Quotes from Austin Grossman

Video games are a huge, incredibly popular, world-transforming medium.

Computers had their origin in military cryptography-in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression.

Wearing a cape doesn't do much for your social life.

I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that. But she got hurt really bad and I've been waiting such a long time for her to be okay again. I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she'd grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she'd be. She'd probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this.

We were feeling something they never had—a physical link into the world of the fictional—through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real.

I'm drawing a diagram of what time looks like if you're looking straight into it - like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time .

This isn't the first time you've done this, or the fifth or the tenth. I guess it's time to think of it as your life.

Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings.

If I had writing materials, I might write a guidebook, a source of advice and inspiration for the next generation of masked criminals, bent prodigies, and lonely geniuses, the ones who've been taught to feel different, or the ones who knew it from the start. The ones who are smart enough to do something about it. There are things they should hear. Somebody has to tell them.

The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game.

In sooth, thy life sounds passing strange and shitty.

It's time to go and face them. To prepare them, as we say in the trade, a proper reception. Welcome to my island, assholes.

I wrote code that merely did what it was supposed to do. Simon's solutions were rapid and weird—convoluted, sometimes in a pointless way, often in a way that looked pointless until you saw how elegant it was.

Who wants to make the language of dreams?

Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor.

It's raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

You mean like in Archon? For the C64?" "Um. Right." Lisa scowled even a little more. A bearded guy at the back rolled his eyes, as if in disbelief at what a loser I was; he was wearing a jester's hat. It had come to this.

Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.

My name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I was educated at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and I have seen the devil walk.

You resolve to reach the center of the galaxy, the center of everything, if you can, and that's where the game ends, now not a game at all but a campaign that's going to go on as long as your life does, no matter what you think of me now, because we are graduating from high school, from college, getting married, and now it's time for all cards to be turned over, all items identified, all secret areas revealed. And now at last maybe we can score this thing properly.

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all.

The people who hired me have been shot. The people who shot them have been shot.

If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.