Category: interview

How Starcraft beat Chess: Blizzard looks back on the world's best strategy game.

With Battle.net, Diablo and WOW behind them, it’s probably fair to suggest that PC Gamers have probably spent more millions of hours on Blizzard’s games than any other company’s. With the upcoming release of StarCraft II we spent an hour chatting to three team leads of the original game, now all working inside Blizzard on StarCraft II. They are Frank Pierce, the executive vice-president in charge of product development (he oversees all the new games), Bob Finch, the lead software engineer on (he makes the engines and decides on game features), and Sam Didier, Senior Art Director (he makes the world look o-so-pretty). In line with their history of fantasy roleplay, if anyone fancies LARPing this, Frank Pierce’s voice suggests a paternally-growling Tauren, Bob Finch is an tinkering Gnome alchemist, and Sam Didier is some sort of excitable Goblin with ten tonnes of hi-ex strapped to his endlessly-whirring noggin.

Modding Skyrim: understanding what modders want

This is an interview with the anonymous modder Vorians, who’s worked on the Unique Landscapes and Better Cities mods for The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. I was interviewing him to talk about Skyrim for this piece on What Modder’s Want for Gamespy, but he didn’t reply in time, so I’ve posted it here.

A Fresh Breeze: The Witness & Jonathan Blow

I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview Jonathan Blow, creator of the most challenging game of this generation “Braid”, and play a very early version of his next puzzler The Witness; so early that only the core structure will be preserved when it’s finally released.

Robot Dance; The Aesthetics of Deus Ex 3

At the beginning of the year, I sat down with Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, the Art Director of Deus Ex 3, to talk about Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s baroque influence, how Warren Spector helped them justify the style differences with Deus Ex 1, and why the future will be yellow. This originally appeared as a piece on IGN.