At this year’s Paris GDC Chris Kline, the lead programmer at 2K who worked on BioShock, talks about how the game should have failed. As we all know the game didn’t fail, but Chris goes on to explain that the mistakes and corrections made along the way are the reason the game turned out so […]

At this year’s Paris GDC Chris Kline, the lead programmer at 2K who worked on BioShock, speaks about how the game should have failed. As we all know the game didn’t fail, but Chris goes on to explain that the mistakes and corrections made along the way are the reason the game turned out so well in the end.

He says they started off by making a sequel to System Shock, since they had most of that done already. Then decided to scrap that and focus on making AI ecology and sweet looking monster models. After putting out a demo, they realized that even though the industry liked it, the end users seemed less than thrilled. So they came up with the idea of marketing it as a shooter, which sparked the interests of the gaming masses. After a few more mistakes they ended up with a great game.

Kline said, “Some people think that constantly messing up, and pushing dates isn’t a good way to make a game, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to make a good game.”

So that’s how you make a good game, I guess the guys working on Spore knew this already.

Via [crunchgear]

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Financial Times has probably the most in-depth Steve Ballmer interview in a while for Bill Gates’ retirement celebration. A lot of it is spent on his obsession with search. But there are some savory sprinkles in the mix. Like, unless the board tosses him, we’ve got nine more years of shouty, sweaty Photoshops to look forward to.

I’m kind of worried that he states not once, but twice, that Microsoft’s key trait is persistence: “I’d call it our long term approach, which is a combination of taking on bold challenges, being patient, being persistent, being relentless.” But, hypothetically, what if you’re persistently getting it wrong?

I would like to see agility more than persistence. Of course huge companies can be persistent—inertia can be a kind of persistence. He also scrubs on Google for doing basically one thing, and just doing it really well:

“I mean, they have a gestalt, but gestalt is gestalt. Let’s speak about the reality. The reality is one product makes 98 percent of all of their money, search. Oh, they’ve two products, AdWords and AdSense. They have two products, both search-based, that make all of their money, and it hasn’t changed a lot in five years.”

Of course, Google does other stuff, but it’s an interesting philosophical question: Is it superior to do a zillion different things—a couple of them fairly well, some good, and a lot not so fantastic—or to do just a few really great things? [Financial Times, Thanks Jimmy]

Via [Gizmodo]

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“Yesterday up in the air I snapped a sat that wasn’t there”— so might photographer Trevor Paglen say about his show at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum. It’s a series of pics of 189 secret satellites: the ones that officially “don’t exist.” Dubbed The Other Night Sky the photos are time-lapse images of the snoop-sats moving through the night sky, made with a custom star-tracker. Apparently it’s his attempt to draw similarities between government secrecy and Galileo’s historic tangles with the Catholic church. Found with the help of an amateur astronomer, each photo is of a named spy sat, and they’re quietly beautiful—if you can forget the eerie spying aspect. The show runs until September 14. [Wired]

Via [Gizmodo]

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