Way of the Rodent has a new interview up with Eugene Jarvis (creator of Defender/Robotron/Crusin' USA). Relatively short, but interesting, he discusses his thinking behind his games, and gaming in general. Budding game designers take note, while his comments on game design may seem obvious, there are quite a few in the industry who simply ignore them. Some examples:

Designing videogames is all ABOUT limitation. It’s not about doing everything that’s possible, just because you can. It’s about finding some small subset of something that’s FUN and building on that.

We designed all the graphics and animation (for Robotron) in about two weeks, because there wasn’t much technology to play with. Today, you’re never really finished with your graphics because there’s so many options – reflectivity, alpha-shading, shattering systems… By the time you have the luxury of being able to focus on your gameplay, the deadline is looming. Then, we spent four out of the six months of Robotron’s development PLAYING the thing.

In PC and console games in particular, I hate it when I just can’t figure out what the game IS. It’s like the designer never really found out what was fun about the design and just tried to give the player lots of fancy options – you can drive backwards, have a camera up your exhaust pipe, lots of different kinds of gravity, whatever. If feels like they couldn’t quite find the point of the game and so they’re asking the player to design it for them. It’s as if they’re just trying to check as many boxes as possible. They think that if it takes a player two years to experience all of the options, then it’ll be two years before he figures out that it’s a bad game.