Zoonami Keeper
Martin Hollis on GoldenEye, GameCity and why he loves WiiWare
There's no regulation that I know of on the quality of university level course for any subject, except for the barriers to entry that you need to cross to be an accredited institution.
To provide that for game design would be very tough, and I don't really believe that regulation is the right way to go about it. I don't think the government is agile enough to be able to solve those problems. I think it's a problem for education and for the game development community to solve together.
I also think that something like Skillset and what Ian Livingstone is trying to do is a very noble enterprise.
I think it is people fighting their corner, and I want to fight it too. It's my corner and I love it! Also, I love film. There's been intermittent support of film by the British government. I know the history of film, and if you look there you can see that, once upon a time, we had a fabulous film industry.
Economic conditions and no support from government meant it toppled and today 90 per cent of the films I watch are made in Hollywood. Once the ball has rolled in that direction it takes an immense amount of money and energy to revive that. There's been small attempts to try to do that for the British film industry, but really it's in nothing like the shape it was in during the '50s and '60s. The likelihood is that it never will be.
There's no reason for that because of the wealth of talent and the nature of culture in this country and fact that we all speak English and so on, there's no real reason for that other than we don't quite have the scale as America.
I think the same thing could happen in videogames. We could lose our position and the fact that the country punches above its weight, to an enormous degree, we could lose that. From time to time the economy does go a little bit wobbly and that's the nature of the economy, and during those times we should support the cultural future of the nation, even though you're trying to save pennies.
It's very easy to overlook it, because it's quite background. It's always there. It's quite easy to overlook that sort of background foundation. I think it is enormously important, and I think it's possible to support it in ways that are extremely cheap.
A staggering percentage of people in this country are very very passionate about videogames and are prepared to spend time to support events. GameCity has a very reasonable entry price and it has a completely different ethos to any other event I've seen anywhere else in the world - I think it's a fabulous thing, it should be cherished. It's my favourite event to go to.
Other events can be £200, $600, whatever entrance - that are much more 'professional', in quotation marks, that are more boring, I'm sorry to have to say. I think it captures the excitement, the more cultural, artistic elements, which is really what it's all about. Why can't there be more events that do that, as well as GameCity?
We'll be talking about game remakes and how important they are for understanding the cultural importance of these artefacts that happen to be videogames. How that informs modern game development and the future of game development.