Today, TWENTY damn years ago, an unfinished game was shipped, a physical manifestation of my 25-year old ego and inexperience, and an ordeal of learning through which I dragged a team of fine and talented people.

I had just come off of working on Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Flight Unlimited, and I completely misunderstood how important the influences of people like Doug Church and @Warren_Spector had been in taming my crazy ideas into working games.

Trespasser was my 1995 vision of the open world future, free of HUD and full of emergent gameplay and simulation. My inexperience and ego caused it to fail as a product, but I am very proud that we tried, and were loud about what we thought games of this kind could be.

And I want to be sure to stress, to anyone who feels like they have screwed up and will never recover: without the disaster of Trespasser there would be no Xbox. Everything is a lesson. Everything.