What are your thoughts on MAME? Does it bother you that you can surf the Net and get pretty much any one of your old arcade games up and running for free on your home PC?

It's interesting. It's similar and different from the Napsterization of music. I guess it's similar in the sense that you have this huge body of material that is now available essentially free to run on your PC. They have software that emulates virtually any system ever made from Atari 2600 to arcade games to even some of the later Nintendo systems. You have all these games being provided free to people. Game designers are obviously not getting any royalties, although they probably never got royalties anyway.

The one thing that makes that different is that all these platforms are pretty much dead -- they weren't really economically viable, and, in fact, a lot of these games were in danger of becoming extinct. In some ways, this amazing underground community that has, through all kinds of volunteer efforts -- if you had to pay people to do all of this stuff it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do this -- people have done it just for the love of the old games, so, in a sense, they've done a tremendous public service in preserving the old games to be played and enjoyed today. You also look at the number of Internet games pretty much just ripping off the old games and calling it something different, you know, changing a few things around and pretending it's an all-new, original game and they're not paying for the rights to those games either. Nobody really lost any revenue due to the whole thing, so there really isn't a victim.

In my mind, I see it as a wonderful thing that these games are out there being enjoyed. As a creative person, and I think even musicians would agree with this, your No. 1 objective is not to make money, your No. 1 objective is to get people to enjoy your creative product. To listen to your song, to play your game, whatever. That's why you're in it. If you wanted to make money, you'd be out selling real estate or something. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to have this way for people to enjoy works of art and have great access to it. To have things that have been forgotten and out of print and in the dumpster revived and enjoyed by people. I'm amazed that people cared enough to do it.

your No. 1 objective is not to make money, your No. 1 objective is to get people to enjoy your creative product