Tuesday, May 13, 2008
What did you think of "State of Emergency"? One gamer told me it reminded him of your game "Smash T.V." with the sort of swarm gameplay of it.
I think that was kind of an exploitation number. It was like, OK, let's go out and cause hell and machine-gun people. That lasted about 10 minutes. It was fun for about 10 minutes. It was: I'm going out and slaughtering people by the millions and why? There was no motivation for the player. It was just wanton killing. I strongly believe in putting the player into a scenario where there's a reason you're doing things. You have a cause and you're not just out there creating mayhem. That's, I guess, my objection to "Grand Theft Auto." I really don't like the amoralistic games where you're out there doing bad stuff just for fun. It's kind of like video vandalism, you know? Maybe you could argue that it's better to have the guy break windows on the video screen than down the street [laughs]. I really don't know. To me, it is a little troubling -- maybe I'm just kind of old-fashioned -- to have the player take on an amoral role in a game. I feel strongly that the player should have a cause and be acting for the just.
You liked the malleability of arcades. If you wanted another button, you just drilled another hole and stuck another button in. But now that there are so many options with the consoles -- the Xbox with its 50 buttons and 12 joysticks -- have you thought about working in the console arena or are you sticking with arcades for the foreseeable future?
You know, it always seems like whatever they got is still not good enough [laughs]. It seems like the ultimate thing and then in a couple of years it's, "Yeah, this Xbox is kind of limited." So, I don't know if I'll ever make the transition. With arcades you can throw in your own hardware, whatever the latest, state-of-the-art thing is. It gives you a little more freedom. You don't have to cram it into a particular box.
[But] who knows? I guess it's sad that interaction is so hardware-dependent. You take a movie and you can play it on a TV set that's 40 years old, but video games are so dependent on [a particular] generation of hardware. It makes the art form more difficult and more fragile because there's so many games that were written for platforms that no longer exist, for hardware that no longer exists. It's problematic -- you don't have a universal medium.
"Defender" and "Pac-Man" share the title for highest-grossing video games of all time. I've read that there over a billion dollars in gross receipts for "Defender." Does that make you feel pretty proud?
It's a good little notch on your belt buckle, but the funny thing is in the video game business, like a lot of other businesses, it's "What have you done for me lately?" It's not satisfying to latch on to something that happened a quarter-century ago. You want to be contributing today and pushing forward and trying to do something new and something that might get people's attention. It's satisfying now and then, but you feel like you have to go out and do something more -- kind of like the rock group that had their big hit 30 years ago and they're playing Vegas. After a while, just playing the same old tune 300 nights a year, it gets a little old. You want to move on and do something new and cool. I think that's an exciting thing about this industry. It's amazing what new and interesting things that technology has allowed us to do in the last quarter-century. We went from little guys made of 27 pixels to photo-realistic 3-D animation. It's a hell of a quarter century.
What do you think it's going to look like in another quarter-century?
If the world's still here, which I hope it is ... That's a very good question. I guess you have to say the trend toward more photo-realism would just continue and obviously things would look better and better and better. You always say that at some point they're good enough. Like maybe we can stop worrying about making things look better when they're good enough, but it seems like they're never good enough [laughs].
The Madden games are a perfect example. The fundamental gameplay doesn't really change all that much year in and year out, it's just increasing the photo-realism and they'll probably be indistinguishable from a real game pretty soon, I would think.
We always say that; we were saying that in 1990. It was like, "Man, those guys look so good! There's no point in making them look any better than that." It's 12 years later and it's, "Man! They look so good!" It's hard to pooh-pooh that, but obviously it's more and more a process of refinement. You're right that at some point, we may reach diminishing returns and that'll be a real challenge for the industry because we won't be able to just sell on technological upgrades. We won't be able to say, "Well, it's the same old driving game, but everything looks cooler!" And we'll have to make something actually more interesting. Probably we'll just be branding things with the brand of the moment. We'll have "Justin Timberlake Driving" and that kind of stuff. You look at TV and movies and the stuff looks great, but you're continually telling the same old boy-meets-girl story in a way that relates to people of that era. Video games are moving into that -- where it will be more about the story and more about the star and things like that rather than technology. But I don't think we're there yet.
What are your thoughts on MAME? Does it bother you that you can surf the Net and get pretty much any one of your old arcade games up and running for free on your home PC?
It's interesting. It's similar and different from the Napsterization of music. I guess it's similar in the sense that you have this huge body of material that is now available essentially free to run on your PC. They have software that emulates virtually any system ever made from Atari 2600 to arcade games to even some of the later Nintendo systems. You have all these games being provided free to people. Game designers are obviously not getting any royalties, although they probably never got royalties anyway.
The one thing that makes that different is that all these platforms are pretty much dead -- they weren't really economically viable, and, in fact, a lot of these games were in danger of becoming extinct. In some ways, this amazing underground community that has, through all kinds of volunteer efforts -- if you had to pay people to do all of this stuff it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do this -- people have done it just for the love of the old games, so, in a sense, they've done a tremendous public service in preserving the old games to be played and enjoyed today. You also look at the number of Internet games pretty much just ripping off the old games and calling it something different, you know, changing a few things around and pretending it's an all-new, original game and they're not paying for the rights to those games either. Nobody really lost any revenue due to the whole thing, so there really isn't a victim.
In my mind, I see it as a wonderful thing that these games are out there being enjoyed. As a creative person, and I think even musicians would agree with this, your No. 1 objective is not to make money, your No. 1 objective is to get people to enjoy your creative product. To listen to your song, to play your game, whatever. That's why you're in it. If you wanted to make money, you'd be out selling real estate or something. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to have this way for people to enjoy works of art and have great access to it. To have things that have been forgotten and out of print and in the dumpster revived and enjoyed by people. I'm amazed that people cared enough to do it.
It is great. Like you said, there are games you would never get to play otherwise, unless you can track down a Vectrex ...
Exactly. Every day, there's less of those around. I think it [emulation] is fabulous.
Anything else in the pipeline from Raw Thrills?
We're doing this one and we have a driving game that we're working on that's coming up in the fall. That's kind of our next thing and now we're looking at some other ideas, some other concepts that we're playing around with. The fun part of being a game designer is that you've always got your next project. You always can dream about making the ultimate game, even though you never really do it. You still have your dreams [laughs]. There's always the next game.
"Target: Terror" is set to make its public debut at the Amusement Showcase International Show in March and will be released by Betson Distributingto your local arcade this spring.
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