D.I.C.E. Red Carpet 2014
It’s rare to get a collection of some of the best and brightest names in gaming under one roof, but that’s exactly what happened at the 2014 D.I.C.E. Summit this year in Las Vegas.
One of the themes of this year’s Summit was how many game developers feel we are in a Golden Age of Gaming now, especially with the launch of new-gen hardware. So, taking advantage of this rare opportunity, I decided to ask these gaming personalities to use this time to reflect back and let me know their favorite part of the last generation of consoles.
Freddie Wong (Founder, Rocketjump)
Not doing social integration into everything. Also, I appreciate the fact that you could get a harddrive for your Xbox 360 and just plug it in. None of this weird, hacky, SSD crap. Just pop in a harddrive or USB stick. Oh! And an interface that made sense! I have no idea what’s going on with the Xbox One interface.
Richard Hilleman (Chief Creative Director, Electronic Arts)
The Wii. What I love about the Wii, and it represented a small moment in time, but what it did was it got people playing on couches together again and I think that’s gaming at its absolute best—when there are four of us playing something on a couch together. The game is actually between us, the screen is a wonderful thing and if I do a great game I’m very proud of it, but what you’re going to remember most is the interaction you had with the person next to you on that couch and it’ll be a part of your context forever. Pretty rich stuff.
Ted Price (President, Insomniac Games)
The experimentation with online was one of my favorite aspects. I’ll just give an example. PlayStation Plus was a really, really cool idea. I also think that what Xbox Live continued to do, expanding their service to players really made a big difference and sort of educated all of us, both in the development world and in the player world, about how fast online was changing the gaming environment.
Rami Ismail (Business Development, Vlambeer)
The general expanding of the devices that we play games on. Just look at mobile. It wasn’t even a thing when the Xbox 360 launched, there was no iPad, and there was no iPhone. This was all last gen essentially. So, just the diversification of the devices we play games on was exciting. But if I had to choose a game, Earth Defense Force 2017 because it’s a game about shooting buildings and giant ants and is just such a pure, weird game. It’s the B-movies of video games and we need more of that.
Warren Spector (Director, Denius-Sams Gaming Academy, University of Texas at Austin)
My favorite thing, to be honest, was the Wii. Just having a new controller to play with, the new gameplay opportunities that offered us. I mean, I got to make a game with Mickey Mouse that took advantage of that controller and just having a new challenge like that with new opportunities was my favorite thing about the last gen.
Jean Guesdon (Creative Director, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Ubisoft)
The realism. The graphic capacity for the last generation is something that really made a difference over the last seven years. Also, the online connectivity was just starting in the beginning of the generation. But the graphics and the power really unleashed the creativity.
Mark Turmell (Senior Creative Director, Zynga)
For me it has to be the rise of free-to-play. To actually have a game that you can download and install and test out for no cost to you was a game changer.
Neil Druckmann (Creative Director, Naughty Dog)
With the PS3, it felt like for the first time the technology wasn’t limiting us in creating the experience we wanted to create. More memory was awesome.
Bruce Straley (Game Director, Naughty Dog)
The Last of Us was pretty good. [Laughs] Actually, Neil [Druckmann] and I worked pretty close together on Uncharted 2 with the team at Naughty Dog and that was a really special moment and taking what we learned from that and then trying to build off of what we learned and applying it to The Last of Us, so my own personal evolution really.
Steve Gaynor (Co-Founder, Fullbright Company)
What makes this question difficult is the last generation was so long. The Xbox 360 came out in 2005. I bought one for the first Dead Rising. Now the third one has come out. But even just very recently, The Last of Us amazed me. And the first Bioshock was one of my favorite games of the generation. This was before I started working on Bioshock 2 and Infinite. I came into the franchise as a fan. As a fan it was one of the most incredible experiences I had in a game, period, never mind just the last generation. I feel like we’ve lived through some of the most immersive, surprising experiences games could deliver in the last generation. And I think we’ll be hard pressed to top it.
Matias Myllyrinne (CEO, Remedy Entertainment)
Honestly, for me, there are two contenders and this might sound a little silly, but just having Minecraft on the Xbox 360 was awesome. It was a family thing, playing with the kids and seeing them build these massive worlds. Sure, we had played on other platforms, but playing on the big screen and being able to share it with everyone was great. The second one for me has to be Battlefield 3. That was my multiplayer gaming obsession. There are other really great games, not least of which is GTAV, which finished off the generation with a bang with its scope and depth and fidelity.
Rex Crowle (Creative Lead, Media Molecule)
The PS3 for me, definitely. It was a really connected console and for the first time you could really play together whether it was on the couch or with everyone else around the world. It gave us the opportunity to make LittleBigPlanet and give everyone the chance to play and mess around.
Randy Pitchford (President/CEO, Gearbox Software)
This was such a long generation, so many great games. One of the things I loved was that franchises that existed before in the prior generation or even earlier reached new heights, like Grand Theft Auto. We also saw some great new franchises appear. The lifespan of the generation brought Gears of War and several iterations for example. And with Nintendo, I don’t think there was a swing that missed when it came to their first party franchises. Mobile entered the market. PC had a resurgence. The Indie scene has gotten huge with Papers, Please, Gone Home, and even Ridiculous Fishing, which I love. It’s so hard to sum up the generation. I think Ni No Kuni for the PS3 was my favorite game of 2013. And, of course, we had a good time with Borderlands, and a Brothers in Arms game, we made sure the world experienced Duke Nukem Forever, and we finally delivered our Aliens game. Man, what a time for us. I think we shipped like five or six titles last generation so what a time for Gearbox, right?
Palmer Luckey (Founder, Oculus VR)
User generated content has been amazing. You’ve never really seen that outside of niche things like Second Life before. I also loved Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii, as lame as that is. You know what happened? I didn’t buy a Wii. I didn’t want a Wii. Then Brawl came out and I drove to the store and immediately bought a Wii and four Wiimotes and the game. I said to myself that I have to play it with all my friends, so that was the most excited I probably got over something.
Patrick Hudson (President, Robot Entertainment)
It has to be the iPhone. It changed everything in gaming. So many of my peers who were making AAA-games forever are now all off in mobile games studios. Guys who worked on Age of Empires and Halo Wars are now making Words with Friends and are in the pockets of tens of millions of people worldwide and it’s unbelievable.
Lucas Pope (Developer, 3909 LLC)
Digital distribution because before that you used to have to find a publisher to sell your game. You had a developer and then you had to have a huge stack of money to press discs and put them in stores and in the last seven to eight years, digital distribution changed that whole dynamic so that I can make a game, by myself, in my room, and sell it to people and make money off of it. It also let the Indie scene blossom because you don’t need to find a buyer for your game before its done.
Nina Kristensen (Co-Founder & Chief Development Ninja, Ninja Theory)
I’m addicted to the mobile games that have emerged. I play on my phone all the time. Tower defense games are the bomb.
Tameem Antoniades (Co-Founder & Chief Creative Director, Ninja Theory)
For me, it was the maturity seen in games and game genres. The quality of games has improved more over the course of this generation than in previous generations. The quality of art, gameplay, and then with things like Steam, just opening it up to a whole new generation of gamers and new ways of playing games. It’s been awesome.
Todd Howard (Game Director, Bethesda Softworks)
I think we’d have to go back in time and realize that the last generation of consoles was coming out just as HD TVs were becoming popular. So, we can look back and say that was the HD generation, when things got really, really crisp and people started to look at games beyond them being a toy. They started looking more real to a general audience. You’d walk by someone playing FIFA and do a double-take to see if it was a real soccer game or not. All of those things that help bring the industry out of the notion that it was a toy-ish hobby to mass entertainment for lots of people. Then combine that mass entertainment with being on smartphones and the web, making it easy to obtain via price point or avenues of distribution, that’s what my memory of it is now.
Troy Baker (Voice Actor)
It’s hard, not only because it’s still fresh, but I really believe that what we did with The Last of Us was special. From a graphics standpoint, from a gameplay standpoint, they sucked every bit of juice out of it. I mean, we were eight years into the hardware cycle and the fact we were still able to surprise people is really impressive. If there was a swansong for the last gen, I think The Last of Us was a worthy one.