Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…So on the video game side, when did you first fall in love with video games? I’ve had a funny relationship with games because my real aspiration has always been to program cool stuff. And I get more enjoyment out of programming than anything else in the world. And so my first really two formative experience with games were playing this game called Adventure for the Atari 2,600. It was like you move this dot around the screen and picked up objects like swords and fought dragons and invaded castles and solved puzzles. Very, very simple iconic stuff rather than realistic graphics. And then the other game that I really got immersed in was Zork, which was a text adventure game. It would tell you where you are and what you see and you type in commands like go north or pick up sword or open door and explore a world that way. So the game didn’t have any graphics, but in your mind you had this elaborate picture of what you were seeing there, and it really brought in [inaudible 00:16:09] inspired imagination more than other things. And playing those games led me to go off and want to learn to program everything that I saw there. And that drove a lot of my programming. I learned how to move a player around the screen. I learned how to build a design tool so I could build castles and save them off and then play them in a game. And I realized there was a separation between the tools that you use to build a game and the game itself, and that the more powerful tools you had, the more creativity you could unleash in yourself or others. And I learned all the programming techniques that supported games, how to parse text, pick up sword and go north. How do you make that sentence into an actual series of commands on the computer? And that was really, really exciting. I have to say, until the time that Fortnite came out, I played video games primarily to learn what they were doing, so that I could go off and do that myself. I’d sit down when Wolfenstein came out and then Doom came out. I’d go through it and look at it Pixel by Pixel, I’d move the mouse very slightly and look exactly what was happening to figure out. That’s funny. That’s great.…

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