The Infinite Arcade

摘要

Stephen cakebread dreamed of making games. Really big games. He toiled away on medical software until he landed a gig at Bizarre Creations, the UK developer behind the Project Gotham Racing franchise, a driving simulator for the Xbox. PGR is famous for its meticulously rendered 3-D vehicles and hyperdetailed environments so rich they can barely be squeezed onto a single DVD. But being a cog in the 30-person PGR machine didn't much satisfy Cakebread, now 26. Each title required him to spend hours squashing bugs in the code. "I was getting bored," he says. So, in 2003, with a budget of approximately nothing, he designed and programmed a game of his own. It was the opposite of the photorealistic PGR games; it was more like Asteroids, the arcade classic. Players pilot a two-dimensional spaceship around the screen, blasting the hell out of incoming squares, circles, and diamonds. He called it Geometry Wars.