What Playstation titles do you think were under appreciated maybe?
Disruptor on the Playstation 1. Very under-appreciated. [Laughter] Katamari Damacy was probably one of those games on Playstation 2 that was extremely under-appreciated. I thought the controls left a little bit to be desired but the gameplay itself was unique. Nobody had anything like that. I’ll say another one, Ico. It’s one of those fan-favorite cult classics now. While it didn’t do well fiscally, I think many of us in the development community still look to that game as a perfect example of establishing mood. They employed some subtle tricks to make you feel as if you really were in the world and we analyzed it heavily as we were developing our games at the time.
You guys are entering into a new chapter of Insomniac wherein you’re going to be developing stuff not exclusively for Playstation anymore. I know you released a video and spoke a little about how that came about. But now that you’re probably a little bit further away from the initial announcement, how does it feel that part of your fate is going to be in some other platform holder’s hands?
Well, that’s true but we’re releasing on two platforms that are already mature. It isn’t as if either the Xbox 360 or the PS3 is suddenly going to vanish. So there’s a large core audience for both now. Or a large established audience for both. So I don’t feel any kind of trepidation about releasing a game on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. What I think was cool is that we are continuing to work very closely with the same folks at Sony. And it’s been wonderful that in this business where an announcement of a traditionally first-party developer going multi-platform can create problems, it didn’t in this case. Sony understood our reasons for going multi-platform and we were interested in continuing to work together just because it’s a relationship that’s made sense for so long and things continue to be good.
What are you looking forward to in terms the life cycle for Playstation 3 and Playstation as a brand? What do you want them to do? What would you like to see other developers push them towards?
There are certainly a couple of opportunities. There’s 3D and there’s Move on the Playstation 3 that, if used right, can change the way people play games. For example, I played Sports Champions when I was in Europe at GamesCon, and it felt as if I was actually pulling arrows out of my quiver, nocking them on my bow, and then pulling the string back. I never experienced anything that in a game before.
To me, it was a great demonstration of how Move can be used correctly to bring about new gameplay experiences. I think the danger, of course, is if something like Move becomes tacked on to a game, and people just throw it in because it’s going to be a bullet point on the back of the box. But, if developers use it as the core controller, I think it really can enhance the player’s experiences. Same with 3D. When I was playing MotorStorm Apocalypse at E3, playing a demo in 3D, and it was amazing.