I'm interested in reading interviews of founders of great computer games. Besides "Masters of Doom", are there any other books?<p>I'd love to read things on the founding of Wow / Lineage / Everquest; the start of Duke Nukem / Unreal / Halo / Mario; ... or anything else along those lines.<p>Book preferred, but list of interviews cool too.<p>Thanks!
IMHO, gaming industry is not very lucrative as a whole. As a rule, releasing a succesful project doesn't guarantee that you willl have funds for the next one. Therefore, teams developing games can hardly be called startups.<p>Anyways, I think you are better off collecting and reading individual articles in specialized press i.e. Gamasutra, Kotaku etc. If you want to read about the making of past titles, seek postmortems.<p>As far as I can understand it, gaming industry and innovation went searate ways. You are either (a) making multimillion-dollar blockbusters and bound by capitalists and IP holders, or (b) try to do whatever you want with your friends with nearly zero chance to be noticed by the industry or consumers.<p>There is a certain line of thought about computer games (here we're talking variant b, or underground): Games are a new art form in its infancy. Really, think about it: game can do (kind of) what music and cinema can, and more: it is interactive! As other art forms, it is looked down at and tries to copy other, more recognized art forms (as cinema was looked down upon compared to theater and tried to imitate it). Therefore, adherents of this line of thought say, we must experiment and we should find expressive means unique to such art form as games. If you want to learn abouut this approach, I suggest you start here: <a href="http://tale-of-tales.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tale-of-tales.com/</a> it's home of Tale of Tales, Belgian developer of art games. The site is rich in content and contains many links to other like-minded sites.
I've only read a bit of this book so far but it seems pretty neat -<p>Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time<p><a href="http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/2214" rel="nofollow">http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/2214</a><p>It's not exactly interviews of founders; they don't really focus on the people who made the games per se. But it talks about how the various games were created, and it's pretty interesting.