Quantic Dreams' David Cage
On the development of Heavy Rain, Move integration and the difficulty of the triple-A market
One of the most distinctive and acclaimed titles released this year, Heavy Rain has also gone on to be a significant commercial success, to the surprise of its creators and its publisher. The title gets a second lease of life later this year when it adds motion control support, becoming one of the first core games to make use of Sony's Move technology.
At the recent GDC Europe, GamesIndustry.biz took the opportunity to meet with founder of Quantic Dream and director of the game, David Cage. In this exclusive interview, he discusses the vision of the game and the importance of maintaining the direction of the title, why he turned himself into a brand to promote it, his thoughts on the increasingly risky triple-A console space, and why Move needs to be about more than just pleasing a casual gaming audience.
This is what I called enlightened dictatorship. It's all about being the vision holder and guaranteeing the consistency and the direction you want from the project. But at the same time remaining open to ideas because you can't think of everything and you don't only have the best ideas yourself. Sometimes my ideas are just crap. I'm lucky in that I have people around me saying, "you know what, David? This is really bad." That makes the project what it is. I'm really fortunate to have this team around me, we're very close.
We did a Power Point presentation to pitch the project to Sony and if you review that now that the game is released the presentation is incredibly faithful to what we've done. Sony said it's insane how every single bullet point in the presentation is still present in the final game. The overall vision was extremely clear. I just had a two page synopsis at the time, but I knew it was the story of four characters, it was about love and redemption - all those key things were there from the start.
That didn't happen for a number of reasons. The first was that they understood it's not an ego thing. It wasn't to make me feel important. It was a business decision. A business decision that guarantees their creative freedom. You're right in that it is a difficult balance to find. At some point if I'd have got a big head and started to feel like a genius there are people around me who would have said "no you're not. You have a team surrounding you."
It's true, not many people are in this position. I don't know if not many people want to do it, but honestly it's not an uncomfortable position. When you go for two years on the road telling people your game is going to be great and they should trust you - your game better be great. Because otherwise people will remember and they will kill you. Really, it's what happens. I wonder if publishers maybe don't want people to take this position so much because there is a fear of creating stars. In the same way as it happened with movies. In the old days the studios were the stars and the directors and actors were just employees. But things change and it's been a total switch. Maybe it's an unconscious fear that may happen in games but it needs to happen because you need more vision holders, more voices, more faces for this industry.
Often studios are run by programmers or people who are used to building things from scratch and they don't always want to be in the limelight or be onstage discussing how they feel about their projects. It's a slightly different job, making games and talking about games to the press and consumers, and not everyone is comfortable doing that.
It's very difficult to get into this market and we could only do it because we have been around for 14 years, because we did Nomad Soul with David Bowie, because we did The Casting demo. Each time we climbed step by step in reaching the point where we can have this credibility and at the same time working with triple-A projects. But if I was starting from scratch now there is no way I could get that, no way.
But the indie environment is very interesting because they have the creative freedom. They don't have the financial means yet, but again, step by step, that path we've followed for the past 14 years can be faster by going online with online games. You can do them very cheap, very fast, very interesting, do another one with more money and climb up until you reach that triple-A project.
Honestly, Sony was the perfect partner for Heavy Rain and I'm not sure many other publishers would have picked it up because it was such a big risk. It's much less of a risk now but when they signed it, it was a big risk. Sony said that even if it's not a huge commercial success the platform will benefit from the image of promoting original games. It definitely made sense. I think that when you want to do a triple-A project with a publisher you need to have a very strong track record otherwise it's difficult to get their trust.