Can you remember where you had the ideas for your games? We have most of our best ideas on the toilet.

Chris: Toilet is great for me. Shower is the best. I get most of my ideas in the shower, because I’m relaxed. In all fairness, I don’t come up with entire ideas per se, because ideas are derivative in a way. Total Annihilation was my attempt to build a game like Command & Conquer, where I would do a whole bunch of things differently which I would think were improvements. What I didn’t have was a brand, an art style or many of the things they had. But I had many game mechanic improvements. You know what it is? When I travel through Europe, I look around and get inspired by architecture, by history, by television and film... it all goes into my head. But the little things like the full strategic zoom in Supreme Commander was me playing Railroad Tycoon 3, I think, and being frustrated it wouldn’t zoom to my cursor, but it would zoom to the middle of the screen. But the idea came to me in that moment. I wasn’t working - I was playing someone else’s game.

Think about music - when you listen to music, the styles, even the singer’s voices. The way they control their voice-box. You get Dave Matthews or the guy from Pearl Jam [Eddie Vedder] where they were singing... using the throat. And then 50 bands come out, and [mimics grunge’s bass-heavy singing style] they’re all singing like that. Then you get a new guy or woman, who sings in a completely different style, and everyone else copies it... but it was still an evolution from something else over here. Art, painted, drawn, sung, filmed... is almost all evolving from a previous work. Every once in a while you get somebody who takes a big jump, and they’re a genius artist. Which I find fascinating.

There’s a concept by musician Brian Eno called ‘Scenius’, where a group of people trying to work toward a similar end cross-pollinate ideas between each other. Someone makes a tiny advance in a drumbeat pattern, and that’s taken by everyone...

Chris: We have that in games all over the place. I look at BioShock and I go... see! Look how fun this particular thing is. I’m going to try and do something like that, but in an action platformer. Lego Star Wars has to be credited with the most number of singular bits of design genius in one place. And that’s why I give those guys a LOT of credit.