Way of the Ninja

We did. We're really proud of what we were able to achieve and we did some breakthrough stuff, particularly in the story-telling and cinematics and we were able to work with some absolutely incredible people like Andy Serkis. We were able to pioneer the performance capture and so forth. So the reception for it has been absolutely brilliant.

As a person to work with you couldn't ask for better. He's extremely professional and really knows what he's doing. Andy had never worked in games at all and I don't think he'd ever played a game when he first came on board. It was really interesting to him because he's seeing a media that he hasn't worked in before and saw some big opportunities to push his craft forwards. He was able to bring a huge amount to the project. He didn't just act in the game but was our dramatic director, so he directed all of the cinematics while Tameen Antonaides (co-founder of Ninja Theory) directed the gameplay.

But then Andy also bought a huge amount of other stuff to the game – he was involved in the story quite heavily, particularly the character art, he also did the casting which was done exactly like a film. He did workshops with all the actors who did complete read-throughs on set. They did a complete run through of the entire game acting it all out like a theatre production, so they really understood what they were doing, and he ran it like a film production in a really professional way. He brought a lot more to the team than just playing a character.

I think you can only do that if you've got professional talent from those other industries. It's something we did across the board, we brought people in from other industries and media who'd never worked in games. There's a company called Play It By Ear out in New York who do sound effects and they had never worked in games before. We worked with them on the sound effects – they actually did the sound effects for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Absolutely. If you want to make something's that really high-end and really engaging if you get the best talents from each discipline and you're able to integrate them effectively into the game then you're going to get the best possible results. So there's a lot of these relationships that we very much intend to maintain going forwards with our new games.

No we're not, we're working on a new IP.

Yes, we're looking at doing something really big and ambitious and absolutely build on our strengths in storytelling, cinematics and combat.

There's always more stuff to learn but I think we know the PlayStation 3 very intimately now. We had to build everything from the ground up because when we started there simply wasn't any middleware or anything like that.

It was nice to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive going in to new generation of consoles. From a practical standpoint it was very helpful for us to be able to get the most we could out of the PS3 at the time. Going forwards we are going cross-platform with this new game.

Yes, our new game is going to be PS3 and Xbox 360. We have actually signed it but we're not announcing to who at the moment.

We're looking at several things. We're certainly targeting a triple-A blockbuster, with two and a half years in production. We're actually looking at something in addition to that - we're considering opportunities in creating a CGI movie using the game engine alongside the game itself. The game is certainly the most important thing and we haven't decided for sure to do this, but it's something we're looking at. It's an interesting idea.

I think there's a lot of opportunities there and it's something we'll be exploring over the next year or so.

It's very interesting but it's not something we're doing right now. It's something we might consider doing a little bit further down the track.

It's a brutal environment out there for an independent, particularly considering the size of the games that we're developing. But we've now signed up the new game and the future looks pretty rosy for us.