Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, Fable. Bigger is better, right? With special thanks to GTA3, too many devlopers look for the bullet-points on the back of the box: free roaming open-city, 50 hours of gameplay, realtime day-to-night transitions...

I don't like to compare video games to television and movies. It's not that their aren't any similiarities: all of them are forms of entertainment and the video game consumer is almost certainly a consumer of both film and television. It's when games are compared with television and movies on the terms of revenue that leaves me cold...

Over the years, I've seen a lot a poor and misguided game design. Both in games that I've played (going all the way back to tabletop games) and in many of the products that I've worked on. The industry as a whole suffers from a lot of copy-cats
and me-tooisms...

How do you keep your project on schedule? How do you hit your milestones at the end of the project? You have to take feature lock down seriously...

I've said before that I don't really play games. I don't own a single console anymore and the little laptop that could, the computer I use tap out all these missives is no where close to being able to play today's current crop of pixel-pushing games...

Almost without exception, every project leaves the bulk of production until the last 4-6 months of the project. It doesn't seem to matter if development is scheduled for 12-months or 36-months...

Crunch-time: the inevitable long hours that plague the end of every project. Whether it’s for a demo, alpha, beta, or the final submission it’s production’s last ditch effort to get the project back on track...

There is quite a bit of buzz on the Internet about the recent launch of the PLAYSTATION3 (and yes, officially, it's supposed to be in ALL CAPS—as if Sony is heralding the arrival of newest console.) The convention wisdom seems to be that Sony is an unstoppable juggernaut on the field of videogame consoles...