42 Quotes by Jason Schreier

Making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake or trying to run a train as someone else is laying down track as you go...

Unraveling the threads of a good game story is like solving a well-crafted puzzle. After a lengthy, sometimes difficult journey, the pieces click into place, and you're rewarded with the satisfying payoff of a job well done.

Among video game developers, it's called 'crunch': a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family and even food.

I think the most insidious version of crunch is when you say, 'Hey, I'm working for this triple-A video game; I personally want it to be as good as possible, so I'm going to stay tonight until 10 P.M. to finish this feature.'

I think there's this tradition of a culture of NDAs that has spanned all the way back to the '70s and '80s when game developers where very paranoid about cloning and people copying one another's ideas and business sabotage.

I've always been in favor of drastic transparency, radical transparency.

Like any good RPG, 'Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning' is adept at digging its claws into that part of your brain that just loves accomplishing things.

It's easy to think of a role-playing game as an amalgamation of two main components, narrative and gameplay, jammed together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes, they fit together nicely; other times, they're as awkward and frustrating as that one weirdly-shaped 'Tetris' block that always falls into the gap where you need an L.

Modern video games like 'Mass Effect' and 'Uncharted' cost tens of millions of dollars and require the labor of hundreds of people, who can each work 80- or even 100-hour weeks.