The Right to Remain Silent

Yes, and you can't really predict it - you can't make that happen, I don't think. All you can do is put stuff out to places where the people who are doing that social media stuff are going to look at it and hope for the best.

Yeah, we were very careful. It is lewd, rude and politically incorrect, but we were very careful to tread a line where we didn't actually use any real swear words. We have things like 'ball bags', but there's no actual oathing in there - we don't f**k and we don't swear or use blasphemy. So there's a lot of rudeness and scatological humour, but I suppose that's Northern Ireland for you [laughs]. But we were quite self-censoring in that we tried not to make it gratuitous or puerile, we tried to make it witty in the way that we used that stuff. That was the intent anyway, and hopefully it was funny, not just kind of gross... So no, we didn't have any of those issues.

It is lewd, rude and politically incorrect, but we were very careful to tread a line where we didn't actually use any real swear words

The only ones we did have was making sure that everything was technically compliant, really. Likewise, in the trailer for the original game, someone gets his head blown off and we were expecting to have a question mark about that, but everything just sailed through. And I have to say that working with Telltale has been an absolute delight on episodes two and three, because we haven't had any sort of heavy-handed editorial stuff at all from them. It's all been great support and sharing of their experience.

Wow, that's a big question. Well, my memory goes back to the LucasArts games, because my kids were playing those - Full Throttle, Sam and Max, Monkey Island and all those games. What struck me about those is, compared to early games like Streets of Rage and Sonic the Hedgehog, which my kids started off on, those LucasArts games struck me as having wit and storytelling, and started a whole genre of others doing the same sort of thing. I think it was that sort of combination of humour and irreverence that was compelling about and which people were nostalgic for, and Hector was really looking back at those games, almost as a sort of tribute. So I think Telltale's success has really been built on reissuing a lot of those classic games on different platforms and they're now looking to move into new games in that genre. It'll be interesting to see what happens next. That's all I can say, that there's a generation of people who grew up with those games and from that there's a great nostalgia for what they delivered. I think those qualities are delivered in other forms of games as well, I don't think it's a tradition that died out - it got transmogrified into some of the RPG games and total immersion games. There's a huge amount of wit and daft characters and things, it just evidences itself in different ways, but I think Telltale are demonstrating there's a place for what they do. People like it.

Yes. I haven't got a clue [laughs]. I hope that I've found out in a positive way on episode two and three of Hector... I think careful puzzle construction is one of the things that Telltale were certainly helpful with. That seems to be the key to their whole success, really - that emphasis on the internal logic and structure, and drilling down into that rather than kidding themselves that something is working when it's not. It comes down to this in any form of content - following the logic of something, not getting carried away beyond that. I guess they just have so much experience of doing stuff, because a lot of their staff were at LucasArts years ago. There's a whole tradition there.

Well, it's different for different platforms, I think. We're releasing two and three as separate episodes, maybe because episode one was already out, and then the box set will hopefully leverage it onto yet more platforms. I think that's the thinking.

Yes, I think it's been seen in other markets that it's the long tail of property - getting as much out of it as you can by packaging it and repackaging it, because the up-front costs of producing any form of IP these days are such that you need to get as many sales as you can to actually keep going, afford the next one or even break even in some cases.

Yes, we're working to deadlines but they're deadlines that we've agreed between us. They're pretty tight, but they're doable. There's definitely a constraint on the production because there's a constraint on the money. We haven't got huge budgets to play with, because potentially the uptake may not be huge. I think Telltale are taking a risk by investing in something that was an iPhone property and did okay there, but who's to say what will happen next? Maybe that niche of people was that niche of people. We don't know yet, so they're taking a risk by producing the next two, but we'll see what happens. It's very heartening that they can embrace a small independent from the middle of nowhere with no background in producing games, frankly. That's a tribute to them, really.