Games such as Ultima Underworld, Wing Commander, and Thief: The Dark Project, were just stops along the way in his career. Warren Spector, executive producer at Ion Storm, and lead game designer on the highly anticipated Deus Ex, is a 16-year veteran of the game business - six in pen-and-paper games, and ten in computer gaming. Here, he shares his experiences with some of the best-known games and game developers in the industry with writer Wallace Poulter.

1. How did you get into the industry? What were the first games you worked on?

WS: I started out in 1983 as a minimum-wage assistant editor at Steve Jackson Games, where I worked on Space Gamer magazine, developed TOON: The Cartoon Role-Playing Game from an original design by Greg Costikyan, and wrote a bunch of role-playing adventures, board games, and so on.

In 1987, TSR - the Dungeons & Dragons company - made me a "Godfather" offer (or what looked like one at the time!). I signed on with them as a game editor and developer. There I worked with Doug Niles on Top Secret/SI, on the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide with Zeb Cook, on the Buck Rogers Battle for the 25th Century board game with Jeff Grubb, and a bunch of others. In addition to writing modules and working on board games and RPG rule sets, I also got to write my first (and, to date, only) published novel - an embarrassing little thing called The Hollow Earth Affair, available today in landfills everywhere.

One day in 1989, I was sitting at my desk at TSR wondering whether I should use 20-sided dice or percentile dice in a game I was going to work on when it dawned on me: I was in a business that had... ahem ... plateaued. I had been on a panel at a science fiction convention with Richard "Lord British" Garriott and been hugely impressed with what he was doing on Ultima V. And I'd done a fair amount of computer gaming. I knew I had to make the leap. As luck would have it, Denis Loubet, with whom I'd worked at Steve Jackson Games, called that very day and asked if I was interested in an associate producer job at ORIGIN. Cool!

I took a whopper pay cut, if you can believe it, and left paper gaming behind. My new boss assigned me to work with Richard Garriott on Ultima VI. What an education! I also got to work with Paul Neurath on Space Rogue, working on the overall plot and writing conversations. This was another education - and a lot more demanding than anything I'd done in paper gaming. Then, I got to work with Chris Roberts on Wing Commander. I'm pretty sure I won three arguments in the two years we worked together on that title. OK, maybe two....

Around the same time, I got to work on the first titles I could call my own - Bad Blood and Ultima Worlds of Adventure: Martian Dreams. (Though I say this was the first title I can call my own, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the incredible work done by Jeff George, Mike McShaffry, and others on those titles....)

Spector on Underworld