After a long and fruitful career working on some of the most important titles to ever hit the industry, acclaimed director Warren Spector announced on LinkedIn last night that he is officially retiring from game development. “I’ve had a great career. Wouldn’t change a thing even if I could,” he writes. “But the reasons to retire are simple: I’m a month away from my 44th year as a developer.”
Known primarily for Deus Ex and Epic Mickey, Spector’s career dates back to 1984 with the tabletop game Toon, though his biggest impact would be felt with the legendary 1992 title Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, in which he served as a producer. Practically creating the immersive sim genre overnight, Ultima Underworld reinvented how first-person games played a year before Doom completely dominated the scene. He would continue down that road with games such as System Shock (producer), Thief: The Dark Project (producer), and most importantly, Deus Ex (director).
“I’ve had the chance to work on tabletop roleplaying games and boardgames. I’ve worked on more digital games than I can remember — 17 full games, I think, and 9 or so add-on packs,” he recalls. “Gratifyingly, some of those games are still being played 15… 20… 30 years later. And most of them have been in a genre that has had influence beyond what I or anyone else expected.” That’s definitely an understatement.
Why the sudden announcement? “I definitely have mixed feelings about this… But the game business has changed and it’s just not as much fun for me anymore. Plus there’s a new generation of developers coming up who deserve their time in the sun,” he states. I can feel that last part, too. As much respect as Spector deserves, he’s been doing this for longer than most of us have been alive. Younger developers need their chance to create titles as important as he has.
Signing off, he writes, “To all of you reading this I want you to remember that games are not a solved problem yet — there is, I hope, plenty of experimentation and innovation to come. And to all you young developers out there, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your job is to make people forget people like me ever existed. Will I come back? Never say never. But I think it’s time to ride off into the sunset. Now stop reading and make great games.”
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
