Designer Notes 29: Steve Gaynor - Part 1

[Soren Johnson]

In this episode, Soren interviews Steve Gaynor, co-founder of The Fullbright Company and best known for his work on BioShock 2, Minerva’s Den, and Gone Home. They discuss how bad Sierra adventure design could be, why he decided to make video games instead of comics, and about that time he interviewed Ken Levine and Tim Schafer for his zine.

 

Games discussed: Godzilla, Snarfs, Space Quest 4, Police Quest 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Marc Ecko Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate, Bioshock, System Shock 2, S.W.A.T. 4, Half-Life, Bioshock 2

 

https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/steve-gaynor-part-1

[Salacious Snake]

This was a good listen. I'm looking forward to part 2!

 

It was fun hearing mention of the canceled Star Trek Online. I was bummed about that one; I was super deep in the forum community. Since there are a lot of Lucasarts fans here, it may be interesting to note that Mike Stemmle was the story lead, and I totally bugged him about games on that forum.

 

I think it was a more ambitious game than the one Cryptic made, which isn't a knock on that one. Like, it may have been overly ambitious. At least I ended up with this little memento (by way of my girlfriend at the time meeting Perpetual people at a job fair):

 

[Akalabeth]

I think this guy's talk about QA is pretty relatable in that playing games that are knock-offs of other games really illustrates some of the things that makes the superior game superior.  On Console I played all of the Gears of War games but afterwards played other games like Inversion, Binary Domain and Quantum Theory-  and while those latter three games had some good stuff in them, some things they were missing like Gears of War's reload mechanic really drove home how great that mechanic is because in the other games as your guy reloads you're just sitting there doing nothing at all for a second whereas in Gears you can stay engaged and gain a buff.