Chris Avellone Interview

PCAction.de has conducted their own interview with Obsidian’s Chris Avellone, chatting with the designer and company co-founder about his job responsibilities, what he’d be doing if he wasn’t a game developer, sex and violence in video games, and more.

pcaction.de: What’s a typical workday at Obsidian Entertainment?

Chris Avellone: It starts the night before – then I’m going to the Rasputin-mode and predict the future, while I go through my notes for the next day. I look behind me to a movie or TV series, which have to do with my current project, and eventually go to bed. Then I dreamed I was a Mad Max, wake up to do morning exercises, and go to work at 9:30 clock. There, I check my to-do list and then I try to focus on three main tasks that I want to do until the end of the day. This can, for example, playing a new New Vegas-area and typing a feedback be it. To 19 clock I usually just stare stupidly at the screen, where the characters dance around demonic. Then I play Fallout 3 for example, until I want to continue working or go home – and then the whole thing starts over again.

Hopefully Chris will post the English version to his blog in the not-too-distant future.

UPDATE: In ultra-fast fashion, Chris has updated his official blog with the original English version of the interview. For whatever reason, these three questions didn’t make it into the PCAction.de article:

What are your favorite games of all times? And what about movies/music?

Fallout 1, Chronotrigger, Zuma, Final Fantasy III, the Hero System, Illuminati, Chez Geek, System Shock 2, Bomberman (multiplayer), Robotron 2084, Myth 1, Ultima Underworld I. I have a lot of “design doc” games that I think all designers should play (Dead Space’s interface is really incredible, for example).

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Some games are very popular. But unlike in the movie business there is only a small fan audience adoring the people behind the product (e.g. game’s producers, directors, sound makers etc.). Are you annoyed by that fact?

Nope. There’s so many people involved with making a product good (or bad) anyway, it’d be hard to juggle them all. I am only annoyed when people don’t give credit where credit is due, and if magazine articles come out that give credit where credit isn’t due (usually by accident or giving people wrong titles), that makes me sad.

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Is there anything about your job that you dislike?

Performance reviews, always knowing that any design you do could have been 20% better and you have to leave that extra 20% for the next title, the escalating cost of games making it less likely publishers and developers will take risks, and the parameters that production and voice acting places on narrative design.