The book excerpt is fascinating. A nice read for sure.
I believe it is a very European perspective that LucasArts was _the_ adventure game company. Now it feels wild that while making Broken Sword no-one at Revolution was really that aware of Gabriel Knight, considering how famous that feels now. These kinds of perspectives are quite important to note down; our sense of (video game) history easily coalesces into a single narrative, and it can easily be dominated by the U.S. perspective.
The business and company politics and the discussion of the technical lead role, very interesting to read as a software developer fascinated by game development. Tony’s vision of being able to have a “prototype lab” on the side and to be “free of deadlines” etc … isn’t that the dream? Sounds a little optimistic, but I can also relate; I always wish I had more time to just experiment and improve things at my work without such constraints – it’s a challenge to secure time to do this, though it is very good to do for everyone, in the end.
Also wow, to move the office in the middle of a crunch to finish a game!
I’ve enqueued a bunch of the podcast episodes on my player’s playlist 🙂
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