Keeping it Edgy

Well I'm really happy with the Metacritic score, the critical acclaim and the 75 awards we've won worldwide. I don't think I could ask for any more than that - I didn't think I'd be up there accepting a BAFTA award, or getting the DICE award for best action game. That just blew me away.

Do we wish the sales were better? Yeah, but we learned a lot. We launched in a really tough window, in an economic climate that wasn't that great. I think that Dead Space: Extraction is going to benefit a lot from the original, and we're already getting a tonne of publicity on that. If we ever make any Dead Space games they'll benefit from the fact that we had great critical acclaim.

Within EA it's the highest-rated internally-made game for the last year, and I think it's probably our highest-rated action game in the last five years.

Well, we did pull the game in two weeks early - it went through Sony and Microsoft test with flying colours. We didn't get bounced once, so we were able to release two weeks early. I think maybe part of it wasn't having online, but other than that... EA came back and I think learned a lot about how much to spend on new IP at launch. Maybe we underinvested in the beginning - it was a good investment, but maybe it needed more.

But the name is surely out there now, and the awards really helped. If you look back at the history of videogames, a lot of times it's been the second game that's benefitted from the first game's critical success.

Yes, there was probably a longer, more consistent tail on it. What I mean by that is that each week it was selling the same amount of units for a long time. A lot of the time it will dip until it completely drops off, but even today it's still selling a pretty consistent amount of units per week.

I'm confident - it is an experiment, but there's going to be 50 million Wiis out there by the time the game comes out, so if you only hit 2 per cent of the installed base and you've got a huge number.

I don't know - there have been some already, Resident Evil and House of the Dead, that have done really well, so we're pushing for that 80-plus-rated game, and that'll put you in the top 5 per cent of all Wii games... because most do not have a great score.

Marketing's always the key. We're coming out a little bit earlier, so hopefully not in the middle of a whole bunch of other stuff, but also the gameplay - you haven't seen this kind of gameplay on the Wii. You've got zero G, and a lot of the mechanics that we had in Dead Space, and more, we've put into Extraction. It's a pretty robust game.