Patrick Hickey Jr. on his interviews with classic video game developers

It's more than just fun and games, Patrick Hickey Jr. will tell you.

For “The Minds Behind the Games,” the journalism professor and gaming reporter interviewed more than 30 developers behind classic video games that shaped the industry. The book runs the gamut of games and offers personal accounts of video game development that reveal the struggles that go into creating them.

Q: Tell me why you decided to write a book about video games from the programmers' perspective?

A: I thought that there were too many video game books that were written from the point of view of a researcher. But all of these books didn't feature direct quotations from the creator. They're not as in-depth and behind the scenes as I think hardcore gamers would like them to be or even a casual reader that knows nothing about the video game industry.

So I decided to go out and find a lot of these people and talk about how the game affected their life, and there's a lot of crazy stories in there. People don't necessarily equate that type of struggle to video games, and they think it's all fun and games, but there's so much humanity and so much passion and so much perseverance behind the creation of a videogame, and it's almost more so than any piece of art that you could think of. So I wanted to really capture that.

Q: You didn't just capture the stories behind the video games that were considered financial success but also those that were flops. Why?

A: I wanted to capture some of the successes as well as some of the failures because I feel they all had an impact one way or another on the industry. Two of the biggest failures in the history are featured in this book.

“Night Trap” is considered one of the worst games of all time, but it's basically because the game should've came out in 1985 or 1986, when it would have been completely state of the art. Instead, it came out in 1992, and by then no one cared about it. And the game had such a bad reputation that one of the creators of the game's girlfriend left him. And he was almost like blacklisted from the industry. So he wanted to make something so cute to follow up “Night Trap” so no one would ever remember it. He ended up creating “Cats and Dogs,” which is like the first pet simulator. I think that's a story that needs to be told.

In terms of “E.T.,” “E.T's” failure isn't just the failure of the game, but it also played a huge part in Atari's failure as a company. They really hurt their best programmer at the time, Howard Scott Warshaw.

This is a guy who made two games that sold over a million copies. He was a complete rock star. And even though “E.T.” was considered a huge failure, it still sold over a million copies so the guy has the best range of any video game developer of all time.

Q: What are some misconceptions you think people have about the video game development process?

A: We think of the creation of video games as someone saying like, “Oh, oh, I have an idea. And it's going to be this.” And then the game gets made like that. That's absolutely not how it happens. Sure, there may be that light bulb moment. But the games end up going through a process of fine-tuning with what works, changing what doesn't work.

The biggest problem with “E.T.” was, Howard Scott Warshaw said, all the things that he envisioned for the game ... Once you have that idea to make something, you do it, but then if you don't have those little moments where you're like, “If I could do this there, it would be so much better,” if you don't have an opportunity ... to fine-tune and to playtest, then your game ends up as like complete garbage.