Austin Grossman on story

This is worth a read; Austin's a dood, he carries around a little notebook and hand-writes out his books, the debut of which is causing a ruckus.

"The video game story-development process is incredibly broken," says Austin Grossman, shaking his bald head and looking out the window of a tiny cafe near the University of California at Berkeley campus.

He speaks from experience: Grossman helped design almost a dozen critically acclaimed video games, including Looking Glass Studios' System Shock, cyberpunk fave Deus Ex and the 2006 "reboot" of the Tomb Raider franchise, Tomb Raider: Legend.

It's so true. Beautiful graphics do not a game make. This bit caught my eye too:

Still, sometimes he dreams of making video games from the Victorian novels he studies as a graduate student, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "You could do it Grand Theft Auto-style, running around the city jacking coaches and trampling kids," he muses. The whole point, he says, would be to experiment. That's just what he hopes to do when he returns from the archaic world of print and goes digital again.

I'd play that.

Comments

[kim]

...and his book is good too! I'm 4 chapters in and loving it.

[Justin Hall]

I loved the jacking coaches and robbing kids!