Something to GRIN About

We worked closely with Capcom Japan and I was really scared before the project started, because I could see a number of obstacles we'd need to clear before we could work efficiently on the title.

But we had Nakai-san and Eshiro-san working with us on the title as creative advisors representing Capcom Japan. They were in on all correspondence regarding design specification, reviewing builds - so we were very close to Capcom at every stage of the production, which was a must to be able to achieve that Capcom 'feel' - though obviously we'd done our research into previous Capcom games.

Capcom came to us - they used a production company to find a couple of different developers suitable for the job that had the technical know-how that Capcom themselves understood would be needed in order to create a game such as a current-gen Bionic Commando.

They came up with I don't know how many studios, of which GRIN was one, and then Inafune-san - the head of R&D worldwide - came over to the Stockholm office. He looked at our technology and we had some meetings with him, and he was basically like "It's going to be GRIN or Bionic Commando will not happen!"

He was very pleased with the vision that we had for the game, and the technology we had available to realise that vision.

Oh yes, I couldn't believe it the first time I was told we were even being considered for work with Capcom. Even more so when it turned out that it was Bionic Commando, which was one of my favourite games.

Yes, it's going well, and has been for a few years. One of the reasons is that it's become easier to find personnel, and there's better education now that's aimed at making games. Art, production, animation and design - that's not a big issue any more.

But I don't know why the Nordic region has been so successful - in fact in general Nordic companies have been successful when you consider that there aren't that many people.

So far it's gone well. It's a new concept - the design is innovative. It does have some resemblance to SpiderMan, but in my honest opinion it is very different, and the whole swing mechanic is incorporated into the game - it's used for fighting, interacting with the environment... we've really built the game on that mechanic.

If the swing mechanic doesn't appeal to a person that plays the game, that will be negative, of course - but in general the feedback has been very good. Some people like the game, some people don't, as always, but in general there have been a lot of good comments, particularly about the multiplayer elements.

That's really a question for our CEO, but at the moment our goal is to sort organisation, make everything stable and adapt to the size that we are right now. We don't have any immediate plans to expand right now - it's very easy to be too aggressive and end up with all the problems from growing too fast.