The Sky's Not the Limit

Martyn is blessed because he's been extremely successful. From our perspective I value the relationship with Ubisoft, because it was a really good one - they contributed creatively to the product, and I think it was an ideal one for both sides. They have a much higher overhead base, and unlike the relationship often with publishers which is one based on, ultimately conflict, they sent it off to testing - which they funded - they sent it to casual testers and gave us the feedback... they contributed an awful lot, and to me that's an example of a win-win scenario. So I'm not in any way anti-publishers.

I would say that previous relationships that we've had with publishers have been incredibly negative, because they've contributed almost nothing, and we've been put in a position where we've actually made a loss on games they've earned millions of dollars in profit on.

I won't name names, and I'm not whingeing about it, but the funny thing is that they come back to us later and want to do another project with us... but anyway, I certainly have no criticism whatsoever of Ubisoft, just praise.

I'll tell you exactly what attracts me, and that's that the original assets are 640 x 480 which look fantastic on an iPhone. The moment you put them onto a high-res big television, they start looking very blocky.

Absolutely, yes. Going forward we'll be using different technology, so there will be the scalability, but actually on those older games we don't have that.

What's interesting about a game like BASS is that when we first wrote it, it was for DOS - it didn't have any Windows support whatsoever. So when Windows 95 (I think it was) stopped supporting DOS, the game was effectively dead. And when some hackers came along and asked for the source code, we gave it away for free because we'd lost the opportunity to exploit it. The programmers formed a group called Scumm VM, a very talented group, and they adapted a number of old adventures which, otherwise, wouldn't have been available to play.

What I want to do going forward is have a relationship with our consumer where we'll sell it on the iPhone for a couple of quid, but we'll probably give the PC version away on the basis that we're on a different model - we need to generate revenues to build new games.

So if they want more adventure games, if they enjoy this type of game and want us to make more of them, then yes - they can have it for free and not pay if they don't want to - but otherwise pay us a bit of money and allow us to continue writing games within this new context.

Yes, we could go through a publisher, but if we do that it's going to cost you USD 20-30 because of the value chain. So we want to build a direct relationship instead, but be totally open on where we stand, what are costs are, and so on.

Well, remember that BASS we've put in lots of stuff, but it's not hugely expensive - so this is not a product that has cost us an awful lot of money. So therefore we can actually afford to test the water.

Well, I do a bit of consultancy, and my overhead is almost zero - so even if it doesn't work, it's such an exciting time that we have the complete flexibility to change. We're very clear on the vision of what we want to achieve, but we can change it if it fails.

I'm absolutely blown away at the way that the time and passion spent by fans of the game, and Revolution. People talk about the first time they played BASS, or Broken Sword - it's in the public consciousness, people remember it, and I'm very flattered by that, so I think we're in a great position to be able to do something like this.