A Hollywood Tale - Part Two

Well, quite a bit. That's an IP that's owned by Universal in partnership with Tigon, so it goes where we want it to go, providing someone's making an offer of course.

But with Vivendi it was interesting, and I guess I'd be speaking more about Starbreeze than Tigon in this respect, but the two companies decided that they wanted to work together again probably in 2006 - on a couple of different projects, and Dark Athena was one of them. By virtue of so many things, that wound up being the only project. I think it began very much as a remake, a small project, and evolved over time into being something that seems so much more profound than how it began.

It wasn't a huge licensing deal when it began, but it became something much larger, and I think it just went to Vivendi because Starbreeze and they wanted to do business.

No.

I worked with Activision for many years, I started my career there in the mid-nineties, and produced Call of Duty 2 for the Xbox 360. So I've known so many of those guys, their executives, since I was in high school. They love brands and annualisation, and there wasn't going to be a Riddick game every year. It was somewhat predictable, what happened.

We weren't surprised - and I certainly don't take that negatively, personally, or anything like that. They were very gracious to us, and they're wonderful people. I actually like them an awful lot - it just wasn't their thing. They were very helpful in finding Atari as a new party.

It was very important - it was a finished game, and one that we were very proud of, relative to all of the challenges involved in just bringing that together. It was the second game of that kind I was involved with - Scarface was the first - and they're tremendously difficult, because you have to build so much, and create so much, just to get a lingering sense of whether or not it works.

In our case we had to build a functioning Barcelona before anyone could sit down and find out if it sucked or not. We thought very big in the beginning about what we wanted this game to be, we created some huge challenges for ourselves... and yet more came.

I think that most of those guys felt very passionately about getting that game out there, onto store shelves, and - good or bad - just finishing that story.

Not very much - I think the thing that everyone took away from that transaction was an awful lot of excitement, because for Ubisoft it wasn't a game they needed, or had to have. The fact that they expressed interest and made that deal spoke to us about the quality of what we'd made.

I think a lot of guys felt very excited that a publisher we really respected wanted to put the product into retail. It was a good pat on the back for everybody - whether it was by necessity or not, Ubi coming to the table and running with it was a bit of a ray of shining light, for sure.