Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here are your hosts. John Joseph Adams and David Barr

Kirtley. Hi this is Dave and this is Dave. And this is John.

And welcome to episode 84 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Austin Grossman,

a game design consultant currently working on the Dishonored Series from Arken Studios.

His first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, told from the point of view of a comic book

Super villain was released in 2007.

His latest book, You, is about a young man who goes to work for a

successful video game company founded by his high school friends.

Then stick around after the interview as we talk video games with Ted Kismatka, a writer who works for Valve,

creators of Half Life and Portal. This episode also features a special presentation of

Dave's Fantasy Short Story Save Me Please. All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Austin Grossman.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Okay, so to start with, how did you first get interested in game design?

My parents, for reasons I never understand, bought a really early computer.

They bought a Sinclair ZX81, which came with basic hardwired in and so the kids in my family learned

basic and for some reason the things that it occurred to me to do was try to mess around with weird graphics patterns and to try to make games with it.

And then when we graduated to the Apple 2E, some early games that were distributed, like

Loadrunner, came with the level editors included. So I messed around with it and But then I have to admit that I didn't really play any games after I left high school.

I went through four years of college without messing around with that stuff at all.

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