Saying Hello to Hello
The MD of indie outfit Hello Games, Sean Murray, talks about the experience of starting out from scratch
Basically it's us, we're self-funded. We used to have decent salaries that we've passed up - I bought a house with that, and now I've sold it to fund this.
Yeah, it's not insignificant, what we're doing and what we've put on the line. We're not eating out of dustbins or anything like that, but we are back in beans-on-toast land. But that's the basic need - it's now or never, but I don't want that to be a badge of honour.
Well, we all got together, talked about the games that we loved - and there was something raw in the group about a love of old school gaming. Not necessarily retro gaming, but the feeling you got from games you played when you were kids... games that had charm and personality and good solid gameplay mechanics.
That's something that's started to come back in through Live Arcade I think, and iPhone and PSN - those markets are opening up again and people want to play that stuff. On Nintendo there are a lot of those games that are just whittled down to raw gameplay.
We always wanted to work on something like that - it was achievable, to just concentrate on the gameplay, and while we've announced the game, people haven't had a real chance to play it - I think that idea will come through.
No, we'll live or die by how it plays, but we think it plays well. We wanted to make something that was fun, and from when we started - literally a couple of weeks in - we were sat playing something that was fun, and we've just built on top of that.
We came to the idea by sitting around talking about different ideas - we all had ideas, and we had to come to an agreement. There was one idea we kept coming back to, and it really solidified when we were playing with a bunch of toys, using them to demonstrate, building little levels with Lego and that sort of thing. There's something very powerful about demonstrating your ideas with Optimus Prime or GI Joe in your hand...
Yeah, I hope so - we've had it playable from day one and iterated since then, and then there's also that amazing ability to not have to run ideas past someone, so we can just add. There's subtlety there that I think will surprise people... I like to paraphrase the old saying, that it's 1 per cent perspiration and 99 per cent iteration - just taking that raw idea and making it better through play-testing.
So we're not doing anything because a publisher has said they want it, or because it needs to tick a milestone box - we're not thinking in those terms. We're able to iterate and focus on that entirely.