A Hollywood Tale - Part Two

It is, but my own personal opinion is that gaming is the Field of Dreams, so to speak. If you build it, they will come. This industry has always grown and been led by innovation and quality, and games that do something new and interesting, or are just plain good.

I think investing in that, in whatever form it takes - whether it's new IP or licensed IP or whatever - is what the focus should be. That's not necessarily where everyone's head is at, so it's a different problem that affects us. General issues about how publishers are trying to make games, and make money, exacerbates some of these things - risk tolerance, risk models and so on.

It's interesting to me - when I was working at Vivendi, on the one hand they had Blizzard and all these guys where everything they make is gold, and on the other hand they had this Games division that's losing money hand-over-fist. Why you don't borrow from one to administrate the other...?

When those Blizzard guys go to DICE and they show lists of games that they cancelled over the years, what they're telling me... okay, I'm Rob Pardo, the guy that designed World of Warcraft, and guess what? Three out of four of my ideas are actually kind of bad, and I don't really know it until I build them and find out.

There's something to that, and why that gets ignored by people... you've got the rest of the industry saying "Okay, you've got 18 months, go!"

Well, it varies from project to project. In general, we're typically looking for developers who have got a new IP. You've got a team that has an interesting idea for a game - we'll have an interesting idea about how to take that game and build a franchise and a universe, something that can exist as a film, an anime series, or whatever would be appropriate.

But it's sort of a leverage construction of a brand or a franchise across all media at once - of course leveraging our position, Vin's credibility, his talent and awareness to put deals in place to get those projects funded and into development. That's how we tend to work from a business development standpoint.

Then in terms of our day-to-day, it's really me. I'm pretty much Tigon, truthfully I'm the whole company... I talk to Vin and that's it. Assault on Dark Athena is probably a great example of our day-to-day, because there it's such a familiar environment for me, having been involved at Starbreeze and worked with those projects - so it's literally me on the phone with those guys talking about design and production issues, or code issues, art issues - giving them my guidance and being part of that discussion.

It's general production work, just that this independent production party happens to be involved - as would Universal Motion Pictures, because they're a stakeholder as well. Then the added level of involvement we get to have is when things like the Activision and Vivendi merger happened, and Activision says they don't want to keep Dark Athena... suddenly myself and Universal are out there trying to find a new home for this project, and there's a lot of business development happening that's not normally something I'd do as a designer.

So I think it's a bit difficult for people on the outside to get their head around what we do, because they're so used to publishers and developers and that's it. But the idea of independent producers is a fairly new thing for the games industry - there's ourselves and a few others. It'll be interesting to see what form Jerry Bruckheimer's studio takes.