DON DAGLOW
President & Creative Director, Daglow Entertainment
Don Daglow is a pioneer of the industry whose game design credits include the pre-industry PDP-10 mainframe computer games, Baseball (the first interactive sports game, 1971), Star Trek (1972), and Dungeon (the first computer RPG, 1975), as well as commercial titles Utopia (the first God game and first graphical sim, 1982), Intellivision World Series Baseball (the first game to use multiple camera angles, 1983), Earl Weaver Baseball (1987), Tony La Russa’s Ultimate Baseball (1991), and Neverwinter Nights on AOL (the first MMORPG with graphics, 1991). He’s also served as executive producer or producer on a long string of hits, including Adventure Construction Set (1985), Racing Destruction Set (1985), EA Sports’ NASCAR Racing games (1995), the first PC versions of Madden NFL Football (1996), and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). He founded long-standing game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988 and received a Technical Emmy® in 2008 for creating Neverwinter Nights. He was formerly the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Foundation, the charitable wing of the Academy.
On getting into the game industry:
I had been writing games as a hobby on the university mainframe through my college and grad school years, and then while I was a grad school instructor, teacher, and writer.
When Mattel started their in-house Intellivision game design team, they advertised on the radio for programmers who wanted to learn how to create video games. I’d never have thought of looking in the paper for a games job, but I heard the radio ad and called them. When I said, “I don’t have a computer science degree, but I’ve been programming games for the last nine years,” I think they thought I was making up stories because Pong had only been out for about five years at the time. Fortunately, it all worked out, and I was selected as one of the original five members of the Intellivision game design team at Mattel. As the team grew, I ended up being director of Intellivision game development.
On favorite games:
I’m going to focus on games that changed the design landscape in some way:
• Seven Cities of Gold, design by Dan Bunten and Ozark Softscape, published by EA, 1984: The game has only a handful of resources to manage and a gigantic map to explore for treasure. It is proof that a simple concept with few moving parts on a primitive machine with basic graphics can be compelling if the tuning of challenge, suspense, and reward is elegant and subtle.
• The original Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo, design by Shigeru Miyamoto, 1985: The game style has been the subject of endless variations, but this game to me is the foundation on which all the others are built. Just the right balance of eye-hand coordination, environmental and enemy challenges, hidden goodies, and ongoing positive reinforcement made this a game that adults and kids could both play and love.
• SimCity, design by Will Wright, published by Maxis, 1989: This game redefined what a computer game could be and was fun despite breaking many of the commonly accepted design commandments: It had no true opponents (apart from an occasional visit by Godzilla), a score with no clear methodology as to how you earned it, and no clear final goal so you could play for as long as you wanted. Will Wright persevered through repeated rejections before finding a publisher for one of the biggest hits in the history of the industry.
• John Madden Football for Sega Genesis, design by Scott Orr and Rich Hilleman, published by EA, 1992: The first console version of Madden Football created a monster franchise in the industry, but what made it shine initially was a beautifully tuned head-to-head gameplay mechanic that made playing your buddies an incredibly fun way to pass an afternoon.
• GTA III, 2001: The long-term success of the series has obscured all the innovations the designers introduced, even as later versions of GTA gained massive budgets and huge sprawling worlds. The concept of a 3D sandbox game with running AND driving gameplay was revolutionary in 2001, and they changed the way people look at audio with their use of radio stations. Major publishers had told us that mixing play styles like this was a deal killer because it doubled the budget and doubled the test time, but DMA and Rockstar did it anyway. They used stylized graphics for marketing the game in an era when everyone else was selling photorealism on the boxes. One qualifier to my admiration: They used over-the-top violence in the game to get negative publicity to drive sales, and this game is so great that IMHO the trick wasn’t necessary.
• Minecraft, 2009: Let’s see what made this game a certain failure: only one programmer, primitive blocky graphics, it’s easy to die in survival mode, it’s self-published by the programmer… How did it overcome all these negatives? By using simple gameplay to combine the best elements of computer games and Legos to create a world of almost infinite potential where you feel like it’s you, not the game, that imposes limits on what you can accomplish.
Advice to designers:
Enjoy the journey, not just the wrap party. I see many people enter our industry who are anxious to be the next Shigeru Miyamoto or Will Wright. Most well-known designers are the product of the special cases of their era, and rarely are they well known in later phases of industry history. For every Miyamoto and Wright, there are many designers who were once trumpeted in the industry press but who have now faded from the scene and are forgotten.
If I look at the people who have had the most success in the industry over the last 10, 15, or 20 years, a simple truth emerges. You have to do what you love, and you have to keep growing as you do it, in all areas of your personal and professional skills.
If you love games and love the process of creating them, it will rub off on everyone around you. If you keep looking for how to do a task better than the last time you did it, you’ll grow. Your career will still have ups and downs, but it will advance.
If you embark on a master plan to become a video game celebrity by age 30, you stop thinking about building great games and start thinking about your personal pride. At that moment, the energy that should be going into the craft of game design and execution instead goes into career planning. Which, of course, is the fastest way to sabotage your career. The person who is unhappy until they achieve their goal spends most of their time unhappy. The person who enjoys the journey toward the goal—and is resolute about reaching it—is happy most of the time.