game design

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.

A /noclip interview with Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games about Dwarf Fortress: where the ASCII simulation came from, how it works, and the plans for its Steam release. It includes his telling of the famous bug in which cats were poisoned by alcohol.

IGN plays through the first episode of the original Doom with its creator John Romero providing commentary. Romero shares stories, design secrets and behind-the-scenes details about the levels, including E1M1.

Wildlife videographer Dani Connor Wild talks with Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini about how her red squirrel recording became the desert mouse sound in Dune.

John Conway talks in a short Numberphile interview about his mixed feelings toward the Game of Life, his most famous invention. He says he is not especially pleased that it overshadowed his other work.

Mike Acton, in a HandmadeCon 2015 interview with Casey Muratori, discusses game engine development, hiring and learning on your own.

Myst co-creator Rand Miller recounts how the HyperCard-built game struggled to run on 1x CD-ROM drives. He and his brother Robyn compressed image and audio data heavily to get acceptable performance. Part of Ars Technica's War Stories series.

A 1984 Computer Chronicles segment in which Susan Kare explains the ergonomics and interface design of the original Macintosh. She introduces the interface step by step for newcomers.

A 1993 interview in which Steve Jobs talks about designer Paul Rand, who created the NeXT logo. He recounts Rand's insistence on presenting a single design and his uncompromising professionalism.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

ThePrimeagen interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo, with TJ DeVries, in a long live-streamed conversation. They discuss language design and Lattner's experience building Swift.

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

A Channel 9 Going Deep interview in which Brian Beckman talks with Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, about the language's design. It covers Clojure's persistent data structures, reference types and its approach to concurrency on the JVM.

Lex Fridman interviews chip architect Jim Keller about the future of computing, AI, life and consciousness. Topics include CPU design, branch prediction and why imperfect designs often win.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

A Channel 9 conversation recorded at GOTO 2012 between Anders Hejlsberg (TypeScript) and Lars Bak (Dart). They discuss the two languages and different approaches to making JavaScript development safer, including runtime type checking.

Ian Cutress interviews chip architect Jim Keller about his time at AMD, Intel and elsewhere, management advice, design approach, Moore's Law and x86 versus Arm.

Sam Holmes Sailing visits sailing legend Sven Yrvind and tours his boat, covering the man and his small-boat design philosophy.

A two-hour extended interview in which Crash Bandicoot co-creator Andy Gavin tells how he and Jason Rubin built the game at Naughty Dog. It includes the custom Lisp tools used.

A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Topics include Python's design, the GIL, asyncio, the future of programming and AI coding tools.

Sandy Munro and Cory discuss how Tesla Model 3 and Model Y bodies in white have evolved over five years, including giga castings and lean design.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut talks with Elon Musk right after Musk's 2019 Starship presentation. Musk discusses Starship's design, why SpaceX favors conventional engines over aerospikes, and how deleting parts and processes speeds up development.

Ian Cutress interviews Mike Clark, AMD's chief architect of Zen, about his career since the K5, how Zen began and how CPUs are designed. It also covers the future of AMD.

Jim Coplien and Bob Martin debate test-driven development and unit testing in an InfoQ video that grew out of a JAOO 2007 dispute. They also touch on design and architecture.

A 1956 episode clip of the game show I've Got a Secret in which 95-year-old Samuel J. Seymour appears as the mystery guest. He was the last living eyewitness to Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater, and the panel tries to guess his secret.

A clip of Sandy Munro, a veteran automotive engineer, describing his visit to a SpaceX Starship design review and meeting Elon Musk. He says he was struck by how deeply Musk is involved in engineering.

A short clip of Steve Jobs saying Microsoft has no taste, from an interview about Windows. It is an excerpt reposted by a fan channel.

A Gamereactor interview at E3 2012 with John Carmack, who shows his lag-free head-mounted display running DOOM 3 BFG Edition. He discusses what the headset could mean for the games industry.

A short clip of Simon Peyton Jones talking about the future of programming languages, saying Haskell is useless in the sense that pure programs cannot have effects, while mainstream languages are useful but unsafe. He describes languages converging, with ideas such as STM and LINQ moving between them.

A clip from Lex Fridman's podcast in which chip architect Jim Keller argues that Moore's Law is not dead and that transistor scaling still has lots of room. He also discusses how to break down hard problems.

An extended Fifth Estate interview with Pierre Sprey, designer of the A-10 and a key figure behind the F-16, arguing the F-35 is an over-engineered, expensive failure.

Jay Leno drives the Tesla Cybertruck with Elon Musk, who talks about the design, including the stainless steel body and bulletproof doors, and Leno demos the roll-up bed cover.

A Google I/O 2014 fireside chat in which members of the Android platform team answer questions about why the platform works the way it does. It is moderated by developer advocate Reto Meier.

An open Q&A with Python creator Guido van Rossum hosted by Microsoft Reactor, covering his career, PyCon's origins and his opinions on other languages.

Dave Plummer interviews Dave Cutler, architect of VMS and Windows NT, in a roughly three-hour conversation about his career and the history of Windows.