Stainless Steel

Probably, yeah. I have no idea what the inner workings of Square were about it. It did surprise us, just as a general principle - let's face it, Square aren't short of cash, so why sell IP? Because as soon as you sell it, not only have you not got it anymore, but somebody else has got it and therefore there's more out there on the market that is competing with your own products. I'm not complaining, though. I've no idea if they sold anything else, but I guess it all helps cashflow - sell a few things like that, it gets an entire office full of people paid for a while.

That's right. I don't think Square would ever have done anything with Carmageddon but that doesn't mean to say that therefore they would sell it. That's pure conjecture; we certainly never asked them if they were going to do something because we didn't want to rock the boat. We didn't want them going 'actually, hang on a minute - why are we selling this?' So we just said 'yeah, yeah, fine, OK!'

It's a very good question. Much of it is Carmageddon coming back, but we're not going to rely on that. It has to appeal also to a completely fresh audience, in the same way as it did before. We appeared from nowhere when it came out in '97 - we were unknown, SCI were really unknown, so it had to stand up on its own two feet. Obviously the violence and the press and everything gave it publicity, but that's not why it sold. The initial demo quite famously crashed the internet in the UK. It came out and we took the internet down. This was in 1997, which means the internet was probably one small building somewhere in Swindon... The demo then had loads of people playing it, and because it was fun. It really had to stand up.

So what we're trying to do now is the same thing. We can't just sit back and go 'oh, people will buy it because it's Carmageddon.' It has been a dormant brand for a long time. And we're very much now in a culture of try before you buy, which obviously had a little bit back then with the covermounts, but not quite so much. Now because you can download demos, the game has to be good. So yes, we are appealing to previous customers with brand recognition, but at the same time we're certainly not relying on that. It has to be good enough to be attractive to brand new people.

Well, we've had bad experiences with demos. Novadrome on XBLA, that was a big lesson. Novadrome was a game that we co-published with Disney - it was our IP and we still own that IP - that had the hell tested out of it, by us internally, by Microsoft and by Disney. Everyone loved it, and it went out there and didn't sell at all. It sold really badly. We did a full post-mortem on it with Disney, and it was the demo. We'd played it too much, ourselves and Microsoft and Disney, and we didn't realise how steep the learning curve was. So the demo went out there - and if you don't capture people in the first 10, 20 seconds you've lost them. It's really, really fast. You have to capture people quickly, Novadrome taught us that in a big way.

Which is why on Duels of the Planeswalkers we then passed that lesson onto Wizards and between us put a phenomenal amount of effort into demos. What Wizards actually did on that was contracted a company to effectively get people in from the streets, real Xbox players, who they asked 'have you ever played a trading card game before?' If they said yes they weren't allowed. They were then take to Wizards and asked again 'have you ever played a trading card game?' because some of them have lied just to get into Wizards, and if they said 'I have actually, I play Magic every day' they were booted out.

So it was people who'd never touched Magic before, and our lead programmer went out there and stayed for a month in Seattle. They cliniced the game, they videoed it and they then sent back what happened on the demo, they made changes, they did it again and again. That amount of effort in, a month of iteration like that, just on the demo - because Magic: The Gathering's a very complex game anyway - and our conversion rate on Magic is incredible. It's tenfold of what some people quote. I'd say roughly that as many people do convert and buy the full game as don't, put it that way.

That's absolutely right. We have obviously had a lot of experiences of the download stuff so we've obviously also had a lot of experiences of mistakes. The problem that we had originally with [the demo of] Crystal Quest on XBLA was that it was the first levels. Crystal Quest starts out very, very simply, so what you weren't shown from the demo is what the game becomes. When Hollywood puts out the trailer for a film, they don't show you the first 30 seconds of the film - they show you all the exciting bits, bang bang bang, from all the way through, so we need to think about that in terms of demos. So what you were saying about people turning off demos and going for trailers, I can really see where they're coming from because we've been burned badly. However, we've also been successful for demos. I think if you've got the confidence in the game and the game is good enough, and you really carefully design the demo, as you say, like a separate product almost, the demo should work well for you.

Oh, yes. It'll definitely be bespoke, and it will be a demo not a trailer, definitely. We did the same thing originally back in '97 - the demo of Carma was one level that was a city level, and was carefully constructed to be a demo, to give you a really good cross-section of the game. And it did really well for us. Unless a demo hooks you quickly, it can be an anti-demo if you're not careful. There are games out there, I'm sure, that a demo could never work - maybe a complicated RTS or something - and I think maybe for them a video is better, because you're never going to get people to invest enough time to understand the game, and they're going to go 'ah, this looks a bit crap'. However, for Carmageddon it's got to be fun right from the word go - that's the whole point of it. You've got to burst out laughing, and you can get that right away from word go.

Yeah! Or running them over in a particular way. Actually, I'm sure you know, the key thing with Carmageddon is it's not the violence, it's the humour. There are so few games out there that have come out since, really really few, that are genuinely funny. That's what we're really trying to do, and that's what was lost when other people worked on Carmageddon. They didn't understand that the essence of it was that me and my business partner Neil Barnden, who did the art side, we've both got crazy senses of humour and we're well known for being stupid. That essence got put into the game - it's an idiotic game, we're really proud of that and we're going to make the new one as idiotic as possible.

I'll be quite happy with that!