[After ordering lunch, the topic turns to the iPad…]
I know enough about technology to know to wait for the next generation but we were flying in and looking at everybody with their magazines and I’m, like, thinking that a year from now most of these people are going to be on tablets. I don’t have to lug all these books on these business trips. I went to the Sony store the other day and saw all their e-readers and, really, these already look like a Betamax, man.
Look at Susan Boyle and her success, right? I love studying media and the more I learn about other media the more I apply it to games. Studying why she was successful… my mom sees herself in her. Everybody’s mom sees herself in this YouTube phenomenon. It’s funny; she used YouTube to become a phenomenon but then just sells CDs because my mom doesn’t have a digital music player and still buys CDs. So she sold a million CDs.
So do you have the formula cracked for Justin Bieber, then?
I didn’t even know who Justin Bieber was until all that shit went down, by the way. Never underestimate the power of the 12-year-old female army, man. They’re a driving force from Twilight even back to the Harry Potter stuff.
So back to video games, how do you get them? Where do you get them?
I’m not gonna get them anytime soon. I’ll get them when they become teenagers because a lot of them will realize that maybe they want more of a power fantasy. There’s things we put in the Gears franchise that deliberately try and attach to women. I had a girl tweet that she got a tattoo on her lower back of the Crimson Omen [the Gears series’ signature skull icon]. So, in Gears 2 we had the themes of Dom and Maria and in Gears 3, you’ll learn more about Marcus’ relationship with his father and Dom dealing with the aftermath of what he’s done [in Gears 2]. And female Gears will finally be in the game. That’s one of the most common requests. Whenever I do a signing, girls always come up and ask, “Oh my god, are we going to get female Gears?” I’m always like, “Maybe, maybe…”
You hear excuses a lot from other development studios ast to why they can’t put female characters in these kinds of games. Most recently, it was with Ruffian and Crackdown 2….
Why? What was their logic?
They said they’d have to devote resources to animating another model, a female model…
Well, we do have custom animations for the female characters that we’re putting in Gears 3. But we actually found that there could be a fair amount of overlap [in the animation sets] because when we put them in bulky enough armor, it actually works just fine. So, it’s something that just looks cool now, to see that kind of iconic Gears armor but with a girl in it. We’ve hit a really good balance of our female Gears being attractive but not slutty and bad-ass but not ugly. I’m really proud of them. It’s been 18 months since the last game [in the Gears universe] and Anya the dispatcher has had to put on armor and fight. She has no choice and that’s an evolution of that character, which is really cool. Instead, “Oooooh, no, no… I’m gonna run away.”
So, now that it’s all out there… Gears 3. What’s in store?
It’s been 18 months after the events of Gears 2. When we last left Delta [Squad, the soldier protagonists of the series], they’d just sunk Jacinto, which was humanity’s last safe location to flood the Hollow [the Locust enemies’ underground stronghold]. As we open, the COG military’s largely fallen into disarray and we have pockets of humanity that are all stranded now. You can see this reflected in the characters and their armor. The armor’s a lot less heavy and tank-like. It’s a lot more rag-tag. And a new threat has arisen called the Lambent. We teased this in Gears 1 with the [Locust] wretches that were infected with emulsion and who exploded upon death. Then, at the end of Gears 2, we saw the Brumak [monster] mutate and you’re going to see the full realization of the adverse effects that this energy source has on the world of Sera. This horrific nightmarish mutated beasts are relentlessly chasing after Marcus and the remaining members of Delta Squad. Delta’s trying to find a way to stop this and no one’s seen any Locusts in months at the beginning of the game, by the way. Nobody’s really sure where they’ve gone or what’s really happened with them. As far as what’s going on with Marcus and his dad, was that a recording that he heard or was that a new broadcast at the end of Gears 2? Nobody’s sure. You’re going to get to know a bit more about Cole Train; instead of him just hooting and hollering all the time, he’s s going to have a bit more of a story.
From a gameplay perspective, it’s not a broken formula by any means…
No. But the key is to keep it fresh.