Tony Zurovec · Director of the Persistent Universe

To me, a lot of that comes, again, from when I grew up: the classic games of the 70s and 80s. What I actually like about them, even to this day, is that they were what I would call pure. By that I mean they didn't have the computing horsepower to do anything particularly sophisticated in terms of their execution. But there are many games I've referenced in the past, whether it's the Ultimas that I love; Crusader, which was largely, I always used to say, inspired by Muse Software's Castle Wolfenstein; Loose Cannon, which was inspired by Steve Jackson's Autoduel. There are so many games from back then where you could see the potential, but the technology wasn't sufficient to do the ideas justice. And it's not that you look back at those ideas and just want to pull them and integrate them into your game. It's that, I think, having played so many of those types of games, I now look at things from a very mechanical point of view. You look at things in terms of the raw components, which is largely all those games had. They gave you some token graphics, but you really had to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. When I look at a game nowadays, the visuals and that type of stuff come second for me. It's the underlying skeleton of the game. It's making sure that the balance is proper. It's making sure that you've got all of these parts and counterparts set up properly, because that's what drives the whole process forward. And so if you've gotten yourself used to thinking about problems in that fashion, then a lot of this just comes naturally.