Cutting the Mustards

Maybe I didn't elaborate enough yesterday. I think that hook is a rare thing. That opportunity to have graphics as the hook is rare, because you're not really going to get that with an Xbox game. I think that was kind of a one-time deal for us.

Also, the thing with Unreal Engine 3 is that, we already know, there are a lot of other people using it. So we'll start to see some really pretty games coming soon.

So like every other game we've made, we'll find different things to become the hook. And when I talk about the hook, it really it just that immediate [clicks fingers] that makes you look at it again, but then you have to impress gamers and press with what the meat is of your game.

But we're not going to get slack on the visuals, the visual bar that we've set, we'll continue to raise it as much as we can.

Well obviously we're owned by Epic, we're part of the Epic family, so I think one of the things that Chair does is work on more strategic sort of things than just making a great game. It definitely made strategic sense.

I'm sure Epic could have put out Unreal Engine 3 for mobile and just said, here's Epic Citadel, an example of what it can do, but it's not an actual game, it's not been through the actual process of what it take to optimise and create a game. That's just not the way that Epic likes to do business.

When Unreal 3 was being developed they created Gears of War to showcase what this stuff could really do. Infinity Blade was really the Gears of War of the mobile space where we could say "here's our technology, but here's a concrete example of what we can do with that technology when you create a game from start to finish."

It's been through the QA process, it's been through optimising, you know that it's a fully featured game. So you know that if you licence the engine you're getting something that's been through the trial of fire. So that was certainly the strategic objective.

But, the main objective was, let's see if we can make a really awesome game that works on these devices. So we worked really hard until we thought we had something that was cool.

It will be different. You're tapping into some core things.

There's a lot of power in having that device in your pocket. I don't necessarily think that tablets are going to be carted around everywhere you go. Maybe if they were a little smaller, but I don't know if we want them to be smaller.

I think right now, the tablet market is less than a year old, it's really in its infancy, right? It seems like a lot of the games on tablets are... There's a few unique ones, but it's kind of like a bigger version of my phone that I use in different ways.

So I assume what will happen is that we'll start to see more divergent games, because they really are two completely different kinds of platforms, you use them in completely different ways. So I hope we'll see different kinds of games which are cool for that platform - like the board games where you have phones around a tablet, like using them for your tiles for Scrabble or something like that.

I'm sure there's unique way to use the iPad, but I think you're absolutely right, that widespread adoption is certainly not going to happen tomorrow. Maybe in twenty years, if we're all walking around with these holographic tablets which project out of our fingers. [laughs]

That is the key - Is it with me all the time?