And now onto Fearless. My first thought when I got the word that you guys were forming this company is you’re obviously somebody, who I think building story and building a universe, is one of your strengths. You’re co-writing Batwoman from DC Comics, and have long been a writer outside of video games. Should we expect the same story-rich environment for your games?
Absolutely. Our mantra is “Be fearless,” and what we mean by that is we want to take creative risks. We want to mitigate those smart tech decisions, but we’re really about let’s try to push the boundaries creatively. Let’s tackle some new things we haven’t done before. But, at the same time, we know where our strengths lie. The types of games that we’re exploring right now, most of them fall into the story-driven action category. That’s a really broad category and can include lots of different genres and lots of different game mechanics.
Cedric and I have both worked on a number of different genres over the years. I think we’ve probably touched on every traditional game genre out there. And we’re really interested in finding ways to fuse elements from different genres. I’m a big believer in what Cliff Bleszinski says about shooters taking on more and more RPG elements. I think we see that happening in a lot of different genres. So I think you can expect us to experiment and explore different gameplay mechanics, different gameplay systems.
But, at its heart, each game will have a very strong narrative, a very robust story, a very strong setting, and iconic characters, which are all very important to us. We want to create characters that are relatable, that you can actually care about, that hopefully become iconic, and really represent the game that we’re making.
You mentioned big story-driven games. I’m assuming that more downloadable, bite-sized programming is part of your ideas as well?
We’re sort of in the early stages of content exploration. We have about six different concepts that we’re really excited about. Moving forward, they’ll get refined and probably honed down to a smaller group that we really invest a lot of time and energy into. But, they run the gamut from a kind of big, over-the-top action title, to hardcore horror. But we also have ideas that we’ve kicked around that are smaller scale games, things that might be better suited to iPhone or to XBLA or other forms of digital distribution.
We do believe really strongly in episodic storytelling. We think digital distribution and episodic storytelling are a big part of the future of gaming. So we’re very keen on those things and are putting a lot into thought, especially around the episodic nature of storytelling and the way we can create the type of games that we can create that would really leverage that. Again, horror is one genre that I go back to a lot. I think if you play a game for too long, you just kind of get desensitized to it, so horror might be a perfect genre for an episodic model. You get those nice hour-and-a-half, two-hour bite sized chunks. You never get that sense of being desensitized and then you get the next chunk a couple of weeks later or whatever.
So those are the types of things we are definitely thinking about. Cedric and I, we’ve had great success building big multi-platform games. I think, in the short term, that’s going to be a big part of the studio’s focus.
You mention horror a lot and obviously you’re a horror fan. What other genres do you feel like are really under-served by the current video games development landscape, and what would you like to tackle?
We have a lot actually. And we’re trying to take each of our game concepts kind of in a different direction and kind of push them in a different direction.
We would really like to tackle RPGs in the sense that we would like to make them more accessible. The RPG is a genre with depth of story and character development. But, I think that some things turn people off of RPGs, like the more cumbersome mechanics or a lot of the data management or character management. Maybe we could dig underneath the surface a little bit so that the experience is a little bit more accessible.
We’d love to find ways to kind of reinvent the RPG and infuse it with other genres, an action RPG or a shooter RPG. I think there’s still a lot of room in the sci-fi category. I think that we see a lot of the same type of themes and types of characters in sci-fi settings in games. And I think there is some opportunity to explore some different visions of the future, and maybe some alternate timeline type things. So those are all the things that we’re considering. There’s obviously a lot of games in this category, but I still think there’s a lot of room for the kind of melee-centric action game. Again, a game that has a very strong story and maybe offers a little bit more choice and a little bit more exploration than some of the games that we traditionally see with the fixed camera. So those are all the types of things that we’re thinking about.
Superhero games are very close to my heart. When I say superhero games, I don’t necessarily mean capes and tights. It’s more about that type of over-the-top action, big powers, a mythic story. I gravitate to what we classify as superhero games all the time. I think that there are a ton of things that can still be done there, and new directions to kind of take that fantasy.
I imagine that you are not at liberty to talk about concepts yet, right?
No. Other than to say that we have about six concepts in development and they do include things like a big superhero game, a hardcore horror game, an episodic concept, and a couple others.
OK. What about funding? Where are you guys getting the money from?
Marc Jackson is our interim CFO and we have a relationships with Seahorn Capital Group. At this stage, we are pursuing multiple routes of funding, including traditional publisher/developer funding models, and the film financing models, which is a little bit new to the game industry but we think it has great potential. We’re open to all funding options right now, but those are the ones that we are most actively pursuing. I can’t actually go into detail about any of the discussions we’re actually having right now. So far, everything seems very promising.
Obviously, your role is as head of creative. Is Cedric going to have creative input as well?
Well, to the degree that he and I are really good collaborators, yes. We, I think, have worked really, really well together in the past. I have collaborated with him on tech decisions and he’s collaborated with me on creative decisions.
But, in this case, the collaboration will be around what types of games should we be making, and what areas do we want to push things. Cedric really sees his role as CTO, as the one responsible for figuring out the tech strategy and for getting the game vision done. He’ll definitely weigh in and have opinions about the game vision. But, he’s kind of letting me run with that. The counter to that is that he’ll be making most of the tech recommendations and be driving the tech strategies. His primary focus day-to-day will be on the tech strategy. He definitely has opinions about the creative asects. He’s worked on a number of very successful franchises everything from Harry Potter to Black to The Force Unleashed, so I really value his opinion.