Warren Spector is the Oldest Man in Game Development**

“To be frank, I’m the oldest guy still actively making games on the planet. But I’m an old dog who can learn new tricks,” Spector says. When I push if he is truly the oldest game developer, he counters with a considered but sarcastic chuckle. “I turned 70 in October of last year. I’ve been making games for 43 years. I think I’m the oldest.”

Spector worked on classics like Ultima and Wing Commander, helped create the immersive sim genre with System Shock, Deus Ex, and Thief, and was instrumental in rescuing Walt Disney’s pre-Mickey creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, back from NBC with Epic Mickey. But before all of that, he was a teacher pursuing his doctorate. “Long story short, I was teaching, and the department took my class away, and I had no idea how I was going to pay my rent.” Sitting on the floor, Spector got a call about an opening at Steve Jackson Games. They were looking for an editor. He eagerly joined and worked on Toon: The Cartoon Roleplaying Game (which he still receives royalties for to this day), among many other projects.

That job led to work at TSR (the original Dungeons & Dragons publisher), which led to chance meetings with Ultima creator Richard Garriott, which led to a producer role on the Ultima series at Origin. “I was a terrible producer,” Spector jokes, “but I like to think I was a pretty good creative partner.” At Origin, Spector and his teams had their hands on early technology, leading to the first examples of cinematic games and motion-capture use. “We did the first fully textured first-person game in history,” Spector says. “We f---ing ruled at Origin, by the way.”