4mm Games' Jamie King

We have worked very hard with the community because we do have aspirations to do with online, social networks, MMOs and these type of experiences so this is us really pushing what the console can be in that space. We developed defjamrapstar.com so the Xbox and PlayStation crowd can get together but also acknowledging that we need to have some social networking tools and even with keyboards and stuff it's not the most elegant interface. So once we've launched it we're going to feed the community. That's why we've gone with defjamrapstar.com, to support the social networking aspects and allowing those guys to start voting and opening the doors.

I think we've had that from day one because hip-hop fans are a very discerning crowd. We're definitely being held to the highest standard. There hasn't been anything of any real merit in games. In terms of purely dedicated to hip-hop culture and the hip-hop generation, for us, looking at the aesthetics and the whole approach of this is very much for you. We are being held to a very high standard and this is definitely being done for the love it. Pretty much the entire publishing community asked "why do you want to make a game about hip-hop?" They're missing the point, it's about engagement. We've all engaged with hip-hop globally for a long time now. It's a music based game that I want to play.

And at the same time, I'm British, I'm white. I'm not your typical hip-hop demographic but I get it and I love it. For me working with Def Jam is cool. I can't drop the ball on that because they have very high standards. Hopefully we've perfected it not only with the visual sense and the community aspects, but with the track list. We've had lots of arguments over that because the depth of music is so big. It's impossible to choose a top 40, so it's a question of how do we engage a broad section of gamers and users that like music-based games and target that to fans of hip-hop. This is very much targeted at male gamers. We're very transparent, we're going to put it up there and online communities are very outspoken and they are very capable of managing and monitoring their own.

We believe in the intelligence of the community and their sense of self-regulation. They know what is added value and what is not. Hopefully we've given enough initial tools and structure to the crews, the battling, the ideas of a meta-game in a wider setting. Those that participate in that community can elevate within that community. Freestyle mode gives those that really do want to be emcee's take on the serious side of the game. Hopefully with all those tools the community can represent itself. There's definitely nothing big business about us. It's hip-hop in the sense that we've raised independent money, every publisher we spoke to said "no, why do you want to do it?". We're very proud that Konami came on board to distribute this game.

I love all the haters, the detractors, the naysayers, because it makes us hungry and determined to do something great. The passion, the sweat and the toil will show. At every turn this has been the complete opposite of big business.

I don't see it as a threat because it's almost a completely different category. I'm very proud of the fact that Def Jam Rapstar is totally dedicated to hip-hop, it's very focused on one genre. The strength, the amount of various styles of hip-hop means we can just focus on one genre like that. It is challenging because Rock Band is on its fourth or fifth iteration, there's Guitar Hero, these have had years of big budgets and we're coming out with our first title but it's got to be as good as those. We deliberately decided to not do certain gameplay mechanics that they or other music based games have done.

We also have unique phonic recognition software, and that was really important so that you can't just whistle your way to a high score. Because of the importance of rapping lyrics we had to really nail the phonic recognition which gives it that extra challenge. There's a lot of focus on rock music out there and it feels like with Def Jam Rapstar we are on our own and it's a very fresh injection to a music genre that's not dead, it's not over, it's just gone a bit stale. We look at Rapstar as a franchise and this first game will get us into the marketplace and then it will be interesting to see how the online community develops. Some of those thing won't work and hopefully we'll be surprised by things we didn't think would be as popular will be more so. And it's great to know with downloadable content we can feed content alongside version two and the expansion packs. So we've definitely given a lot of thought and have high hopes about that. It will also be interesting to see how people begin pushing gesture-based movement stuff and maybe that can be blended in with music performance.