Previously: The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 1, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 2
To wrap up my interview with games industry vet and all-around nice guy Ted Price, I asked him about his favorite Playstation games as well as ones that deserved more love and how he’s planning to tackle 3D game development. Thanks again to Ted for participating!
So leaving aside your own games, and LBP which you clearly truly love, what’s on your list of top Playstation games?
Oh, man. Are you talking about Playstation exclusives or games I played on Playstation?
Let’s leave exclusives out of it and focus on third-party titles.
OK. Modern Warfare 1 is one of my favorites of all time just because it was such a well-done game in all respects. Very polished, great story, great controls, great gameplay. Uncharted 2, was also one of my top favorites because it was an action movie. You’re basically playing an action movie, which was something that I hadn’t experienced before in any console. They just nailed it. Some others? Let me think about other ones that I’ve been playing. I’ll go back to Rock Band. Rock Band–even though, in some ways, it’s a platform-agnostic game–to me it broke a lot of new ground in terms of social play. And even though Guitar Hero had preceded it, the same guys who made Guitar Hero made Rock Band. They took that formula and they made it work well. And also it’s a game I play incessantly with my kids, which I love. And it’s basically introduced my kids to the kind of music I listen to which is a wonderful side effect.
Yeah. Rock Band is great for music discovery. I’ve just learned about so much stuff that I would have never known otherwise just by virtue of playing it with a bunch of friends.
Yeah, exactly. Let’s see other ones? I’m trying to think of ones that I’ve played lately that are more….
Let me redirect you just for a little bit and ask you what games in the PS1 and PS2 eras were coming out the same time as your Spyros and Ratchet & Clanks, that you made you say, “Oh, man, they did something that we really didn’t achieve.” Titles that made you kind of want to strive to push the envelope of your development even further?
It’s funny. We’ve always had this kind of back-and-forth relationship with Naughty Dog, where, in some ways, we’ve been direct competitors but we’ve also been very good friends. I’ll say that Crash Bandicoot on the Playstation 1, it came out before Spyro, and we were very inspired by their graphics. I mean they were pushing the Playstation 1 really hard. And the style that they created for that game was unique. I mean, I loved it. We all loved it. Also loved the gameplay. And I’ll also say on the Playstation 1 era, I say Gran Turismo was one of those game that for me as a non-racing game fanatic, sucked me in. Normally I would never get sucked in by racing games. The way that their progression worked, and the realism of their cars, and especially their graphics, were so compelling, that I couldn’t help but play it.
On Playstation 2…it’s hard to remember all this stuff. Once again, Naughty Dog, we went back and forth with them. They were doing Jak [& Daxter]. We were doing Ratchet [& Clank]. But I remember we were both pushing the Playstation 2 very hard, and kind f looking to each other for inspiration. So we got a lot of inspiration graphically from what they were doing with Jak. Also, Playstation 2….