Firezide Chat with Harvey Smith

Man, it's goofier than that.

There was that "What are you gonna do with your life?" kind of thinking. I was going to a community college on a vocal scholarship, briefly, and I was taking some bullshit classes that I had no business in, like business classes or real estate classes or whatever. I was kind of failing out of it all and not interested at all.

I have ADHD in a big way, so unless something is exciting to me, it's very difficult for me to stay focused on it. The psychology classes or the writing classes, I was fucking so into.

Even art history later. I've taken classes here and there. For a while, I went online to Savannah College of Art and Design and in the Air Force I took night classes. But again, I gravitated to the stuff I liked, right?

One day, one of my friends and I went out to get food. We worked at the same gas station, and we'd gone to high school together. We picked up Chinese food or something, and he was like, "Hey, do you mind if I stop and talk to this guy?"

I was like, "Yeah, I'll go with you, whatever."

He was driving, so we stopped, and it was an Air Force recruiter.

I was like, "What the fuck is this? Dude, are you kidding?"

I sat there in the room while the recruiter talked to my friend, and I laughed and scoffed. I was like, "Dude, he's lying to you. There's no way they're going to do this or this. You're not going to be a pilot. You're not going to be an officer. They're just trying to get you to sign the papers."

Which was literally true. They made all these promises, but we'd just seen Top Gun, so we were all excited. Even though it's a fucking Navy film and it's all jingoistic and shit. The new one has no right to be good, but I actually love the new one too, the one that came out a couple of years ago or whatever.

We had just seen Top Gun, and it was the hotness at the time for the kids. The uncool kids, I should say.

It was a couple of weeks later, and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I was starting to realize that classes weren't going to work out. I wasn't having a good time.

So I drove myself over to this guy's office, and when I walked in, he was like, "You. The guy that made fun of me the whole fucking time."

And I was like, "Yeah, man. How do I get in here?"

So I took the test, and I was in something like the 97th percentile without any prep or anything. I was in the 97th percentile of people who take the test.

He said, "You qualify for literally every single job in the Air Force. What do you want to do?" For the enlisted guys, because you have to have a degree to be an officer, fly planes, and all that.

So I signed up for satellite communications, which I had no idea what that was. It just sounded cool, and it turned out to be a great fucking job.

I had a top-secret clearance and all that, I went to Saudi Arabia. I lived in Germany.

In terms of making you more worldly, being able to travel – I didn't live on base. I lived out in the community with a German family, and I traveled with them, drove on the autobahn and all that kind of crazy shit. Saw lots of Europe. I was there when the Berlin Wall was coming down.

So it was a good thing for me, and satellite communications was an easy, cool, fun job.

And I could have taken my top-secret clearance and that training and done it in the civilian world afterward.

But instead, when I got out of the Air Force, I started writing this science fiction novel that will never see the light of day. I was on unemployment for six months, and a friend of mine started working at Origin. He was like, "Dude, you know more about games than anyone I know. You should come in and apply."

So I applied for like six months as a writer and game designer, and failed over and over.

I was on the softball team. I played in the D&D group that met in the meeting rooms at night – the nice meeting rooms at the time, in the early '90s. It was the most posh place to play D&D because there was a fridge with Cokes in it and all this kind of shit. People would let me into the building.

I went skydiving with Richard Garriott, Lord British. He took a group of people, and I tagged along with them. We jumped out of a plane at 9,500 feet or whatever it was.

When I finally got the job, I could not get the job I wanted, which was a good thing because I wasn't ready for it.

I got a job in QA, which was fantastic, and I spent a year testing System Shock on floppy and CD, and other games like that, seeing great games and bad games all in one year and a half.

When I finally got the job and I told my friends on the softball team, or the people I'd gone skydiving with, "Hey, I'm going to work with you. I finally got a job." Their reaction was uniform. They were like, "We thought you already worked here. Why were you going around with us in the building at night and playing Quake with us or whatever? Or Doom, or whatever we were playing at the time. Descent."

There were all these multiplayer LAN games, but it was kind of a shock to people that I didn't already work there because I just hung out there all the time.

That’s brilliant.

But anyway, yeah. So that was my transition away from where I had grown up, which was no opportunity that I could see.

It's funny looking back on it. It's hard not to have a little animosity for the way I was treated and how violent it was and how destructive to the soul I felt it was.

So I'm trying not to be that guy. There's a John Waters quote: "Show me an angry young man, I'll show you a leader. Show me an angry old man, I'll show you a loser." And I like that quote, right? So I've tried to work on all that stuff.

But honestly, the people that did well in the system back there, they're still back there, and they became the next generation of coaches teaching science and real estate, your parents, and chemical plant workers and shrimpers and all that.

Again, there's nothing wrong with that because everybody's got to feed themselves and pay bills and pay for their kids. Those people work very hard, and many of them are very good people.

Of course, for me it was fucking caustic. As a weirdo and as a creative kid, I didn't get to go to art school, right?

In an alternate universe, I probably would have gone to art school, and that would have been awesome for me. I'd have found myself or whatever. If you're curious about what that felt like, read Big Jack Is Dead because I tried to just angrily put down everything that I felt.

I enjoyed that book. I know you've told me this story before, but just for the newsletter…

By the way, it's hilarious to me. I was in Spain. I think I was in Valencia on a beach, and you were in Spain on a beach somewhere else.

About two hours away.

About two hours away, yeah. What city were you in?

I can't remember, but I texted you. I was reading it on holiday, wasn't I? Reading your book.

You texted me and you said, "I just finished your book on a beach in Spain," and I was like, "Dude, I'm on a beach in Spain." This is a crazy moment in my life that I will never forget for some reason. So anyway...

If you were closer, I would have nipped and seen you, but it meant dragging my whole family for two hours, so I couldn't. I know you've told me this story before, but just for the video, can you talk about that time when you gave some feedback on, I think it was Ultima, when you were in QA?

That's a very good early Harvey story because I think at times I was a bit of a dick and I was hard to work with, but also I was very driven.

I was burning up to do stuff, and I was a tester, and Ultima VIII was underway. I loved the Ultima games. I loved Ultima VII, Serpent Isle, Black Gate.

In fact, I've worked for a very long time with this guy called Steve Powers, who worked on Dishonored and Deus Ex. He worked on Prey, and he did a lot of the good stuff, I think, in the City of Mages in Serpent Isle. You should talk to him too. He grew up in Freeport like I did.

In any case, Ultima VIII came out, and it was a jump forward in engine technology. But it was right on the edge of Super VGA.

Later, this designer-programmer called Tony Zurovec took Ultima VIII's engine, doubled the resolution, and made Crusader with it, which was beautiful. It was one of the first times I saw or played a Super VGA game, which was a ridiculously low resolution – 640 by 480 or some shit like that back in the day. You could see the little faces of the characters, and it was amazing.

The only way he could make it work – talk about design innovation, right? – was that you walk into a room and the room does not scroll with you. It does not update. It's static. When you need to leave the room, you walk into a door and the whole thing slides to the next room. That way, with the CPU, he could afford to display the Super VGA graphics.

But Ultima VIII came out, and it wasn't really... it was too ahead of its own time. It didn't have enough time to bake. The engine was not optimized, as players would say.

Everybody looked really muddy in it, and it dropped some of the cool RPG stuff. They didn't use character portraits, if I remember correctly, and it had Mario-style jumping. It had very long load times, and if you touched water at all, you died.

So it had all these problems.

I remember walking behind a tree one time because it's this isometric angle in Ultima, and some level designer had hidden explosive mushrooms behind the tree. It just went pop, pop, pop. I heard that, and the avatar died.

It was like, "Okay, this is gonna be a fucking 45-second load to get back to where I was. That's gonna kill me."

I went to him, QA guy coming to his desk with a lot of attitude, like, "Hey, dude, you shouldn't hide those mushrooms behind the tree because the player can't see them, and the load times are painful."

And he was like, "The difference between me and you is, you play games, I make games."

That was kind of part of the attitude of the time.

I was like, "Well, fuck you, man. I'm gonna make games too, and I'm not gonna do stupid shit like that."

So I had a bit of that kind of attitude.

I sat down, and you can imagine in that environment how angry I was, because I loved Ultima. I wrote down literally a list of 100 things wrong with Ultima VIII, and I gave it to my boss, Kay Gilmore.

She was my first boss in games. She shielded me from getting fired many times because I had such a mouth, and I probably owe my career to her. I've said that before.

She looked at the list and she was like, "This list is very good."

And I was like, "I just gave it to you because I had to get it off my chest. I'm going to go back to work now."

One day I came into my cubicle. We would clock in – 100-hour weeks, a very abusive 100-hour week. We would clock in, eat pizza, drink Dr Pepper, and literally use an old-school punch clock.

I've told this story before too, but you put the card in, it'll go chu-chunk. And I remember the days that it was three digits. You know, it's like crazy, 100 hours, time and a half.

Getting paid time and a half, making $7 an hour. So getting an extra 60 hours' worth of time-and-a-half pay, for me as a guy that was struggling to make bills every month, that was fucking huge, right?

But anyway, I came into my cubicle, and I sat down at my desk and logged in and started working.

Somebody kind of came in behind me and sat on the desk next to me, and I looked over and it was Richard Garriott.

Richard was like the most famous dude at the company, and he was like this presence that could drift into an area and light you up in a good way, like explain what the company was going to do or do something super fun.

Like, we're going to have a... You know, he used to do these haunted houses that he'd spend a lot of money on that were amazing inside of his castle-slash-house. He used to do a river raft contest where they would build crazy pirate ships.

Isn’t he one of the only people to have been to space and the Mariana Trench or something?

This is before all that, but yes. Eventually, he went to Antarctica and space and all this other shit.

One of my friends did a documentary on him called Man on a Mission. If you want to see a documentary of Richard Garriott preparing to go to space and then coming back through reentry and shit, he went to Star City and this janky, barely held-together Russian program that was still there and paid to go to space.

I think he's the first American father-son combination because his dad was an astronaut too. He was one of the posh kids.

But anyway, I looked up and this dude is – he also was kind of scary, right? Because, you know, if you sneeze on him, you get fired or whatever. 

So I look up and he's sitting there leaning on my desk, and he's holding this printout that I immediately recognize is the 100 things wrong with Ultima VIII.

And to his credit, he was like, "How would you like to fix these?"

And I was just like...

He recognizes that I'm someone that's about to break out of QA because we had a lot of guys like that.

Mark Vittek was about to leave QA and go work on the Crusader series. Dan Orzulak was about to go work for Bungie eventually on their stuff. Starr Long was about to leave QA and make Ultima Online. We just had all these people that were yearning to break out and make their own games.

And I'm a huge supporter of QA. We work with brilliant QA people who change our games for the better. But some percentage of them want to be QA experts and keep on that track, and they're just brilliant at it.

And some of them are frustrated designers that want to leave, and I was definitely the frustrated designer. I was definitely not the best QA person.

So for him to recognize that, and instead of having an ego and being a dick about it and saying, "Who the fuck are you?" – he could have been that guy.

Instead, Richard is very rational. He was like, "What can this guy do that will help us, and it will help him along the way?" So he was like, "Would you like to fix these?"

And he gave me a programmer and a couple of designers that were scripting Ultima VIII, and let us get through that list.

We did not get through the entire list, and it did not suddenly make Ultima VIII a brilliant game, but it made it a much better game.

And Scorpio, the famously caustic reviewer, re-reviewed it and gave it a higher score.

We took out the Mario-style jumping, which was not suited for Ultima. Let's take out that guy's mushrooms.

That guy who was rude to you, did you become his boss?No, no, no. He eventually got out of games, and I'm sure he's a nice guy. He's a history major. He probably brought something to the Ultimas that they desperately needed.

If anything, now my attitude has shifted a little bit. We have too many game guys in games. We need more fashion designers and history majors and psychologists and art majors, because games get more interesting when those people actually come into games.

However, you can't be hostile. You can't be a dick, and you can't shit on the people who want to make games. You have to work with people and be a good teammate, basically.

Anyway, full circle.

But yeah, that was an opportunity to start straddling the line between QA and development, and I ended up in Warren Spector's producer group, working with him, and I worked for Warren for like nine years.

I saw him recently. I see him every now and then. We go to lunch or something, and he's got so many guitars. He gave me one recently, so I own a Warren Spector guitar, which I'm very proud of.

And he explained, like, this guitar is, I think, a Korean knockoff of a really good guitar, but it's cool. It has a good sound. And he talked me through it all.

I'm not a guitarist, so I don't know.

But anyway, I learned so much from working with Warren, the same way I did from working with Looking Glass and all the guys there, Doug Church and those guys.

I learned a lot from Richard. I even learned a bit from Chris Roberts, who I guess maybe barely remembers me, but I was around him off and on.

And Wing Commander was certainly brilliant for the time. And now he's generated through crowdfunding – he's generated what, like, $200 million? 

$2 billion, Harvey.

What?

$2 billion.

2 billion.

(Editor’s note: it’s actually $1 billion, which is still an incomprehensible amount)

I hope the game is great. But like, holy shit!

I've subsequently worked with people who worked with them, and they're still going. They're still adding things to the game, and it promises to be a game where you go from space to ground forces, and it looks brilliant whenever I see something from it.

I hope they finish it. 

I hope they can put it all together into something cohesive. I saw you were on Raphael Colantonio’s stream recently, weren't you?

Oh yeah, Raph. Raph does – you know, Raph is a musician, and he has a really good audio setup at home. And so he does a... I can't remember what it's called. He does a game podcast with a Russian guy. He's really cool. Something game dev or whatever.

But anyway, every now and then he has an idea for something that he wants to do, and of course at WolfEye they have a PR person that helps him organize some of that.

We were talking, and he was like, "I wonder if we did a playthrough of Dishonored, if it would be popular."

I was like, "Well, you know, it would be."

And then he said something that blew my mind, because I've worked on games in the last 33 years. I've worked on games that I never wanted to see again, and then I've worked on games that I couldn't stop playing.

Like literally, when we finished Deus Ex, we kept doing playthroughs. Dishonored, same thing. Dishonored 2, same thing. System Shock. I just never stopped playing System Shock for years, and then I finally said, "You know, why am I comforting myself by playing this game again that I worked on for 10 months with the development team?"

And he said something that blew my mind.

Raph said, "I haven't played it since it was in beta or something like that."

He said, "I never even played the final version of the game."

He said, "I can't even remember some of what's in the game because we changed it so many times, or cut so many things, or added so many things last minute."

And so I said, "Yeah, that would be super fun, and I would participate in that. That'd be great."

So he started a series of, I don't know, six or seven videos, and I'm in all but one. I had a conflict for one of them, which is cool. Make space for other people.

But we had some of the Austin people in who worked on Prey later with them, and we had some of the Lyon people in who worked with me later on Dishonored 2, and it was just a really moving experience.

To be talking to Raph about all that stuff again, and to witness him playing and talking at the same time, it's just very difficult.

And then further, the very last episode was the art directors.

Jean-Luc Monnet is the assistant art director, and Sebastian Mitton was the art director. Both brilliant guys who I loved. They changed my life. They taught me so much.

But I haven't seen them much in the intervening years. And honestly, I didn't know what they remember from their time on Dishonored 2. Like, did they like that experience? Did they not like that experience? What was that like when I moved over to France for four years and we worked on that game?

And then I left halfway through Death of the Outsider because it was really on course, and I kind of tried to remotely continue to work on it from Austin.

But Dishonored 2 is one of my favorite games to have ever worked on. That experience over there with them and the game itself.

The last episode is with those guys, and it was very touching to listen to their commentary about the art.

Because what people forget is that now you can say Sebastian Mitton, the art director of Dishonored 2, and people respect that.

Before that, Sebastian Mitton was a guy who had been our lead architect or something, and wanted to be art director, and it wasn't proven yet that he was brilliant at it.

And he was building his team – Sergey Kolesov and all these other people, Jean-Luc Monet, all these other people that he worked with.

Viktor Antonov was a mentor of his, and he passed a year ago, I think, last year.

And so now it's obvious that Sebastian Mitton knows what he's talking about with art, and so does Jean-Luc Monnet.

They carry themselves a little differently now because, hey, I've proven that I can do something cool here.

And so it was very touching to interact with them around that now because they're talking about things they struggled with. They're talking about things people didn't understand, people didn't believe in at the time, and they had to prove it.

They had to push with this vision and show people.

And also just revisiting the whole thing with Raph as we both aged, because, you know, the game came out – Dishonored One came out in 2012, right? So that's like 14 years. It's crazy, right?

Do you know what a Renaissance festival is? Do you guys have those? Or it's just like England is just that all the time, right? Like it's just like 24/7 Renaissance festival.

We have these Ren fairs, obviously, where we dress up like English people from hundreds of years ago and eat meat on a stick and drink beer and walk around, and then they have arcade games.

This is a fascinating part to me. They're all hand-powered, so like the early arcade games and puzzle games and all are carved from wood, and you pull on ropes to make the ball drop, and you know, it's like some cool shit in there too.

Watching people joust and all that, and I looked up at one point. I was sitting on a picnic table, and I saw this dude in a Corvo Attano outfit, and he's with a small group of people, and he's with this woman, and she's in a costume of some sort of witch or something.

And I was just like, "That's fucking cool."

All these years later, to see a Corvo Attano at the Ren Festival.

I sat there for a long time. It's like, I don't want to be that guy. I'm at the Star Trek convention: "Did you know I played Scotty?" I don't want to ever be that guy.

I want, when I'm done with games, I would fucking walk away and never look back. I heard one of the Houser brothers did that, and I just like, respect, man.

But anyway, I sat there for a long time, and then I was like, "Man, I've got to go tell that guy. Good job. The costume looks great. I've got to at least go tell him that."

And so I walked over, and I was just like, "Hey, man, I love your Corvo Attano outfit. It looks great."

And he pointed to his girlfriend, and he was like, "I love it too. Dishonored is my favorite game. She made it for me."

And I was like, "Well, congrats. It's great." And I almost walked off.

And then I was like, "You know, I worked on the game. I love Dishonored, and I was co-creative director along with Raphael Colantonio."

And they both lit up and talked to me for a minute. It was great.

So I told him bye. I was like, "Good job."

I walked off, went and had some meat on a stick, and the next day I got an Instagram message from the guy saying, "Hey, I looked you up. I thought you were bullshitting me. I looked you up, and you are the guy."

And he was like, "We were there because my girlfriend just found out she has cancer, and we needed one last hurrah before she has to go into chemo. So we wore our costumes and stuff, and it was super meaningful to us that you came over."

And I just like...

Everybody's going through something all the time, man.

Even the people that have been dicks to you, or even the people that are hard to work with, everybody's going through something all the time, and you never fucking know.

You never know what their kid's got going on, or what their families got going on, or what is bubbling along in the back of their minds because of the way their father treated them, or whatever.

And of course, we would love to be able to say none of that matters. Just be good, enjoy your life. Don't bother me with your stories of your past or what's going on in your life.

If everything was even-keeled, the world would be nicer somehow.

But that's not the way things work.

The way things work is everybody is struggling with something, you know.

And I just sat there with tears forming in my eyes before I wrote a response, and all I could say was, "Good luck with everything. Tell her again the costume is great. It really was a good costume, and I hope the best for you guys. Keep doing what you're doing."

You know, that kind of thing.

And it just goes to show you that taking the leap, reaching out to another person, even if it feels cringe...

Like I don't want to tell him I worked on the game or whatever, you know. Just trying to connect with another human being sometimes pays off. And we now live in a world where everybody's so isolated by capitalism, austerity, by not talking to your neighbors. The atomic family has kind of decimated community.

You have to remind yourself sometimes that it actually pays off to be part of a club. Like I was telling you earlier, I have two hobbies left in my life that I go do weekly, and some of my best experiences that don't come from having worked with great people in games come from doing CrossFit with a group of people that I’ve known for years, or playing D&D with a group of people I’ve known for years.

I hang on to those because sometimes I go to movies with those people. Sometimes I go to dinner with them. You realize that’s actually what life is about: connecting with people and having experiences.

I didn't even want to go to that Renaissance Festival. I've been to so many. I was just like, "Oh God, why do I have to go to another Renaissance Festival?"

Next time, you should go as Corvo.

Raph, I think, wanted to cosplay as Corvo.

He could pull it off, couldn't he? Because he's ripped.

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to go as the Outsider, but I got old, so I can't.

Now that it's been a little while, looking back on the Arkane Austin closure, how do you feel about that whole situation?

Yeah, it's crazy because I have perhaps a different view than a lot of people. I've been in games, like I said, three times now. I think I'm probably repeating myself, like 33 years in December.

I still have my badge from Origin that said I was a contractor or whatever in 1993, and 16 years of it was at Arkane. That was after I got fired at Midway for saying dumb shit to the press after Blacksite didn't do very well. That's on me, largely. I'm not the one that shipped the game early and imploded all the studios, ha! But I'm the one that talked to the press and said something stupid.

But I often think about that guy that I talked to in Montreal – his editor is the one that led with the really incendiary headline that I didn't say. So he wrote an article, and his editor came up with a juicy clickbait headline, which is often the case.

I got the impression when I talked to him one time much later that it put a mark on his life too. He didn't seem like it had led to good things for him, and so I was just like, wow, that editor. I wish I knew that guy's name. Not the writer, but the editor for Wired or whatever it was.

But anyway, I had been fired, right? It was like the only time in games I think I've been fired. And I was about to go to California. I was thinking about working on BioShock 2 with my old friend Jordan Thomas, and that would have been cool because I love Jordan, and there are a lot of people on that team that I really like too.

But Raph was like, "Consider staying here and working with Arkane," and I was like, "Little French company. I don't speak French, but they love immersive sims and I like Raph. Hmm, this might be interesting."

I took this huge pay cut, you know, twice in my career. I think once to go work on Deus Ex and once to go work on Dishonored. So all the people that give you advice like, "Never take a pay cut, know your own worth," it's like, man, sometimes there's a reason to take a pay cut.

If the work itself and the team itself seems super valuable to you, and if it's going to lead you somewhere, if it's going to pay off in other ways, trust me, it can.

And so I talked to Raph off and on, and that's what I ended up doing. I worked at Arkane for 16 years through the buyout by ZeniMax and then the buyout by Microsoft.

When I say I have a different view than other people, it's like I feel like game developers are generally very well cared for in the global sense. I know we can make more money, we get better benefits, etc. But really, it depends on where you come from, right?

For me, it's like this is mind-blowing how much we make. And even I hire people at the bottom end of companies, so I know what the salary ranges are, and the benefits are crazy. I have relatives that would kill for our benefits, for their kids, their spouses, whatever.

And I have friends who haven't been able to fix a tooth for a year because they don't have medical benefits in America. This sucks. And so my attitude is like, it was fucking great. I loved Arkane for so long. It was such a great home.

While I was there, we made a little iPhone game. It was not that memorable, but it was like a palate cleanser for me after getting fired, reminding me of what we could do with a small group of people. And then we made Dishonored. We got to work briefly on Blade Runner before that got canceled. We made Dishonored 2.

Raph and his team, with Ricardo and people that I had brought into Arkane, made Prey. Dinga and those guys that we worked with...

We worked with Dinga for a couple of projects, and he levelled up hugely during that time. He made Deathloop with a bunch of people in Lyon.

Anytime you say one person's name, you're talking about 30 to 100 people. A whole team, brilliant people.

But, you know, "live by the sword, die by the sword" is kind of my attitude. I don't want to sound cavalier because I know a lot of people are hurting. I know half my friends are out of work right now. I was out of work for a while, right?

But it's like we really have above-average pay and benefits because of these corporations that are trying to make money on the games. It's not their money; they're generally gathering money from lines of credit or from shareholders or whatever.

If there's a problem anywhere, it's too many layers of executives making 500k or a million bucks or whatever. But the game industry could be leaner up top, in my opinion, not on the development team.

The developers work fucking hard, and they're the ones that make all the money and the IP that's worth a lot of money in the future, per generation or whatever. And the fans really respond to that authentic creative work.

There are so many short films and short fiction and cosplay and tattoos and art done by the community that loved Dishonored. It was just crazy, right? It was more than even maybe Deus Ex.

But the closure was sad. It was very jarring. I liked what we were about to do, which was a return to roots for us, and I feel for everybody that has struggled.

A lot of people went on to work at Blizzard or wherever, but some people really have struggled to find footing.

So it's always terrible when people lose their livelihood or lose their jobs and have to get ousted from a city or whatever. But to me, winning approval for a project, getting paid for another four years, getting great benefits for another year – that is part of the road that you're on.

Part of the road that you're on is also: corporations suffer setbacks. Sometimes they hire idiot execs. Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes we make mistakes and it tanks things. It's kind of the path that you're on.

I wish executive pay was flatter. There are times you hear about the airline pilot in the United States where he tanked the company and he had an $80 million bailout when they got rid of him.

$80 million is obscene. It's like his grandchildren are going to be rich dicks.

So there are problems, for sure. But in a way, I think maybe it was time for me to move on or something.

And so it's very hard as a human being when you suffer adversity not to recontextualize. Trying to find the silver lining or the good side of it, you know.

And then I realize, talking about it, that it sounds like I'm dismissive of the negative impact that it had on other people, and I certainly don't.

It comes across that way, you know.

Yeah, but anyway, so those are my feelings. I loved Arkane so much. I loved Dishonored. I love the thing that we were about to do next. 

I take it you can’t say much about that? 

Ricardo Bare and I are working on something together. Ricardo is one of my favorite developers of all time. He came out of college, visited Ion Storm, and just wanted to talk to developers. He and I hit it off, and we started going to lunch. I started critiquing his work. He made levels in Unreal of his apartment complex, and we would argue about pen-and-paper RPGs.

He had a lot of great ideas. He was pitching an advantage/disadvantage system before Wizards of the Coast was using that. Maybe somebody else was too, I don’t know, but the idea was like: roll 2d20 and take the best result, or whatever the best roll was.

He was a young guy who was smart, on fire, and very pleasant to talk to, know, learn from, and work with. Just a phenomenal talent. So that was exciting: to go back to single-player and to be working with him.

That’s my long-winded way of saying that it was a tragedy in a way, because there was so much institutional knowledge that got dispersed, and there was so much potential in the thing we were working on. It was a place I truly loved.

But also, it had grown. Companies go through these natural waves, right? Wave one is two people in a room, passionate about some idea. Wave two is 20 people working on a thing, and they’re all true believers. Wave three is when they’ve had success, and they’re starting to get too much attention from the people who finance things. And then wave four is when the founders have left, and the place is no longer Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

It’s Willy Wankers.

[Laughing] Yeah, exactly. Every now and then I stop and I read about Nestlé, the company that buys water rights in poor African villages and then sells them bottled water. They’re super controversial, and yet we think of them as these elves making chocolate somewhere in the forest. It’s like, no.

What’s the worst part of your job, or being in the games industry?

I don’t know. Ask me on a different week and I’d probably tell you a different thing. Right now, it’s how difficult it is for people to get funding.

So many people have great teams and great ideas, and it doesn’t all have to be a giant 10-year Destiny effort or whatever. Some games could be like What Remains of Edith Finch. I think Jordan Thomas and those guys just released a game – I think it’s a Steam game about seances. I don’t remember the name right now, but it looked brilliant.

There are so many people with ideas that are more concentrated, more focused, and you just love to see it. You love to see beautiful ideas proliferate, and people who are passionate about a particular period in history, a particular set of characters, or a particular mechanic get to work on that.

So the worst part of being in games right now is how hard it is to be in games right now.

And that’s against the backdrop of 2026, where, let’s be honest, America has been captured by a hostile regime. I don’t even know what’s going to happen. It’s anti-democratic, anti-education, racist, misogynistic. It’s an unholy alliance of evangelicals, profiteers, and people that we would have, in the ’30s, made cartoons about – pointing to the big bosses and saying, “We need to get children out of coal mines. This is the enemy.”

But instead, we act like these people are the heroes now. They don’t suffer consequences. They have fleets of yachts and multiple houses, and billionaires run our world right now.

You’ve got Musk trying to rile up the UK for race riots on Twitter at the minute. It’s crazy.

Yeah, because then you keep people divided, right? You can’t reform the government.

The golden heydays of the United States were things like the New Deal, where unions fought for weekends for workers, healthcare, getting children out of coal mines, public education, women’s rights, ending Jim Crow laws, and all this kind of stuff.

And it’s like, when we forget all of that. I grew up in the ’80s, and everybody mocked how boring the middle class was and how boring the suburbs were – as if aristocrats and peasants were the only things that mattered. That was kind of in the water in the ’80s.

That era seems very appealing now, though, doesn’t it?

Yeah. You think about it now, and it’s like actually that’s the goal: reduce the number of homeless people, reduce the number of aristocrats, widen the middle, and give everybody more opportunity.

So now I sound like I don’t know, fucking Bernie Sanders or something.

What’s the best bit of life advice you’ve heard?

Yeah. I remember Eddie Murphy said, “Don’t take any advice,” and that stuck with me for some reason because your path is your path.

If I had listened to that counselor back in high school – the one who didn’t want to talk to me – I would probably be retiring from a chemical plant with cancer right now, or doing something that might be gratifying for someone else because all they care about is their garden and their dogs. They clock in, clock out, and that’s what they want, and that’s fine.

But I needed to do something with my creativity and my mind.

I have no illusions. I’m a game developer. Sometimes we made good games, and sometimes we made bad games. But it’s a tiny bit of what it must be like to be a brilliant person who changes the world.

If you imagine what it must be like to be Thom Yorke – you look at Thom Yorke, and he’s small, and he has one eye that doesn’t work right, and he must have been bullied terribly, and yet he’s this powerful creative force that got me through the ’90s.

At times, I probably would have ended my life. There were moments I went through some things in the ’90s. And it’s like you want a little piece of that. You want to be able to express yourself and write an article, make a movie, make a song, or whatever that reaches other people and helps them process this existential nightmare that is life at times.

And so being a game developer on new IP, especially something creative or innovative, never forget that is what you’re doing.

If you’re putting the store in the game and selling funny hats and skins for rifles, I guess that pays your bills. But by contrast, if you get that moment where you’re working on Deus Ex and you look around and realize, “Wow, these people are on fire.”

Deus Ex was about mechanically asking: what can we do? Can we make an RPG inside a shooter? Can we give you multiple ways to solve your problems? Can we give you multiple ways to express yourself ethically in the game, like the Ultimas did?

Then all the way to Dishonored, it’s like: can we explore themes related to abuse of power in a game? Can we propose an alternate 1850s Europe and play with that?

It’s the best fucking job in the world sometimes, and I think it comes with this understanding that you have to know how lucky you are.

Even when bad things happen – when I got fired, when I got laid off, when my studio got closed – I still can’t help but realize there are far worse outcomes people in my family and people I know have experienced.

My friend who couldn’t fix a tooth for a year because she didn’t have health insurance – even though it was painful and bleeding – that’s the reality for some people.

So I guess that’s my answer to “What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given.”

At some level: don’t take any advice. If you’re the kind of person who needs advice, then hear a lot of it and choose the right one. Look at the constellation and pick the star you need to follow, because you probably know better than anyone which way you need to go – which way your soul needs to go.

What do you dislike most about yourself?

I wish – maybe all people feel this way – that I had known 20 or 30 years ago the things I know now. The demons I’ve wrestled with, the way I interact with people now. I think I would have been a better force for good and made fewer mistakes.

I try not to talk about my age because people judge you based on your age. But I’m 59, and that’s crazy. I don’t feel 59. I did CrossFit yesterday, and we did this crazy workout that lasted 40 minutes. I was standing on my head, doing all this ridiculous stuff.

But then other moments I’m like, “God, I’m 59 in December. I’m going to be 60. What the fuck? How does that work? Am I not supposed to look like Santa now?”

No offense to anyone who does. Some of my friends look like Santa, but they’re young at heart.

I don’t know. That’s probably the thing I hate worst: I’ve always been aware of death because my mom passed when I was six.

I look at everything and think, this building is going to fall apart someday. This amazing toddler who’s so fun to play with is someday going to be a decrepit old man. 

Everyone starts slipping in the shower eventually, don’t they?

And this couple that’s so happy and young and full of hormones and brain chemicals – they’re just high right now. Someday they might hate each other.

My life has been – I don’t know – the first 20 years were kind of rough, but at some point it turned in a good direction, maybe around my mid-30s, and it’s been great since then.

I really don’t have that many complaints. I just wish I had figured shit out earlier.

I think that’s the thing I dislike about myself: some of my earlier history.

Do you have a party trick?

Yeah. I realized as a child that I could blow bubbles. I can launch a bubble off the tip of my tongue and have it float around.

I read at some point that only Harpo Marx could do that – that he was the person documented as being able to do it before me. I didn’t know that at the time, though. I’d just sit there and blow a little bubble that would float under my dad’s neck or something gross.

You have to have the right saliva consistency. Sometimes you just can’t do it. Your mouth is too dry, too wet, whatever. It has to be just right.

It’s a terrible party trick. After the apocalypse, people are going around with guns asking, “What can you do? What can you do?”

And I’m like, “I can blow a bubble.”

Boom. That’s it.

What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?

My friend Anthony Huso, who did Lady Boyle’s Last Party on Dishonored, writes 1970s-style first-edition OSR D&D stuff. He did The Prince of the Silver Castle, and our group just finished it after four and a half years of playing.

We may be the first people in the world to ever finish it. It is his magnum opus. It’s brilliant in every way, and I love it so much.

It’s a little too hardcore, so I think DMs would have to soften it if they ran it, but The Prince of the Silver Castle is a joy to read if you like games and fantasy literature.

I also bought the complete works of Calvin and Hobbes, which I fucking love. It’s really well put together.

I bought the complete Far Side, too. That’s one of those creativity-building tools for young people. It’s just a person who is an interesting thinker putting together a comic strip.

I also finally found Barlow’s Inferno by Wayne Barlowe. It’s full of evocative Inferno imagery.

And I have a book by Ikumi Nakamura, who worked on horror games and does urban exploration in Japan – going to ruins, taking photos, climbing into strange places. The photos are brilliant, and it’s infused with her enthusiasm.

If you want to find it, it’s called Project UrbEx.

What about games? Do you get time to play video games?

Some. I’m not the gamer I used to be. It takes something breaking through.

I finished Astro Bot the other day. At first I thought, “What is this? It looks like a PlayStation game meant to sell the PlayStation.” Then you realize how brilliant the mechanics are, how brilliant the fanfare is, how well done it is, and how many mechanics there are.

It’s a staggering project. If you like platformers, it’s amazing.

I’m about to start playing something else. I’m probably behind everybody else. On my phone I’m playing Grim Quest, this simple little dungeon crawler that’s deceptively hard.

I’m looking forward to all the Steam stuff coming out. We talked earlier about VR and how disappointing it is that it hasn’t taken off more, but every now and then there’s something like Budget Cuts, Ocean Rift, the National Geographic kayaking experience in Antarctica, or Half-Life: Alyx.

It’s almost worth having a VR system just for the things that come out once in a while.

The thing is, it’s never been more true that a small group of people can make something cool.

If you could go back to an important part of history — imagine you’re in a protective bubble — where would you go?

Yeah, I think people always say things like the crucifixion, so they could see if all that was real – coming back from the dead. If you’re an atheist, maybe it would just be a meaningful moment, or if you’re not, maybe it would mean something different. Or having a drink with William Shakespeare or something like that. Other people would say they’d want to be at the Stonewall riots or whatever. There are probably all kinds of answers.

You could go back and watch dinosaurs eat each other or whatever. But every time someone asks me something like that, it’s personal for me.

I would love to go back and watch my early life. The memories are so faulty, right? Of all the things that happened to me, all the things I’ve pieced together over the intervening years – some bad things that happened inside my family, even before I was born – I would love to know more about all of that. To go study that.

Maybe that sounds like a self-indulgent answer, but that’s what comes to my mind.

Is history that important, or is your personal history more important? History is stuff that happens all around us all the time, and it’s largely recorded as a narrative, and it’s often written by the victors.

So I don’t know. People who say, “I’d like to go back and watch Napoleon command a battle” — Napoleon was probably a dick, man. No one in the future is going to say, “I’d love to go back and watch the United States bomb the shit out of Iran,” or help Israel decimate Palestine. So I don’t know. It’s an interesting, tricky question.

What if you could go back to tell yourself something? Where would you go, and what would you say?

Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ve had that thought before – going back to comfort a younger me. Telling myself that things would be okay, that someone loves me, that I’m going to be alright, that it’s not as scary as it seems.

But fuck, I don’t know if that’s even meaningful, because you kind of have to live through things in order to understand them.

And they shape who you are today, right?

Yeah, right. And I don’t think I would want to change much. You know what I mean? As bad as some things were, it’s like the butterfly flaps its wings and suddenly I’m hit by a bus at 15 or something.

I don’t want to mess with that. I don’t want to fuck with that.

When was the last time you cried?

Cried? You know, I’m a weirdo because I can’t actually cry. I haven’t been able to cry since I was very young.

Just twice in the intervening time, I’ve actually sobbed when something happened. And often it’s not something you’d expect to be powerful in my life. I remember sobbing on the couch a couple of days after my dad shot himself, and it was because I felt sorry for him. That feeling came over me, and it was shocking.

But generally, something sad will happen. Like, man, I watch The Lord of the Rings movies, and every time Arwen comes and takes Frodo and rides to Rivendell, I fucking tear up.

It’s such a dude answer, you know? Like, “Oh, she’s this beautiful eternal mother figure protecting this childlike hobbit.” But it fucking wrecks me.

And half of what wrecks me is the horse. That horse, that elven horse, is trying so fucking hard to get away from the Nazgûl. It’s so good.

But then it shuts down. Something shuts down. I feel this cold, like, “Oh, it’s gone.” Literally like that. One moment it’s the most powerful thing in the world, and then it just becomes this blank thing.

Do you think you’ve taught yourself to do that through all the things you’ve been through? Do you think that’s maybe a trauma response?

Probably, yeah. Probably.

I was going to say, one of the times I remember – because it’s literally only about three times in my adult life that I remember just sobbing – I envy the people who can cry because they describe it as a cathartic cleansing.

It’s not a weakness. It means you fully have access to your emotions, right? So it’s powerful.

But it’s fucked up because one of the three times I remember, I was in my apartment late at night watching this stupid fucking made-for-TV Elvis movie. There’s this pathetic moment where Priscilla has left him, and she comes to one of his shows. He’s trying to show her his fancy clothes, and he’s so proud of them, but she’s looking at him like, “Wow, he’s a child.”

That moment set me off somehow, and I just fucking wept for like 20 minutes.

It was like, “What the fuck is happening here?”

It’s like emotions – we still don’t understand even the barest part of the brain.

I think part of it is the way we live is so unnatural to how we’re meant to live that our brains are all jumbled up.

When’s the last time you cried?

I teared up. I didn’t cry, but it was about a week ago, actually. I took my youngest kid to see this thing – I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s called The Amazing Digital Circus.
It’s a YouTube series made by a trans woman, and it’s this animated thing where an AI pulls people into these digital constructs and traps them in this world, torturing them. It’s quite adult for kids, and it has these adult themes.
But the cinema was packed with kids his age and a few older ones, all dressed up, and they were screaming and crying and shouting. It just felt quite powerful. Like, wow, look how much they cared about it.

That’s a good answer because sometimes, when you’re in a crowd and you see other people feeling something, it’s a really powerful way to feel something yourself. Especially if you’ve been through trauma.

I went to see Backrooms recently, which I loved, and there was a poster for that. There were some kids, I think in a group, who were going to see it, and I was like, “What the fuck is that?” I didn’t even bother looking at it. I thought, “It’s some kids’ thing.”

Then someone said it was from the internet, and I was like, “Oh, okay. But so is the movie I’m going to see.” 

How do you want to be remembered when you die?

Fuck, I don't know, man. I guess the obvious answer here is, I think probably many people would say this: like you get to this point where you hope that you've been a positive impact on other people more than a harmful impact, or you know, like more than you made me feel lesser or whatever. I hope, I hope positively.

There were a couple women that got married in a Dishonored wedding. They wore costumes and all. And when they asked us if we would write some lines from the perspective of the heart, you know, the narrative device we did for Dishonored, and I was so moved by it that I was like, I wrote a bunch of lines from the perspective of the heart.

I called April Stewart, who was the voice of Jessamyn Caldwin in the heart in Dishonored, and she was also Cartman's mom on South Park. She's brilliant, a brilliant voice actress. If you need a voice actress for your game, she's brilliant.

And I said, "Hey, this thing's happening. I wrote some lines. If I email them to you or text them to you, can you just read them?" And she was like, "Well, I'm busy, but I'll do this. I might have to do it on my iPhone in the kitchen."

I was like, "Dude, it's totally fine. We'll clean it up or whatever."

And so we literally had her record lines as the heart that we wrote about because the one person getting married wanted to hold the heart up to their partner and scan them sort of and have it say these things about their future and stuff, and that was just like they were so thrilled that we cared and that we had gone the extra.

We got nothing out of that except the feeling, feeling good, you know, and I hope it was very meaningful to them, right? So you hope that you hope that both with the people you've worked with and the fun you've had, and even working out or playing D&D or going to a movie together, whatever, having dinner, you hope that people remember those things and remember them fondly, and then you hope your work, some article you wrote or some song somebody wrote or whatever, like stays with people. 

What about if you could choose to have an inscription and a gravestone? What would you choose?

Oh my God, man! Probably something like “do not resurrect”. Once was enough.