Games That Define Developers

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete is art director on Deus Ex: Human Revolution at Eidos Montreal.

"If I had to pick one, just for sheer feeling and narrative, it would have to be Out of This World. In Europe it was called Another World.

"It was so elegant. There were very few things you could do, yet it allowed you to do so much. The narrative was so tightly intertwined with how you played and how you evolved. For the time it was beautiful.

"Also, the fact it's one guy all by himself. Your companion, the alien, he just runs, but you end up liking him and developing affection for him. It was emotional, like very few games are. It was almost perfectly put together."

Matt Southern is the creative lead on the MotorStorm series at UK-based Evolution Studios.

"In the genre I work in the biggest influence of all time is unquestionably OutRun.

"I can still remember seeing it in the flesh for the first time in an arcade in Spain when I was 14. Its perception of depth and speed and the fact it was so damn cool – racing a Ferrari with a hot girl next to you in the sun...

"I'll never forget the first time I played it. The music was incredible. The graphics at the time were incredible. One of those little voices in my head said, 'This is going to be something very special and important.'"

Dr. Ray Muzyka is one of the co-founders of BioWare.

"I'd go way back to 1979, 1980. It was on an Apple II – not an Apple II E or a II Plus, a II, with the lowest memory you could get, 16k or something, and it had a cassette tape drive, it didn't have even a disc drive or a hard drive. That was in grade six or something. My science teacher said, 'Hey, I think you'll like this, you should check this out,' because he knew I was into technology and board games.

"It was Pirate Cove by Scott Adams. It was a text adventure game. It took three tries, each about three minutes, to load this cassette tape – the old squealing sound. The first two failed. I was ready to give up, and he said, 'No, trust me, you'll like it once it loads.' I played it, and in the first couple of minutes I was completely in love with videogames. I'd played some arcade games before that, but this was the first PC-based experience. It was just awesome, and it captured my imagination.

"You had to visualise everything in your head. You were on an island. You could type in two word sentences. Those games spawned the RPGs and adventure games that followed. Everything else evolved from there.

"That was the starting point for everything I did from that point on. That's why videogames are my main hobby."

Dr. Greg Zeschuk is also a co-founder of BioWare.

"There's this game called Dogfight on the Apple II Plus. You had a single screen, it had helicopters and planes, and you had left, right and shoot. We literally would have eight or 10 people play this game, and you'd just put your arm on this computer, seeing the screen through this forest of heads.

"We spent the whole summer playing, changing seats and hot swapping. It was our very first multiplayer experience. I look at that and go, 'Wow, that was remarkable,' because literally the amount of pain we would go through to play this every day, all summer. When you played this you realised how incredibly compelling that play experience was in a group of people.

"That was very powerful. It maybe didn't have as much of an impact, because we hit a point at BioWare where we didn't do as much multiplayer, but then we came back to it with co-op experiences. But obviously Star Wars is a big multiplayer game. That's always been one of our passions, funnily enough. We're known for RPGs, but Baldur's Gate was multiplayer and Neverwinter Nights was basically an offline MMO."

Martin Hollis is the founder of Zoonami and was the designer of the original GoldenEye 007.

"To a degree this is a stock answer, but it certainly has had a big impression on me and it's still true: PaRappa the Rapper, which I saw in 1999.

"I completely fell in love with it. I will always love music games because of PaRappa the Rapper. The naivety of the visuals opened my eyes to the fact that you don't need to chase reality all the time. It isn't necessarily the right answer. Because of that, it's had a huge influence on me."

Chris Hecker is a former technology fellow at Sims developer Maxis and creator of SpyParty.

"It would have to be Go. Go is the most beautiful game ever made. The saying about Go is, when the space aliens come down and they land on earth and we're trying to communicate with them and then we show them Go, they're like, 'Oh yeah, we have that.' For me it's inspirational because it shows the fractal complexity that can come from really simple rules, which is just amazing depth and beauty.

"It has an incredible handicapping system, with the ability to have players at different skill levels both have compelling games in the same world and space. It's aesthetically beautiful, with the stones. The graphics are good!"