The Future of Atari - Part One

Well, it's brand new, it's an organically-run studio. I always think the reality is that studios have a certain level of gravitas based around the franchises they're responsible for, the number of people, etc.

So from that point of view, it doesn't have anything - but it does have awesome potential, not only because of Paulina Bozek's ability and experience, but because London is such an opportunity to recruit the right people.

There are so many companies chopping and getting our of product development, I don't quite know what's going on, but there's a huge amount of talent available, and we want to bring them to work with us - because I think we have a good vision about what games we want to build, how we want them to be network-centric, and a lot of people are excited by that.

So I think it'll grow a lot in importance. Phil works mainly from the Hammersmith office, and so I think it's always helpful having the studio near the leader, and I think that will help the focus.

But we have a big operation in Lyon, a lot of creative management in New York, so London's not the only place - we're not retreating to the UK, we're adding with the UK.

Well I certainly think it will be one of the most important studios, but I think it will have a different set of brands and feelings to it, because Paulina's aim is for more of a popular culture set of products and I think it will feel more mass market innovation in the way that we're thinking about web games, doing things that bring new consumers into the market - I think that's very important.

I think every product has its own qualities and merits, so it's hard to say in aggregate that the line-up does this, or it does that, but if you take an extreme of Ready 2 Rumble on the Wii you've got a very clearly-defined mass market product with parody characters clearly aimed at a family audience, that can be socialising as well as playing the game.

I think that is important for that product, but at the opposite end of the scale I'd say that The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 there's a developer in CD Projekt that really understands its consumer, and has dedicated huge amounts of time and effort to quality, story, and character development - those two games are not going to sell to the same people, but in their own market will definitely deliver on that vision.

And there's QJ [the working title for the forthcoming collaboration with Mizuguchi-san's Q Entertainment] - we were very scant on details, but we wanted to have an excuse to bring Mizuguchi-san over, and it was great of him to make the journey. When that ships I think it'll hopefully bring us one step closer towards that goal.

No, she's going to do first-person shooters. Soccer and first-person shooters would be perfect for her... [smiles]

She's been given a broad canvass to paint on - she's obviously centred in the social entertainment and gaming sector, and that's what excites and interests her - building a team of like-minded innovators. So I think she's going to stay in that kind of space.

But what I think has changed in her approach is multiple platforms and new business models, and that can be a really amplifying effect to a team's creativity.

The actual studio part of the headcount is only the initial half dozen people that are the architects of what the studio will be. However, we're looking for office space to put about 150 people in the London area, so that's our first practical limit. I don't think we'll have 150 people right away, but I don't think you want to hire quite that fast, because you can make a lot of mistakes.

Game designers, obviously engineers that will want to - in particular - have game experience but will want to add to that some network experience. That's a super-important part of what we're doing. And we'll also hire network engineers, that we want to give game experience.

So it's a hybrid collection of people - we don't want people that have just created web applications and don't know anything about games, nor do we want people who have only ever made boxed goods games, and don't really know anything about a web experience. We have to bring those two schools together.

Yeah, it does - because our business focus, our management team that we're assembling, is really going to be focused on building the Atari network brand, and we're assembling a different management team for - and right now our internal working name for the company is Districo - that will develop its own management team and will become an independent management team. It's chairman is Patrick Starr, we've just hired a new CEO of that, and we'll announce at the beginning of January who that is... it's an industry veteran.

We don't feel we need to own our own distribution. Where we're taking Atari network means we don't have to have direct distribution into retail - we have products that go into retail, but we're very happy being a shareholder and founding member of Districo to do that job for us.

It's a five-year plan.