Midway There

Midway is a name that goes back a long way in the history of the games industry, particularly having had such a strong arcade tradition. But while the more recent past has been a little quiet, the company's gearing up for a key presence on the next-generation platforms.

Here David Zucker, CEO and president, talks exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz about the challenges of such a move, the importance of multiplayer, why the games industry isn't well represented in the mainstream media, and why single-player games are incomplete.

I think from a pure action standpoint, there's really nothing like it. Some people are comparing it to Max Payne, but you've got to look at the mass destructibility. Go play the demo and see the things that explode around you. Interacting with the environment really shows you what the next-gen systems can do with good technology.

Yeah, we can see the sessions, and [as of the end of August] it's tracking towards 1 million downloads, which would be very big.

But you can look at some of the times and actually for people from New Zealand, the average session is over 70 minutes - maybe they're exploding everything in the environment.

Yes, obviously, we started working on Stranglehold as our first big next-gen title, and we've been working on it for a number of years. But the film tie-in aspect is really only the John Woo tie-in - it's the spiritual successor to [1992 John Woo film] Hard Boiled, but it's not based on Hard Boiled.

Yes, exactly, it's really bringing the cinematic action style of the best of what a great John Woo Hong Kong action film can bring, and it brings some of those elements into the game world.

Yes, it's going to happen, and vice versa. Games drawing from Hollywood and Hollywood drawing from games. With Wheelman we've got Vin Diesel, and there we're looking at the cinematic, thinking about the best car chase movies in the history of film.

And that's what we're drawing from, that's the feeling we want you to get when you're playing Wheelman, that's what we're aiming for.

Well we've been focused on this next-generation, really now for a couple of years. We've sunk over USD 100 million just in the technology for next-gen development. It all starts with Stranglehold, we've got BlackSite coming, Unreal Tournament 3, Wheelman, and really a healthy schedule for next year, which we'll be talking more about later this year.

We have been focused on making this transition for some time. We started with a distributed technology based on a common code base to try and leverage technology across multiple studios for the long haul, for this entire next generation.

We were not as happy as we wanted to be with our performance on the PS2 and Xbox console cycle, so we've been very focused on growing our market share in this cycle.

We believe in the Wii, we had four launch titles, we have three more this year. What's great about it is that it's obviously expanding the base for casual, and bringing gamers that weren't buying games consoles to buy consoles now

It's had a great startâ¦you know the GameCube had a great start too, but we think the Wii is going to do much better than the GameCube did, and we weren't surprised by it.

I think it's going to be interesting to see how the growth rate continues to ramp as we start to see games like Stranglehold, and Halo, and Grand Theft Auto, and these titles that are really going to take advantage of what the PS3 and Xbox 360 can do. These are games that won't be available on the Wii.

There'll be a nice expansion of the market, and we've got a pretty big commitment to the Wii.

Absolutely. I think with the Wii, the family can play it, grandmothers play it, housewives play it - they haven't been exposed to games before, but you've also got core gamers. There are M-rated titles - Mortal Kombat: Armageddon which is doing quite well, you see Resident Evil doing well on the Wii.

So sure, it's a different user-base, but it can also be a user-base that graduates up to the Xbox 360 and PS3 over time.

Continuing to expand and grow. My six year-old boy is playing Club Penguin and Webkinz, and they all have community elements, people are exposed to it at a young age, so I think it's only going to continue to grow.

Multiplayer is a big part of our initiative, you'll see Stranglehold has a really cool six-player multiplayer where you'll be able to go into the Tequila Time slow-motion - never been done before in a multiplayer arena.

BioShock's a game that a lot of people are talking about, but there's no multiplayer, no online feature in that. We think it's going to be critical for a big next-gen title to have that additional feature and functionality woven into the gameplay.

So all of our major next-gen games going forward will have a very big commitment to multiplayer.

I think BioShock's going to be a great game, it's definitely getting great reviews, but it's interesting that there's no online, there's no multiplayer. For an Xbox 360 game, in this day and age, to be a really top game - from our standpoint it's pretty hard to see how you have a complete game without multiplayer.

Well, look around, not just at Midway, look around. It's hard - believe me, it's hard.

I don't know, it depends on the title. Certain titles, with existing IP, existing teams, probably have a better hold on that. But if a title gets delayed, typically, people don't want to delay it again.

Sure, absolutely, it is about game quality. There are probably games where too much additional time was added to them, which wasn't warranted by the demand for that game, but as far as adding to the quality of the game - it makes sense.

Not well. For all the great things about games, you look at the contribution from a culture and arts standpoint, learning, people being engaged, and discovery through the process of games the typical news hook is about some violent game, maybe some downloadable PC game that nobody played, in which you could shoot President Kennedy - that no retailer distributed, that no publisher was involved inâ¦and suddenly that's the games industry.

But here it is, it's bigger than the box office, but what's interesting is that in the mainstream media there are fans, people that play games that want them to succeed. They tend to be younger - the Larry King type, he doesn't know what the hell they are, but you're going to see over time, there's no question in my mind, in Midway's mind, the next Larry Kings will relate to games as just another form of entertainment - in fact, not just another form of entertainment, but the form of entertainment.

If you talk to the other entertainment bodies, whether it's games, or movies - games is where the action is. There is no question that games has a bright future, as much as there is some political backlash right now, in the US at least any of the efforts to curtail the sale of games have all been met with failure.

I think the mainstream press still tends to hook on the negative issues associated with gaming, just like they probably did with comic books in the fifties, and movies when they first came out, but that'll pass, and it's already starting to happen. You see 35 year-old editors now that are enmeshed in games.