Zoonami Keeper

Martin Hollis on GoldenEye, GameCity and why he loves WiiWare

Feature by Dan Pearson Contributor

Published on Oct. 25, 2010

GamesIndustry.bizI'd argue that those games, particularly GoldenEye, really helped to define that console generation, and in fact multiplayer FPS as a genre - do you feel that the genre has continued to innovate or has it become stale, retrograde even?

Martin Hollis

First of all, those games were a particular style of FPS, and I don't feel that anyone has really carried that onwards. I feel that the consoles have lost ground and momentum with FPS since those days. Nowadays the interesting things that are happening for FPS tend to be for PC, and that has a different culture and it has different styles of gameplay. Different core mechanics and semi-core mechanics.

The experience of playing it is very different, very solitary. There's online, but that's a kind of solitary. I think that the genre's moved away from that idea of getting people together in a room, more towards, more of an Xbox experience - I think that's a great shame.

I have to admit that when I look at FPS games, I'm always looking for innovation, and I don't tend to be that excited by what people have done. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was retrograde, but there's an awful lot of things that I've seen that aren't really that new.

GamesIndustry.bizYou raise an interesting point about the solitary nature of modern gaming there, despite all the talk of connectivity and community. When I look through the stack of fifty or so games under my TV, I struggle to find more than three or four which offer local multiplayer.

Martin Hollis

I think that solitaryisation, that atomisation of people and their play styles is a great shame. It is more convenient for people, but it is less emotive. The best experiences I've ever had playing games has been with one, two or three other friends, all in a room, playing anything from Super Bomberman onwards. I think it's a shame that there are so many games that support this one person on their own, this alone style of playing with other people, and not so many that support more togetherness.

One of the things I like about the Wii is that it's more about the family and the living room, more about bringing people together. Maybe something good can come out of Kinect with that.

GamesIndustry.bizI read something that you tweeted earlier today about the nature of the education system. Do you think that our industry is being fed the right sort of candidates by the schools and universities? Are there people who purport to be educating people for an industry job but are actually doing nothing of the sort?

Martin Hollis

Good question. My feeling is that, speaking as someone who works with people who've come through the education system, and I want them to be well trained and well served by that system, and I also want my country to do well in the sphere of games... My criticism would be that the traditional subjects like mathematics and computer science, the real problem they have is getting the bright people to choose those subjects. Especially at university.

That's connected with my experience in Cambridge. Their intake in computer science has shrunk by half over a decade and a bit. From my point of view that's a disaster because there's just as many smart people, but for whatever reason they're not choosing computer science and that impacts me personally and it impacts the industry at large in this country because you need programmers to make a videogame.

The other thing I'd say is that I'd highly question that the education system is thinking in the right way in order to be able to provide game designers of any calibre at all. I think it's an immense challenge. People have come to me and said, can you help us with our syllabus in game design, and I don't know where to start, really.

What I would like, in an ideal world, is to be able to speak to a graduate of a game design course and feel that we could talk the same language and maybe even that they'd have some fresh perspectives that I hadn't seen.

That's what happens when I talk to art graduates and that's what happens when I talk to software engineering graduates. Why isn't the education system able to deliver to that enormous amount of people who are prepared to pay a great deal of money to learn how to play games?