Industry Insiders Discuss Their Desert Island Games

Walking the hallways of the D.I.C.E. Summit, you're bound to run into a who's who of prominent game industry personalities. While stopping to chat, we decided to ask each of them an intensely personal question: If you could only have one video game to play while stranded on a desert island, what would it be? The answers we received are surprising.

Corey May, Sekret Agent Productions
"Ultima VII. It's ginormous. I think I still haven't managed to see everything the game has to show. It's full of amazing things to discover. It's got that Skyrim-esque reward for exploration (pre-dating Skyrim by many years). It has an amazing cast of characters, awesome bad guy Guardian - like top three for me - and I just love the world. If I'm allowed to cheat can I also have Serpent's Isle? Can I have them together? They're both technically Ultima VII, and I want the add-ons too. I want the whole thing, and I'll just play that on a desert island all day long. I need a 386 to run it though."

Nathan Vella, Cabybara Games
"I would probably say Spelunky on Vita because I'm *** terrible at it but I still play it once a day every day and have for a year. I don't get good at it, but I still think I'm getting better. That or one of the Street Fighters. Playing by yourself kind of sucks, but any game that has a training room that you can actually play, I love." 

Hilmar Veigar Petursson, CCP Games
"I've been playing Cookie Clicker, and I'm not sure I want to admit it. I haven't played Dwarf Fortress as much as I would like to play it, so a desert island sounds like I would finally have the time. Dwarf Fortress is a game I could play without a network and go insanely deep on it, so how about that? Or maybe Cookie Clicker [laughs]." 

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software
"If I was stranded on a desert island, I would need NetHack. But I would also need the source code. I would play it, modify it, play it, modify it, and, you know, live the NetHack dream. Actually, wait a minute. Can I change my answer? I want an online game where people who aren’t stuck on the desert island can communicate with me and rescue me. I would do that instead."

Jim Reilly, EEDAR
"It would have to be Demon Souls. I could play that game over and over again. Once you beat it, it gives you New Game+, and I don’t even think there’s a level cap. And if I have online on this desert island, I would invade games and have people in my game."

Chris Charla, Microsoft
"I would pick Project Spark. I know I work at Microsoft, but I would use it to make my own games. I would make my own GTA, my own Fable, and I would slowly recreate models of my friends and give them AI so I wouldn't be alone anymore."

Mike Salmon, former PC Accelerator editor
"I'm actually going to say Grand Theft Auto V, just for pure longevity. I could play it online or just mess with the world. It's a game that lives forever. You could play it forever.

Karla Zimonja, Fullbright Company
"I'm going to say Minecraft for obvious reasons. You can endlessly regenerate the world, endlessly explore, and endlessly build things. That seems like less of the same thing over and over again."

Steve Gaynor, Fullbright Company
"This question is hard for me because I don't really like playing any one game for a long time. I've put a lot of calendar years into Animal Crossing: New Leaf. You can actually go to a desert island in the game, so that would be meta."