorly-thought advertisement with the text: "John Romero is about to make you his bitch", which turned many fans against him.
The reclusive Rebecca Heineman, who was born William Heineman, but changed her name when she transgendered to a female as an adult. Heineman earned the nickname "Burger" by a habit of buying a sack of hamburgers, storing them in her desk, and eating them over the course of several days.
My favourite interview is in the last chapter - Paul Reiche and Fred Ford seem to be having the most fun. For example, they started a company named "Toys for Bob" and they chose that name only because they liked the sound of it. Although there is no actual "Bob", everyone in the company had to make up a story about who the "Real Bob" was.
One can read this book to learn and copy the habits of great games designers. Although there is a wide spectrum of personalities among the interviewees, most of them share a passion for video games that drives them to work long hours designing, building, and playing these games. And most of them began this passion early in life - well before high school.
One nice thing about this book is that you can read the chapters in any order - each interview stands on its own.
The author provides an introduction to the book - describing his motivation for conducting and publishing these interviews. I was surprised he did not end it with a conclusion - summarizing all he had learned.
For me, the book was interesting because I enjoyed a peek into the lives of people who have a passion for what they do for a living.
But I admire those who can create these games - the people with enough imagination to conceive of a great game idea and enough technical skills to execute that idea.
Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers put me in touch with those people. Video game enthusiast Matt Barton sought out the programmers and artists who worked on many of his favourite games and he asked them about their lives and their work. This book is primarily a transcript of those interviews.
Interviews include:
George Sanger, who composes and compiles music for video games, including 7th Guest. His main advice: "Be nice to each other".
John Romero, who built the influential first-person-shooter game Doom. Romeros was hailed as a rock star in the industry until his marketing department published a poorly-thought advertisement with the text: "John Romero is about to make you his bitch", which turned many fans against him.
The reclusive Rebecca Heineman, who was born William Heineman, but changed her name when she transgendered to a female as an adult. Heineman earned the nickname "Burger" by a habit of buying a sack of hamburgers, storing them in her desk, and eating them over the course of several days.
My favourite interview is in the last chapter - Paul Reiche and Fred Ford seem to be having the most fun. For example, they started a company named "Toys for Bob" and they chose that name only because they liked the sound of it. Although there is no actual "Bob", everyone in the company had to make up a story about who the "Real Bob" was.
One can read this book to learn and copy the habits of great games designers. Although there is a wide spectrum of personalities among the interviewees, most of them share a passion for video games that drives them to work long hours designing, building, and playing these games. And most of them began this passion early in life - well before high school.
One nice thing about this book is that you can read the chapters in any order - each interview stands on its own.
The author provides an introduction to the book - describing his motivation for conducting and publishing these interviews. I was surprised he did not end it with a conclusion - summarizing all he had learned.
For me, the book was interesting because I enjoyed a peek into the lives of people who have a passion for what they do for a living.
May 9, 2015
While the interviews are for the most part insightful, I think several of the interviews were a bit on short side relatively. It also seemed that some of the interviews could have benefited from Mr. Barton separating himself as an interviewer from himself as a fanboy. Frankly, I dont care what games he likes, the book is about great game designers and programmers, which Mr. Barton is not. I would rather have had that space filled with the thoughts of these founding members of the game industry, rather than reactions to the authors giddy remarks.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews