Trip Hawkins Quotes

Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive!

But any big change is more likely to result if there is a disruptive event such as new technologies or platforms that have a surprising effect on market share.

I can't tell you how important it was for us to be successful in japan.

With our next generation hardware, polygon rendering will probably be an area we'll get more heavily into.

I have a number of famous quotes, and one of them is, if you get knocked down, get back up again. I don't really feel like I want to let anything ultimately defeat me.

None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software.

Console game publishing has become more like theatrical release film-making and it is very hard if you are not one of the major publishers, and even for them it is hard unless they are working with major game brands.

We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers.

One quality of entrepreneurship is just persistence, not giving up because you have road blocks and also not giving in because other people tell you that you're nuts. You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.

Polygons are fashionable at the moment - particularly in the arcades.

Online console gaming will continue to grow at a healthy pace.

From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.

The way companies hang on to their marketshare is by being scared.

I'm not saying that more performance wouldn't be better - all these technologies are going to get better - that's the difference between first generation and second generation.

As a result, we will continue to see more innovation on the Internet and on mobile phones than on consoles.

So the guy that we're really targeting our system at this year is one of the guys who brought a 16bit system three or four years ago and has pretty much had it with that, and he's ready to buy something new.

What that means initially is that you have alot of products that are only slightly better games in the same genre on another machine - and the titles that really take advantage of the machine come along later.

You have to have the kind of personality where you're resilient and you can get up and keep moving and learn what there is. What I tell my employees is, 'I want you to make mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. But, when we make a mistake, let's all study it. Let's all learn from it. After that, we want to make different mistakes. We don't want to keep making the same mistakes.'

The only problem we've had is the amount of time it's taking people to develop titles.

I thought, 'Okay, what's going to be my edge, and how am I going to define what I'm doing differently?' Once I had that key idea of the software developer as an artist, once I had that idea, a whole bunch of other ideas flowed from that, because I realized that I need to go study the music industry, I need to study the book publishing and Hollywood and figure out how they do things, why they do them that way, and then I need to borrow, and rearrange, the things that they're doing to fit my industry so that I can invent and create this new industry.

You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.

If you always wanted to wait for something better, you'd never buy anything, right?

No matter what I tend to be doing, generally people always think I'm crazy, first of all, because I'm always talking about things in the future that haven't happened yet, and people have a hard time believing what's gonna happen. Secondly, I'm almost always a contrarian, whatever direction everybody else is going in, I'm probably figuring out a way to go in a completely opposite direction.

You know you're gonna have failures, there's no way to avoid it. Especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you're doing something new, of course there are gonna be mistakes. How can you not make mistakes? You don't know what you're going; it's unchartered territory.

You can't get anywhere without incredible passion, because if you're an entrepreneur, there's gonna be a lot of bumps in the road. A great artist has to do their art. There's nothing that can stop them from doing it. They just have to get it out there. It's the same thing for an entrepreneur. If you don't feel that way, then you're probably not really an entrepreneur.

There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time.

And initially, a lot of companies avoid trying to make a really radical new kind of title for a new system, because that would involve learning a new machine and learning how to make the new title at the same time.

If you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you're going to have to be somebody who can tolerate a high rate of change, you have to be willing to put a lot more hours into it, you have to tolerate the fact that you're going to make more mistakes and have a culture that responds to that.

But we also think that we've got more quite alot more support than any new format has ever had.

We'll look at the japanese launch as a model and aspire to have things go as well as they did over there.

You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.