David Perry quotes: the gaming mogul reflects on all of his success.
“A youthful attitude is open-minded and you need to grab, embrace and adopt new trends and then follow them.”
“How can I get there, how can I move forward?”
“Work your way up! I started at $5,000 a year as a trainee programmer. It takes time and most of all passion. There is a big difference between someone who just gets the job done and someone who stays all night to make it perfect so he is proud of it.”
“I like the entrepreneurship stuff; I like the hustle and the craziness of it all. I like finding talent, I like a major challenge and I really like taking on stuff that’s considered hard.”
“The power of Facebook is not only in the vast size of the connected audience, but also in the quality of the social ties and interactions that occur within the network. The Facebook social graph fuels our mantra ‘Try it for free,’ ‘Share it if you like it,’ ‘Buy it if you love it.'”
“The minute you hear the word ‘share,’ you start thinking Twitter and Facebook. These are the places that people can very quickly share something they’ve just discovered.”
“For me, writing is like gold.”
“When a writer is able to experience the whole range of human emotions, from deep depressions to glorious highs, it creates a whole inventory of feelings and musings from which they can choose and infuse into their words and characters.”
“I started writing books on games before games could be bought. In those days you had to actually type the entire game in from a book (without mistakes) and then hours later, you finally got to play. (Or start looking for your mistakes.) This looking at program code and fixing mistakes was a great way to gently learn programming.”
“How did I get into the video game industry? I lived in Northern Ireland and my mother got me a Sinclair ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000) in the USA. I started making games for magazines and was very proud to be ‘in print.’ I didn’t know I was actually getting paid so when a check showed up, it instantly became my career.”
“Ever since I was very young I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else, and when I was little I had the sensation that I would do great things in life.”
“I lived in the middle of the countryside in Northern Ireland. It was cold and pretty boring, so that only made playing games even more addictive. Then when I started making money in school from simple programming, I could afford to buy just about every game released. That was why I became hooked. Finally I was offered a real video game programmer job, I burnt my books.”
“Once I started making money from the games, I couldn’t sleep and wrote so many I ended up getting offered a chapter in a book by Tim Hartnell, and finally my own book. At school I had a backpack filled with sweets which was a little ironic as I’d wanted to be a dentist in my past life!”
“My mother wanted me to be a dentist, so that’s the course I was headed. I then became very interested in being a pilot and as airplanes had gone Supersonic with Concorde, that was the ultimate goal. How the heck do I become a Concorde pilot? I studied hard, but had a very sad day when I finally got to go into the real Concorde cockpit, and as I’m 6’8” tall, I didn’t even slightly fit. So after banging my head around for a while my hopes and dreams were dashed, but I had no idea my real calling would be programming video games.”
“My teachers thought I was nuts for leaving school to join the video game business. They were certain it was a fad and it definitely could have been, but I doubled-down and bet my career on it. It’s all I’ve really ever done since leaving school. I see it as the number one form of entertainment, but we are not there yet. So that’s been my mission and a focus of a lot of my speeches to help people discover the game that makes them a gamer for life.”
“Everything was going great in the UK. It was all just going very smoothly; I had a house, I had a car, I was dating and, you know, I just felt a little too… comfortable. And it was just work, work, work. So I get this call, ‘Would you like to come to California, just for one game, and we’ll pay you whatever you’re getting paid now so it won’t cost you a cent, and we’ll give you an apartment, we’ll give you a car, we’ll pay you royalties on whatever you do for us. We just want you to come over, we have this emergency, and we need someone to come over and help us solve this problem.’ And I’m like, wow, that sounds like fun. And I just closed my door. Literally, went to the airport, got on a plane and flew to America.”
“From an early age, I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen.”
“I loved working at Atari, that brand is so incredible it meant something to everyone. I’d stop at Airport customs, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I work for Atari.’ [They’d say] ‘OMG! Atari was my childhood!’… etc.”
“I am certainly no legend. Unless you use the old connotation which makes me more than a veteran. I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
“The game industry is so much fun as it never seems to stop evolving. Consoles are so powerful now, mobile is everywhere and VR is about to enter the spotlight. I love thinking forward. If the video game industry was a train, what’s the next station, what’s after that, what’s at the end of the line?”
“The more powerful, the closer we get. It’s funny how things keep improving, and you hear people saying, ‘It would be hard to top that!’ It will be topped this year, next year and every year after. That’s what keeps us all so excited about this business.”
“The biggest problem is finding passionate staff that can make our funky ideas come true. When we find them, we hold on tight. That said, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs. I would only kill a project if it became impossible to find the right staff to pull it off.”
“The problem is not a loss of money or credit, it’s a loss of trust.”
“I always look forward to meeting the ‘stars’ of our business.”
“I have been very fortunate in working closely with some of the best in the industry and they have taught me a lot about their individual jobs. So I can talk with them on their terms and understand their frustrations. It’s kinda funky, but many presidents have no idea what their staff are doing. That’s really bad!”
“When you work for somebody who is very technical, and understands and has creative solutions to your problems, it spurs you along and stops you [from] making excuses for things. And I found that very useful.”
“I’ve been lucky and have had the chance to work with some incredibly talented people. If anything I think that’s really what I’ve learned, is to spot the people that can really move the needle.”
“I actually once sat at the back of a payroll class in America—just me and 40 women! And I’m sitting back there, learning payroll, because I want to understand it. So that when I talk to people about payroll I know what they’re talking about. And I set up and managed and ran a full payroll system myself.”
“User education is paramount. They need to learn to look at the internet as a city. You can move into the wrong neighborhood and it can ruin your life. You need to learn where to park or walk and where not to park or walk.”
“I like to see new things.”
“The next decade is always my favorite. I love this industry; it never stops evolving and so it never gets old.”
“When I’m retired, I can’t wait to get back to programming.”
“In my future, I see a dream: to program a game from the director’s chair with a clapboard in my hands to put in front of a camera and yell, ‘Action!'”
“The spirit is strong. Our faith is solid.”
“If you don’t display a little more grace, I’m going to smear butter all over your face!”
