Warren Spector - Career

Career

In 1983, after a job at the Harry Ransom Center as an archivist in charge of the David O. Selznick collection ended after a few months, Spector “was sitting around, wondering how I was going to pay the next month’s rent, when I got a call from Chris Frink. He was a writer for a weekly entertainment magazine I used to edit in college. Anyway, he said that he was now editor of Space Gamer magazine and asked if I wanted a job. So, in the fall of 1983, I started as an editor.” Within a short time, Spector became the editor-in-chief for all Steve Jackson Games products, the company that owned and published Space Gamer magazine. Spector began producing role-playing games for the company, stating, “I supervised game development, typesetting, and the art and graphic departments.” Most notably, he developed Toon with colleague and high school buddy Greg Costikyan. In March 1987 he was hired by TSR, initially working on games such as Top Secret/S.I. and the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game. Spector spent some time in TSR's R&D department, helping launch, among other things, Spelljammer.

Subsequently he entered the computer game industry worked with Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios. He worked on games including Ultima Underworld I and II, System Shock, and worked briefly on Dark Camelot, which later became Thief: The Dark Project. Later he founded Ion Storm Inc.'s Austin branch, which went on to develop Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Thief: Deadly Shadows before being closed by owners Eidos Interactive in February 2005.

In 2004, Spector left Ion Storm to "pursue personal interests outside the company". In 2005, it was announced that he had established a new studio Junction Point Studios, where he is working on an unspecified game. A job advertisement for the studio called for artists for a game that has "classic Hollywood cartoons" featuring "cartoon mice, cats and wabbits". On July 13, 2007, it was announced that Disney Interactive had acquired Junction Point Studios. His first project with Disney Interactive is a project involving classic Disney characters, titled Epic Mickey. The game has been confirmed to be a Steampunk title and designed exclusively for the Wii; the game was released in 2010. Spector has contributed a great deal to video game theory, and constantly promotes the importance of proper execution of ideas in video games.