Warren Spector quotes:

My greatest joy is seeing parents and kids playing Disney 'Epic Mickey' together, handing the controllers back and forth, helping each other out.

As far as the timing, well, I'd write that off to luck as much as anything - I happened to be out looking for a development deal, and Disney happened to think my team and I might be the right people to make a Mickey Mouse game.

It's about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It's about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It's about you.

Once we can do Pixar-quality graphics rendered in real time with interactivity, I could see games costing $200 million to make, and all of a sudden you have to sell a lot of games just to break even, so I'm a little worried someone's going to do that.

Whether it's as the hero of an adventure story, as teacher and friend, as icon on watch, shirt or hat - everyone knows Mickey Mouse.

Dude, I turn into a six-year-old when I come to Disneyland. It's amazing. My eyes glass over and my blood pressure goes down. I'm just like everybody else. I turn into a big kid when I come here. It's the happiest place on earth, right?

On the small scale, 'Ico,' I think, actually delivered a small new thing: holding a character's hand and really feeling like your job is to rescue this person, and establishing a personal connection.

The heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I've been doing since the '80s.

If anything, game development is even more of a team effort than making a movie, so for individuals to get credit for making a game is absolutely insane.

In the electronic game world, I know I have a reputation for doing the cyberpunk thing, and for doing the serious epic fantasy thing, but if you go back to when I was a kid, I've been a Disney fan all my life.

Ray Harryhausen's 'Sinbad' picture was the first film I remember seeing. I was two years old when it came out, and it changed my life forever. I had nightmares about dragons and stuff for years - and loved it!

I'm a big believer in pushing things too far and forcing people to pull you back.

I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!

My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.

The only thing I insist that everybody do is there has to be a basketball court in every game I do, and - with one exception, I let them get away with it once - you can actually shoot a ball through the basket in every game I've made.

From a gameplay standpoint, I've said for years that hero, fiction, and tone have nothing to do with the idea that choices have consequences. And that's really what I'm interested in. I care about you showing how clever and creative you are.

The reality, for me at least, is that the finest recreation of a paper game, played on computer, pales in comparison with the actual, face-to-face experience.

The Junction Point journey is over. To all those who've asked, or want to ask, I'm sad but excited for the future.

The fact is most computer roleplaying games that offer a zillion highly specialized skills end up with nine-tenths of a zillion skills that every player quickly realizes aren't worth the experience points to buy.

I was amazed at how the life of a freelancer differed from running a remote studio for another company. I thought I knew what I was doing in 2004 when I left Eidos because I had run Ion Storm Austin, which was my own independent studio. I had run a business unit inside Origin, but being part of a startup is crazy.

Third-person camera is way harder than I even imagined it could be. It is the hardest problem in video game development. Everybody gets it wrong. It's just a question of how close to right do you get it.

I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question.

I've got friends who are literally working alone on indie games that have no prospect of profit or commercial success. I've got guys working on iPhone games.

I've done a pretty good job of hitting 18-34-year-old males, and not such a good job of reaching kids. Disney has done a great job of reaching kids, but maybe not the 18-34-year-olds. I figure I can learn a lot from Disney, and maybe, I don't know, they can learn a lot from me.

I have been the last space marine between earth and an alien invasion. I really just don't need to go there anymore.

Used games allow more people, specifically younger people, to become game fans because of the lower price point.

We set up a situation and let you interact with it and see the consequences of your choice. That's what gaming does.

The reason our games generate so much revenue is because we're stupid enough to charge $60 for a box or $50 for a download or something. You need used games because most people can't afford those prices.

I have never been assigned a game, I have never made a game I didn't want to make. I've never done anything just to make somebody some money.

I don't even make multiplayer games much, so dealing with multiple characters is something new for me - or, rather, something I've had to recall from my days as a roleplaying adventure designer where the party was everything!

I used to teach animation history classes at the University of Texas, and I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons. I just love cartoons.

I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.

I think there's always room for more innovation and new things.

People perceive games as being for kids, and I think that perception is going to change. Time is going to take care of that. I mean, we've already won. Games have won; it's inevitable.

When you're dealing with a new platform, the real trick is just getting the game running.

Unfortunately, the rights to 'System Shock' trademark and copyright are both up in the air.

We live in a world of virtual goods where none of us own the 0s and 1s. What are you going to do?

Half-Life is the finest implementation of a game on rails anybody has ever done

I'm sad but excited for the future.

I make M-rated games for adults, you know, with guys wearing sunglasses at night and trench coats.

If we're going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be.

I have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords.

My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.

I think plenty of games - from 'Thief' to 'Zelda' - have shown that sneaking around can be fun.

I've loved cartoons all along. Most people outgrow that when they hit 10 or 12, I guess, but I never did. I'm not sure why.

We're not going to do a Facebook game aimed at 35-year old women about farming.

I remember on Deus Ex there was one programmer - Alex Durand, a guy who still works for us - he decided he was going to get through the game without ever using a weapon. I would never think to do that. And that's fine.

The Disney archives, it's 84 years of history. The one way in which I feel I'm a kindred spirit with Walt Disney is that neither one of us ever throws anything away. He never threw anything away.

In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.

Oswald is an interesting character. Disney lost the rights to him in 1928 to Universal, who was distributing the cartoons and basically handed him over to Walter Lantz.

Everyone at Junction Point has been inspired by the creative folks at Pixar and Disney Feature Animation to make 'entertainment for everyone.'

I was an independent developer and started Junction Point in January of 2005.

I said to myself as Junction Point embarked on the Epic Mickey journey that, worst case, we'd be 'a footnote in Disney history.' Looking back on it, I think we did far better than that.

Whatever adults don't understand, because they didn't grow up with it, is the thing they're going to be afraid of and try to legislate out of existence. It happened with videogames, it happened with television, it happened with pinball parlours and rock and roll.

Kids, adults, men, women, everybody has a relationship with Mickey Mouse.

For me, the cool thing is doing things that could only be done in gaming.

Gamers are everywhere, coming in all ages and genders, and developers have grown up, too.

Seriously, I don't know if people would really tell you this. But in my dream world, the people who work for you would say, 'Wow, I didn't know I could do that until I started working with that guy.'

Gamers both demand and deserve novelty. They need something new. As a game developer, one of my rules is there will be at least one thing in every game that I worked on that no one on the planet has seen before.

I would love to take 'Ultimata Underworld' and literally update the graphics.

Before I got into electronic games, I was making table-top games.

Finney is about the best writer of time travel stories ever, and I adore time travel stories - have to make a time travel game someday!

I want content that is relevant to my life, that is relevant to me, that is set in the real world.

The concept of emergent gameplay is really exciting. That's when players are really crafting their own experience. So if you're clever and creative, you can do things that even developers of the game didn't know were possible.

As the story unfolded, the cast of characters changed to match it.

Creating a really believable world is just insanely hard

Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while

Good stories are constructed, not found,

I remember having some problems with [the Deus Ex theme] when I first heard it and I was trying to figure out how to tell [Alex Brandon] I wanted changes. But then I noticed that I couldn't get it out of my mind. I was whistling or humming it to myself all the time. So I just kept my mouth shut and let it be. I think it's a highly addictive tune

I'm sure a lot of the hardcore folks are going to be up in arms and I'm really looking forward to getting into that discussion with them. I don't believe I'm compromising on my gameplay ideals at all. [But] any artist who doesn't want his or her work in front of the largest audience possible is nuts.

Ultimately, all I wanted was for players to feel like they were in the real world. I wanted them to be able to apply real world common sense to the problems confronting them, and I thought recreating real world locations would encourage that kind of thinking. There's also just a real power, a real thrill, when you fire up a game and see a place you've been or want to go, and then get to do all the stuff you WANT to do there but know you'll get arrested if you try! If that isn't the stuff of fantasy - far more than exploring some goofy dwarven mine or alien spaceship - I don't know what is!