A Hollywood Tale

Well, you can't expect to sell a tonne of units without the investment. If it sounds like I'm saying this happened because we didn't get enough press attention, I'm really not - what I'm saying is that we were in an ecosystem that was struggling with this issue. What would have been better for us is if somebody had just decided to take the risk, the view that in order to make money they needed to market the game. Riddick was not heavily marketed, at all.

That, in tandem with the film - in truth I don't know how much that hurt or helped us in general, but it's a difficult thing to figure out. I've made other games since then that were not nearly as good that sold millions and millions. Like Transformers. My life is difficult... what can I say? [smiles]

No, not so much. Every game you make has got its own unique set of circumstances and challenges, disappointments, things you run into and deal with. The thing we took away from Butcher Bay more than anything was just hoping that we might have a better experience with the publishing process the next time around.

And then the flipside of that was an awful lot of confidence that we could create value for something. What you can say in that scenario is that we made a game which was averaging 9s, and if you can't sell that it's probably not our problem. In terms of building the reputation of that studio, Starbreeze, and Tigon, and then leaving that and looking for new opportunities it was great - it was euphoric and a good thing.

But certainly there were a lot of lessons learned, and some of that winds up being in a discussion on making licensed games. But that happens all the time - there's always something that goes wrong, or that can be done better next time.

Well, it's interesting, and it varies depending on what he's doing. If he's shooting a Fast and Furious I get a lot less of his time, but an example of just Vin's involvement - which is not necessarily Tigon's involvement - is that we'll sit down and build through a build of Assault on Dark Athena, and he'll look at the camera angles that we're choosing, some of the moments that we're trying to emphasise. And as a film-maker - because I think a lot of people forget that Vin got his start in indie films and wrote, produced and directed... that was the stuff that impressed Spielberg enough to get him a part in Saving Private Ryan.

So he's not quite the meat-head action star that a lot of people see him as. He'll look at these things and bring up a list of thirty things you could do to make this hour of gameplay, from a narrative standpoint, more immersive, more interesting. So we take it back to shop, and maybe half of them are things we can do, and half of them aren't - but it's an interesting bit of feedback that otherwise wouldn't exist, wouldn't be solicited, that happens because he's involved in the process.

It does, and probably the thing I've realised the most over the last couple of years, now being a lot closer to people in Hollywood and seeing some of their process, is just how little I - or anybody else around games - know about storytelling. I give a lot of people respect for their effort, and a lot of the time they can do some really good things, but there's such a depth and vocabulary involved in film-making that we're just completely ignorant of.

Try as we might, we're not film-makers - and those are the collaborations that are the most interesting to me, to get some of those people working together to bleed and blend those lines, and get some of the expertise into a game... as opposed to an abstract sharing of ideas, which is what we do.

It certainly has, and I think a lot of it has changed because we're making so much more money than they are. There's certainly no shortage of guys that look at games and see them as toys, and meaningless bullsh*t, and now look at revenue - and for their own survival's sake have to care, and have to get involved.

Hollywood and games, over the next decade, you'll see some really interesting things happen. My curiosity is always about the execution of those things, because we don't speak the same language. Oftentimes people in Hollywood struggle to understand the creative decisions that we make - they don't get why something is more fun than something else, or why a character would need to be changed completely to work as a videogame character.

I think that's probably really hard to get unless you play games. I don't know there's an academic way to understand why Mario is fun, or what's fun about a raid in World of Warcraft, or why it's cool to shiv people in the neck when you're playing Dark Athena - I don't know there's an abstract way of explaining that.