David Sheff, photo by Bart Nagel

David Sheff is what you'd call a veteran interviewer, a true master of the art of conversation. As a longtime contributor to Playboy Magazine, he conducted the last major interview with John Lennon before his assassination. He's also interviewed Ansel Adams, George Lucas, Jack Nicholson, Steve Jobs, and Keith Herring, among many other celebrities, artists and visionaries. In addition to his work for Playboy, Sheff has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Outside and Fortune.

He's also spent a great deal of time chronicling the game world. He's the author of Game Over (Random House), an inside look at the Nintendo empire, so the man knows what he is talking about. Sheff is a very smart and sharp observer; he is also very personable, funny, and easy to talk to-it's clear why people feel comfortable "giving up the goods" when they speak with him.

Now we turn the tables on Sheff, as he talks to Tom's Hardware Guide about his experiences inside the world of games, and describes how far things have come since the early days.

ENTERING THE GAMER'S DOMAIN

DK: When and how did you first get interested in the world of video games?

SHEFF: I played some video games myself when I was a teenager in the Atari era, but that is not what inspired me to go forward and write this book, or this series of magazine articles. It was my son, before anyone that I knew had ever heard the word Nintendo, who became obsessed by it. He and his friends were spending all of their non-school hours playing the games, and talking about them in this exotic language about mini-bosses, one ups, and secret passage ways.

When I started to pay attention, it was so intriguing; it wasn't like anything else, like the other trends that had come and gone. This one seemed to encompass so many different areas of their lives-it was so intricate. I started to watch over their shoulders as they played, and I realized that these games had nothing in common with the really simple games that I'd played when I was a kid. They were stories come to life on the television screen-interactive adventures.

Then, opening the newspaper one day, I saw this survey they had done. They have this thing called the Q Poll where they survey certain demographics, but this was a survey of young people, of kids, and more of them recognized the name Super Mario than the name Mickey Mouse. To me, from another generation entirely, that suggested that it wasn't just my son and my friends, there was something going on among children of America, and I started to investigate it. I did my first story on Nintendo for a magazine that didn't exist for very long, but I visited the company, and that became the very beginning-I became more and more interested in what they were doing. I was fascinated by this place, where these artists were trying to do right with what Atari and that whole generation of video game companies had blown.

DK: Did you also feel that the world of games would make an interesting story and an entertaining business book as well?

SHEFF: Yeah I did, and that was one of the things that attracted me. I'm not a business writer, I never went to business school and when business people start talking, I sort of glaze over. But what excited me about this was that, first of all, on the business side, there are some people that were pretty extraordinary. The guy who was running Nintendo, this Japanese man was an enigmatic figure who was unlike Western business people in any way; really an intriguing man, and his family and his culture were really interesting too.

The people whom I ended up responding to most were the creative people who made these games; they were some of the most interesting, eccentric people, who had found a medium that was impossible before. Shigeru Miyamoto, who wrote The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and the Super Mario Games, was a cartoonist-that's what he did for fun. He was an illustrator, and his games sold more than any single designer in history.

His story was amazing, and I would meet with him, we'd walk down the street, and he'd disappear for a while inside his mind. When he'd come to again, he would tell me about where he'd been daydreaming. He saw this little hole in the sidewalk, and all of a sudden imagined what would happen if you fell down inside there. Then, in three months, I'd see a prototype of a new game he was writing, and lo and behold, a character's walking down the sidewalk, there's a crack there, and one of the things you have to do is figure out how to get in. Once you get inside, you're rewarded by entering this whole alternative universe that's filled with magic and surprise, all the things that come with these great games.

They were storytellers and they were artists, and I was interested in that more than the business side of things. These games, at their best, are great art.