<sigh>

I hear a lot of game design pitches and my feedback is often a shrug of the shoulders. A few ideas are clearly superior and I get very excited about them, and a few are SO bad that I can easily shake my head and say, "No, that is a terrible game concept." But often I just shrug my shoulders, because great concepts and terrible concepts all require one thing to be successful: execution.

I sometimes use the original "Diablo" to explain my position on this topic. Before I learned the importance of execution I honestly believe that I would NOT have approved that pitch. I think the conversation would have gone like this:

My point is, the game was so well executed the pitch was kind of irrelevant. But stories like that make it difficult for me to judge other games, because there are lots of really horrible game concepts out there, but many of them could be successful, possibly hugely successful, with the proper execution by a talented individual or team.

I'm often asked about my favorite game of all time. If I had to single out just one title my choice would probably be: M.U.L.E.  This is the game that convinced my father that I had picked a viable career path. 

Dad always thought games were a big waste of time and he strongly urged me to find something else to get excited about.  During my senior year at Pepperdine my folks visited from Colorado. It was Christmastime and that year my wife gave me a copy of M.U.L.E.  After a little badgering Mom and Dad said they would try it and the four of us sat on the couch and played that game for HOURS.  Mom wasn't very good with a controller so she always had trouble getting her mule back into the pub.  With the timer ticking down she'd miss on the left, then on the right, all the while shouting "Ooh", "Oooh", "OOOH!" as the rest of us laughed til tears ran down our cheeks. 

After that visit Dad never said another bad thing about games, and now he and my Mom play them all the time.  In fact, "Fairway Solitaire" is one of their favorite titles!

I'm a nice guy. Sometimes people think I'm a little bit too nice. 

My old Cinemaware boss, Bob Jacob, thought I was way too accommodating. He wanted me to be tough-as-nails but that's just not my personality, especially when it comes to dealing with customers.

It was a Tuesday night and we were trying to get out of the office so we could drive to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Bob was in a big hurry and he wasn't happy when a customer called and I stopped to answer the phone.

The customer had just read a magazine article about our new game "Rocket Ranger" and he was super excited until he found out that the game would require 512K of RAM. His Amiga only had 256K and he was PISSED.

While Bob grew more and more impatient I politely tried to explain that "Rocket Ranger" was a large and complex game and it was impossible to get it to work in 256K, but it was clear that I was getting nowhere with this guy.

After several minutes Bob started tapping on his watch and he hissed, "John, this guy is a jerk. Come on! Hang up the damn phone.  We have to GO!"

So Bob is hissing in one ear, the irate customer is yelling in my other ear (telling me he is NEVER going to buy another one of our games, he is the President of a huge User Group and they are going to BOYCOTT Cinemaware!).  I'm trying to tell this guy that we attempted to make it work in 256K and then, all of a sudden, he just hangs up on me!

Now, I almost NEVER get angry, but when I do it occasionally explodes out of me.

"!%$* YOU!!!!" I shouted, and I slammed the phone down.

When I looked up, I swear Bob had a little tear in his eye. He said, "John... I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!"

I never had the courage to tell him the customer had already hung up the phone...

A couple of my daughter's friends (they were all about 17) heard that we had an Xbox 360, so a few days before Christmas, after a non-trivial amount of begging and pleading on their parts, we invited everyone to come over and check it out.  I powered up our 52" HDTV, cranked the surround sound, and then loaded up the system seller: "Call of Duty 2".  While they played I went upstairs to do some work on the computer.  It was great fun to hear the shouts and exclamations: "HOLY SHIT!"  "Look at that!"  "Oh my god, that smoke is amazing!!!"  "Okay, that does it.  I'm gettin' one of these..." 

Then, they fired up a horror game called "Condemned." 

Now, I'm not sure what was going on down there but this game scared the CRAP out of these guys.  I mean, it totally freaked them out.  My wife was reading a book in the living room and when she started to laugh I came out of the office and stood at the top of the stairs to listen.   

They were actually getting angry with each other.  "Dude, I TOLD you there was a guy over there.  Why didn't you taser him???"  "I hit the wrong button, okay?  Shut up you're making me nervous."  As I stood there listening something caught my eye.  It was one of my daughter's old textbooks... just sitting there on the bookcase.  It was about four inches thick.  Hardcover.  I picked it up and glanced over the bannister at our hardwood floor far below.  A devilish grin spread across my face.  My wife shot me one of her patented "don't even THINK about it" looks, but my mind was made up. 

I held the book over the railing, perfectly parallel to the floor... and then I waited.  It was a good five minutes before I heard the following exchange: 

"Now be careful, dude.  You only have one more bullet left." 
"I know!  Stop talking and let me concentrate." 
"I think there's someone up there...  I'm not kidding... I think I saw someone.  Go slow, dude..." 

Then it got real quiet.  I thought to myself, "... wait for it... wait for it... wait for it... NOW..."  I dropped the book. 

The thick hardbacked tome hit the floor with a mortar-like WHOMP and instantly I heard a gunshot, followed by three terrified screams and one fear-induced bout of Tourettes, "SHEEZUH FUCK SHIT!"  I waited a couple of second and then yelled down, "Oops." 

I felt kind of bad for making the kid fire his last bullet into a brick wall, but it was about time for them to go home anyway.  ;-)  (My daughter later confirmed, between bouts of laughter as she remembered the looks on their faces, that my timing had been absolutely perfect.) 

One of the first games I ever worked on was called "Star Rank Boxing" for the C-64. The gameplay was pretty simple: you could punch high (head) or low (body), and defensively you could push up or down on the stick to defend against head or body shots. 

As we were getting ready to implement the computer AI, I read an article about some Russian scientists who were experimenting with coin flip predictions. They tested hundreds of people and discovered an "optimal" pattern of results that was the most difficult for people to predict. I decided we should use this pattern for the computer's decisions to punch to the head or body. 

I'm not sure how much impact this actually had on gameplay, but I have to publicly admit that I implemented the feature so we could include this text on the box:

Players are a lot smarter now. You can't really get away with stuff like that today.  ;-)