" "After that realization about the web, I felt really idiotic. It forced me to be in the mindset of "Everything I do from now on needs to be thought through ca

" "After that realization about the web, I felt really idiotic. It forced me to be in the mindset of "Everything I do from now on needs to be thought through carefully." With every major technical problem, I didn't just look at "What is the problem I'm trying to solve?", but I took a much bigger perspective: "How can we really change the game and win this?" When it came to developing Unreal -- I think we started that in 1994 -- James Schmalz was writing a solo assembly language 3D game with a dragon flying over a terrain, kind of a Magic Carpet knock-off. And I was tasked with writing the editor for it. But I really thought that through in a huge amount of depth in advance -- you know, looking at what Quake did and Doom did: they had this little crappy editor with a very advanced game engine behind it. Completely separate programs. I thought it through in a whole lot of detail, and I thought that content development was really the essential ingredient in all of that. It was important to spend even more effort on the editor and tools than the actual game itself, just to empower the artists to make a great game. So we came up with this editor-centric approach to game development, where you had this integrated editor that used the game engine for real-time display of everything. Real-time editing of everything, and all of that. And that came from really methodically thinking through the problem of "What do you really do, and how do I not miss the point in this revolution?" " Inspiring!