“Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.” ImaginationMythologyGamingVideo GamesArcadesRussell MarshHuman ExpressionJoystickBathysphereCode Breaking ApparatusMilitary Cryptography Book:You Source: You
“None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, 'How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?' and 'If you added a button to Pac-Man, what would you want it to do?' Conundrums like 'How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair?” ButtonsEsotericMarioPride And PrejudiceVideo GamesJob InterviewSuper MarioRussell MarshPac ManEsoteric Thought Experiments Book:You Source: You
“Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.” HeroinInteractiveVideo GamesLittle Red Riding HoodRussell MarshThrough The WoodsHeroin And Only HeroinNot My StoryOver The River Book:You Source: You
