Game designers on their craft

Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online, gives a GDC talk on how creativity works in practice. He treats it as a learnable process of recombining existing patterns and ideas rather than waiting for inspiration.

Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, gives a GDC talk on the psychology behind game design. He discusses how players perceive luck, randomness and winning, and what his teams learned from playtesting the Civilization games.

Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, gives a lecture on game design at the Computer History Museum in November 2003. He covers simulation design, using the computer as a modeling tool, and how players build a model of the system they are playing.

Shigeru Miyamoto delivers the keynote at the 1999 Game Developers Conference. He talks about how Nintendo approaches making games.

Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering, gives a GDC talk with twenty lessons from twenty years of designing the game. They cover how to design for players, with examples from the game.

Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, on how the medium shapes the message in game design. He starts from television, where commercial constraints shape what shows get made, and moves to free-to-play and micro-payment games and how their business model distorts design.

Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness, gives a talk titled Truth in Game Design from 2011. He argues for designing around the discovery of real truths about a system rather than inventing arbitrary rules, with ideas on how complex systems can give more back than the designer put in.

A GDC 2011 postmortem panel in which David Crane, designer of the Atari 2600 game Pitfall!, explains how it was made. He covers working within the tiny hardware limits and how so many screens were fitted into so little space, followed by audience Q&A.

A GDC 2017 postmortem of the original Civilization with its creators, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley. They tell the development history of the game, including the influence of Empire and design decisions such as fairness versus perceived fairness in randomness.

Jordan Mechner looks back on making Prince of Persia in a GDC postmortem. He covers how the classic platformer was designed and built in the late 1980s.

Eric Chahi gives a GDC Classic Game Postmortem on Another World, the 1991 game he created largely alone. He shows his rotoscoping setup and development tools, and explains his decision to use polygons.

John Romero and Tom Hall look back on the making of Doom in a GDC Classic Game Postmortem. They discuss how the id Software team designed and built the 1993 game.

David Brevik, who led the original Diablo, gives a GDC 2016 postmortem on how the game was made. He tells how it started as a turn-based dungeon crawl inspired by X-COM, how the switch to real-time combat changed everything, and how the small team became Blizzard North.

A GDC Classic Game Postmortem in which Fallout creator Tim Cain looks back on making the original Fallout. He covers the development story and the post-apocalyptic fiction that influenced the game.

Warren Spector gives a GDC Classic Game Postmortem of Deus Ex, the 2000 immersive sim from Ion Storm. He talks about how the team was organised, the questions he asks before starting a game project, and how the game got made.

The GDC 2018 postmortem of Ultima Online, given by members of the original team for the game's 20th anniversary. They tell candid stories about building one of the first big MMOs, including the origin of the shard model and how players broke or protested the systems they designed.

A long livestream event from the Video Game History Foundation in which Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island, talks about making the game. The session includes a look at the SCUMM scripting code behind the first game, which is edited and recompiled live.

RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester gives a GDC talk on how he designed the game as a story generator rather than a conventional game. He covers unconventional design methods, including how the simulation lets players read stories into events.

A /noclip interview with Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, about the game's origins, its enormous simulation depth and how it has been developed over many years. It stays at the level of game design and history rather than technical implementation.