Quotes from Austin Grossman

There are days when you just don't feel all that evil. You don't become a world-class villain overnight. -Dr. Impossible

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.

You don't build a 100 ft robot out of nothing.....there's rumors and gossip, trace evidence. There's a shadow economy out there, where these things get done.

The woman was simply leaving us alone with our future, the future she wouldn't be a part of. She didn't know how to do it or what it was, but she was trying to give it to us.

I'm cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they're going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.

Save the world? I don't think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing's going to fix it, maybe not even science.

Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.

None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, 'How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?' and 'If you added a button to Pac-Man , what would you want it to do?' Conundrums like 'How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair?

He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn't ever studied for any of them.

Could you make a computer imagine an entire world? How would you start? A generation of people would wrestle with this problem—they're still wrestling with it.

It doesn't matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered...

You haven't known terror until you've been chased by a man-sized crow.

I was thirty-five and I'd thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I'd been playing in some other game I didn't even know about. Like I'd been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid's face, a naked king with goat's horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect's voice.