Hanging with Kudo

Kinect pricing, bundles, future developments and more.

Microsoft's face of Kinect, the fast-talking, high energy Kudo Tsunoda, has just pipped me to the finish line in a 100m race. I'm gasping for air, while Kudo appears his normal, chilled-out self. It's fair to say that years of playing Kinect have been kind on Kudo. A few minutes later we sat down for a chat and a cold beverage.

Q: Have you been getting lots of positive feedback from the show floor?

Kudo Tsunoda: That's why I really love coming to shows like gamescom. This is like the fun stuff for me. You work so hard on getting this stuff developed and then you actually go watch, not only press people but consumer people all getting in and having a fun time. It's just great. This is why I got into the games industry in the first place, just to see people enjoying the games that you're working on.

There's a great website that we've got called kinect.me where we've got a mobile tour that takes kinect around and lets people play and it just shows all the videos of people playing Kinect. Whether you're watching it in person or watching videos on the web. What I think is awesome is when people first get in and start playing the experience, you can see their face light up. They get really big smiles on their faces. That's why it's exciting to be working in the games industry. It's been a fun week for me.

Q: Why did Microsoft choose Kinect Adventures as the bundled game over something like Kinect Sports?

KS: All the launch games do a really good job of highlighting the technology. I think one of the things that we've been very focussed on with Kinect and why Kinect is the name of the program is that we're really trying to make a more social experience for people. And not so much just playing games at the same time, but making part of the gameplay experience something where the communication and how you communicate with the other person you are playing with is an important part of the gameplay skill.

I think that Kinect Adventures does a great job of highlighting the technology. It's very social, it's very inclusive and it has some great features like our show off and share stuff, where you can take pictures from the game and post them up on the web. They've got this thing called living statues where - you know how you get trophies - with Kinect adventures you can actually animate the statue using your body, record a message with your voice using the statue and then be able to email that off to people, almost like an e-card. So you unlock one statue and you can do as many recordings as you want and send it off to different people.

So I think Kinect Adventures, it highlights what are the awesome things about Kinect. It uses not only the full body tracking but the voice features and it's very social and inclusive. The game was built so that there is different types of activities that all kinds of people can enjoy.

Q: Will Kinect evolve to offer support for more than two active players?

KS: I think that it all depends on the kind of experience that you want to build. Certainly if you look at a game, go down on the floor, Dance Central is already incorporating a lot more than two players. So you know it's not necessarily any kind of limitation as much as it is developers just trying to customise the experiences around what they think is the best way to play.

You can see like sometimes in a split-screen game it's hard to add more and more players because it's hard to see what's going on - and that's true of any game. I think something like Dance Central you can see is already incorporating more than two.