Warren Spector
Bio: I began my career in 1983 in tabletop games with Steve Jackson Games and TSR. I moved into video games in 1989 where I worked at Origin/Electronic Arts and, later, Looking Glass, Ion Storm/Eidos where he directed Deus Ex and others. In 2004 I started Junction Point Studios, later acquired by the Walt Disney Company. After 3 years teaching game development at The University of Texas, I joined Otherside Entertainment as Chief Creative Officer and Game Director. I've been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Columbia College of Chicago, the Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement award at the Game Developers Conference and the Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Fun and Serious Games Conference.
Gaming the System 
I just want to leave a comment to Deus Ex (1). I played it several times and always found something new. Especially political information. The conspiracy theory behind the game is quite an old one and still seems to be the actual political roadmap for this planet.
From the false flag attack (Liberty statue/9-11) to the Antiterror measures and so on. The actual political happenings, up to ww3 beginning in russia (or the end of the second ww, whatever u might think about it) or the spreading risk of the Ebola virus are leading straight into that “fiction” you made a game of.
Maybe you can share a thought or two on that because this ain’t no fiction no more.
Deus Ex 1 really is an epic game. Thank you for that as the main head behind it.
Just wanted to share this.
Kind regards and take care
Jan
epic mickey on youtube
500 000 VIDEOS
more than 20 millions of views
Hello, I have read you speak against the tendency to attribute the creation of a game to one person. It happens to films too, where the director is credited for the whole work.
It is not correct at all theoretically, whereas substantially so. Proof is you may play many games from an “author”, watch many films from a “director” and feel and see they are a work by that author.
regards
Hello good sir,
I was wondering if you could settle a bet a friend and I have? We were listening to an interview you gave where they asked for your “dream game” and you said one of them was a simulated city block with a hotel and characters that had back stories. My friend says that you would have wanted it to be more like a murder mystery set in the 1960s but I speculated that it would be very modern if not futuristic with it’s own internal currency and the option to get to know the various NPCs. Could you please go in more detail what it was going to be about?
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the city block game, but I’ve never actually settled on a specific time period. My mind always goes to the current day, but that brings with it a lot of questions or, more precisely, requires us to simulate a lot of things that are somewhere between hard and impossible to do.
Computers, televisions, even telephones – everyone knows how they work and in a deeply simulated game, players have a right to expect them to work the way they do in the real world.
That leads me to the future, where you can just say “Well, that’s not how TVs work in the future… ditto for computers, telephones and a host of other things. Frankly, though, that feels like a cop-out to me.
So in my dream world, the game would be set in the 1940s and be kind of noir-ish. That leaves us with many – even most – of the same problems the modern day would give us, but I think it’d be incredibly cool. And despite the difficulty of simulating things that are hard to impossible, that’s half the reason to try something. If you already know how to do something that probably means you or someone else has already done it. And how boring is that?…
Ah nice, gives me of Dishonored vibes with a LA Noire feel and Fallout computers. That would be a pretty interesting era that games have yet to tap into (that’s not about the war) and games like Subnautica have shown us they can be successful without violence.
My dad uses the term “cop-out” in this context too lol, but yeah absolutely you gotta bring something new to the table. That’s the thing about humanity, we need exploration and development.
I’ve been toying with an idea for video game where it would simulate a country and government resources with a Sims/Age of Empires/Civilization type time element so everyone could take a crack at it, then they use data analytics to come up with real world solutions.
Thank you so much on replying to this post It was a very nice surprise! (And thank you for making my all-time favorite game 😉
Have a Merry Christmas!!! 🎄
Epic mickey 2 is my childhood and i can’t dead happy without the 3rd chapter… Do you know anything about it? Don’t you want to restart working at it? Because it’s the best Disney game. Disney mobile games and the others sucks . Epic Mickey is the best. The drawings, the story, all was perfect and i can’t wait the 3rd chapter get out…
Good luck. If you need economic help i’ll try to help you with this project because i really care.
Hi Mr. Spector.
This probably seems really random, but I was thinking about it lately. I just wanted to thank you for creating Epic Mickey and that whole universe because it inspired me in so many ways as a child. I loved Disney so much and to see it in a dark way, which was also something I was interested in, really meant a lot to me. It inspired me so much that I ended up working at Disney World for seven years. It was a really great time, while it lasted (I was laid off because of Covid), but I don’t know if I would’ve had the wherewithal to do it if I hadn’t been inspired like that.
I’m not sure if you check the site or will ever even see this, but I just wanted to let you know what an impact you had on me. There’s no other way to say it, it really really sucks that you were not able to make the rest of the epic Mickey series that you had planned. (I find myself digging out my Wii and replaying Epic Mickey every couple years). But I know you used your talents and ideas and put those into other games that were probably even better. My boyfriend is a computer engineer (and I an artist/actor) that has been talking to me about creating a video game and I just wanted you to know that your creativity inspires me to no end.
Thank you for doing what you do, just know that it doesn’t go unnoticed.
Lots of love, —Julia