Tim Sweeney: preference

Transcript context

…So take me there in the early 90s, so you launched Epic Games in 1991, so the writing of your first big video game ZZT, what was it like? What was the technical challenges? What were the psychological challenges of building that? It was a funny project because I didn’t start out to build a video game. I’d just moved from an Apple II, so my brother bought my family an Apple II right after I’d visit him in California. So I’ve been programming on that for a few years, learned a lot of techniques, but weren’t many Apple II users around still by the time that cycle came to an end. [inaudible 00:17:56] so I’d just gotten an IBM PC of my own and was learning to program and I realized I needed a text editor. So I started writing a text editor. A text editor is a program to edit text files. You have logic to move the cursor around and let people type things and backspace and delete and do all of those mundane actions. And one night I’d finished it up and I was like, well, okay, I have a text editor, but this is pretty boring. And so I made the cursor into a smiley face character and I had the different characters you could place in this document perform different gameplay actions. Some would be walls and some would kill you, and some would be moving objects that could fly around the screen. And so this text editor I made evolved into a little game editor. So I was building these levels for a game. And I put a lot of time into building an editor and a primitive set of objects, about 20 or 30 different objects. Enough to build a really cool and compelling game, but not so many that players would lose track of what they’re seeing. I started off just building different game levels. The idea is you’d be on a series of board, they’d be connected by going north [inaudible 00:18:59], the end of the current board would take you to a new one if it was open or maybe it was blocked and then you couldn’t go there. I built this [inaudible 00:19:05] game world around that, and this was the game that became ZZT and I was having fun with it, building it and playing it, but I didn’t know if it would really work. So I did this experiment. I’d started inviting neighbors over. Some adults, some kids of all different ages and I sat them down in front of it and say it, like, here’s the game I made, figure it out. And I had to force myself not to tell them what they need to do because I really wanted to learn if they were able to discover it all for themselves. Today we would call this a user experience test, and there’s a whole field of research around user experience research, but back then it was just inviting some kids over to play the game. I took notes about what they got stuck on and what they enjoyed and where they felt bored and just iteratively polished the game until I felt it was good then and I put it out and released it on, well, this was before the internet, so there were bulletin boards. I uploaded it to a bunch of local bulletin boards, and from there it started spreading because the way to build up cred for bulletin board users was to upload new files and to claim that, hey, I was the first that brought this to you. bulletin boards, and from there it started spreading because the way to build up cred for bulletin board users was to upload new files and to claim that, hey, I was the first that brought this to you. And so there was a natural tendency of the software to spread. And I decided to use the shareware model, so I didn’t just build this one game. I built a trilogy of three games. And I released the first one for free and I said, hey, if you like this, buy the two sequels. And I included my parents’ mailing address and said, send us $30 and you can get the sequels to this game. And the checks started coming in within a few days and I was getting three or four orders a day. I was making a hundred dollars a day. I’m like, woo, I’m rich. Because being a 20-year-old, that was a pretty big deal.…

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