I’ll always remember when Super Mario 64 came out on the N64. And it was the first
time I really felt like I was freely exploring a 3D space.
And I wasn’t thinking about the technology, the 3D-ness of it, but mostly about the fact
that it felt like a real place, which was always the dream to go into an imaginary virtual
place inside the machine.
I think it’s fun for someone who’s not very powerful, like a young child to like
do something really powerful on the screen.
That’s one of the strongest feelings you get when you’re playing video games is that
feeling of, “I miss that world and I want to go back to it.” And that’s what you
try to achieve with every game you make is to create
a world so real that people miss it when they’re not playing the game.
For Monkey Island, it was really me sitting around writing a lot of little short stories.
I wrote these one-page stories just over and over and over again, really trying to pull
out of that world what it was that was going to
be interesting about that.
The thing about games is to me the main character in an adventure game is the world. It's
not Guybrush Threepwood. It's the world. It's that world that he exists in. And Guybrush
is just the lens that we use to look at that whole world.
And it was really about making sure that world made a lot of sense.
Without a doubt, the single largest advance in the development of video games is the
presence of network connectivity.
As soon as games were available to network and then we were able to create the internet,
it created this ability to create worlds, imaginary worlds, with real people.
This is not about something that changed the history of video games. This is the biggest
change in humanity that we’ve probably had since the development of fire.
No time ever in the history of the world has more music been played more times than in
video games right now.
Take a game like World of Warcraft where people are playing 20, 30 hours a week and
the music is in your face, pounding. We’re doing things now that Beethoven and Mozart
never dreamed of that would be possible, you know.
We’re able to do things in music and branch out interactively. And if the player stops
here…
then we need to keep this rolling. But if he goes in that direction, then let’s start
bringing in a percussion track. It’s almost like
the player becomes the conductor.
I’ve always said that if Beethoven were alive today, he’d be a video game composer,
no doubt in my mind.
Your skill watching a movie might be eating popcorn. A skill playing a game is you feel
like you've succeeded at learning something and you're good at it.
When you press the button, you jump. It's not just a jump. When you press the button
and hold the button, you jump higher. When you
jump and push left when you're going right, you change direction in the air. All these
things add to this visceral experience in the
game that you would never get from a movie, and you feel like you're learning something
like riding a bike or riding a skateboard and you can come back to it and improve.
And there's something about that motivation. There's something about that kind of
experience that drives a player to continue to play that game and come back to it again
and again.
It's not just a puzzle. It's something that people really can relate to and feel very
emotional about.
Disney Epic Mickey, it wasn’t just an intellectual exercise for players. It wasn’t just mash
buttons and beat a bad guy for players. It really touches people. I hope they see the
potential of video games as a medium where you can learn something about the world
and about yourself, try things out in a virtual world that we would never want to you
trying out in the real world…
And return to the real world from these virtual worlds kind of a changed and better
person.
Video games aren’t this trivial little form of entertainment. It's not like just a colorful
crossword or something that we’re doing here. This is something that touches people
deeply.
If you don’t play video games yet, we’re going to get you. Trust me, we’re going
to find a way to get a game to you. So you can understand
just how powerful this medium is.