All Points Bulletin Preview

VideoGamer.com: If there's one thing you achieve with APB that's more important than anything else, what might that be?

DJ: It's hard to say. One of the things I want to see out of this, we use the term celebrity in APB a lot. I want players to become celebrities. I suppose what I really mean by that is it would be good if they truly do become a celebrity. If there's a player or a clan that achieves such amazing status in the game, that they effectively transcend the game, and be known as effectively that name or that clan. It's happened with individual players. You probably remember guys who used to play Counter-Strike... Fatal1ty - he was an individual player. He was the first, but I'd like to achieve the same thing really effectively for their game character or their clan. It's kind of happened a little bit with World of Warcraft because you have the top EU guild, Nihilum - people start to achieve for the first time ever celebrity status from within the game. I think that's very very cool. I think that's very very powerful. So with APB, because we've got the tools that visually they can be different as well - so you have Nihilum the name, but really they look like any other guild, that's the way the game works, but here's a chance for them now to be actual individual game characters. So I think if we can really push that and really make it work, that will be the first time anyone's managed to create real celebrities from their gaming characters.

VideoGamer.com: I thought it was interesting when you talked about why you decided to go with the PC for APB. Are you done with consoles now?

DJ: Absolutely not. I just think that in terms of online, in terms of doing something very, very different, it's just easier on PC because it's an open platform. We can make our decisions, we can stick by them, we can say these are the reasons for doing it, it's still a great market, and just do it. Console is a bit trickier because it's a closed system. So here we are coming up with something about - our game runs on a server, how does that fit in with the worlds of the Sonys and the Microsofts? Do they really understand what we're trying to do? Maybe just now they don't, because we are pushing a few areas. I believe until we deliver the game, people understand then, they go, oh right, okay, I see what they've done. It is very different. So in some respects it's much easier to have conversations with the console people then. When, this is it, hopefully it's a big hit for PC; these are all the huge things that have to be in the game. Putting it onto consoles is still going to be a big job. It's control methods, communication systems; they all have to be thought about very, very carefully. It's more a matter of timing. I wanted a clean run at it, no other distractions; let's build this thing the way we want to build it, rather than trying to always be working with or against potentially different clash of ideas or clash of business perspectives. It's like, let's just do it our own way. If we're right, then that's the best place to have the conversation I believe with the other platforms.

VideoGamer.com: You've talked about having 100 players per city partly due to technical constraints. Is it the case that the current generations of consoles simply aren't ready for APB? Would the next generation of consoles be better suited?

DJ: No I don't think so. It's a technical and a game design constraint actually. Technical is more about bandwidth. That's nothing to do with the systems. In terms of processing power, the current generation is pretty damn powerful. I don't think we'd have that much of a problem in doing that. It was a design decision as well. We use players against other players – we have to have this constantly shifting pool of, some players are tied up in missions, some are then free who've just dropped out of a mission so they're ready for the matchmake, so there are some design decisions about a hundred. There were design decisions about familiarity. If there are a hundred people and you've been playing for ten or 15 minutes, very quickly you'll get to know who they are. In terms of a hundred people and just looking at leaderboards or achievements on a per city basis, a hundred is something you can feel I can be somebody in this city. It's hard to be somebody in ten thousand. So there were lots of considerations, but if we wanted to I believe we could do a great version of APB on console, and it doesn’t have to have any limitations.

VideoGamer.com: You're not calling APB an MMO. Traditionally with MMORPGs they have a long shelf life. Do you see APB being around for five years, ten years, like the World of Warcrafts and the EverQuests?

DJ: Absolutely. I mean that's ultimately the goal. But not maybe for exactly the same reasons that those ones have been around for a long time. They have their mechanics for keeping people in the games, and we have a lot of the same mechanics. At the end of the day, the big bit about these MMORPGs is the community and how they interact and the social stuff. It's nothing to do with the game. So they have that, and then you have the game mechanics. So they have some interesting game mechanics, things like progression, levelling, items that you aspire to own which take a long time to get – that's one mechanic, and that's a great mechanic. It's easily one you can build time around, because you can say, well okay we'll make it this difficult, or you know you can play for seven hours a week, and one instance takes ten hours to complete, and there's only ten per cent of loot for the whole group – you can do the numbers and do the maths and do it on a spreadsheet. The method I looked at, the kind of ideas I looked at was more like Counter-Strike. There's a game which kept people playing for years and years and years, but from a very, very different perspective - just a great, great, great core combat game. I want more of what Counter-Strike did coupled with the social stuff that Counter-Strike didn't do. You couldn't even have a clan in Counter-Strike for heaven's sake. People used to improvise by adding it to the end of their names. They had to try and organise when to meet up, and try and form groups, they effectively ran their own server then and try and get a good server and invite players to it - all that stuff Counter-Strike players were doing, they had to try and do off their own back. We've taken all that and said, make it from the beginning. You get all the social stuff you get from World of Warcraft. The difference is in the core gameplay. APB is a hell of a lot of fun to play, because I do play it day upon day upon day upon day upon day. We have progression as well – it’s visual. We have leagues and stats and achievements. But at the end of the day, after playing World of Warcraft for a night I don’t sit back and go, wow! That was an amazing fight I was just in. It’s not really about an amazing fight. It’s about tactics and just getting through stuff. I want people in APB to come out after a couple of hours and say, wow we had some amazing fights with that squad and that clan, and that guy was dominating tonight.

VideoGamer.com: It would be fair to say that given the games you’ve created, you’ve solidified yourself in the pantheon of video game creators. What single achievement are you most proud of?

DJ: I suppose it would be Lemmings actually. It just happened instantly. It was a) inspired by an animation, so the idea came together probably in an hour. We actually named the game in that hour. I have never worked on a game where you come up with an idea and you name it within an hour and then a year later it still comes out with that name. In terms of it being so, so different. Probably because it was the last game I personally wrote as well. Effectively after the Lemmings games the teams were too big. So I suppose for all those reasons Lemmings is the one that still resonates the most with me. It was a pivotal point. And I did write it the way it came to be. For all those reasons to me it was very, very special.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned the concept came from an animation that was created in an hour and the game was named in the same hour. Can that happen now?

DJ: No I don’t think that could happen now. These days games are so much more in depth, unless you’re doing something very, very simple, like an iPhone game or something. To give an example, for me, if I get an idea for a game, typically I tend to in my mind I work with it, I mull it over, I go through things, typically for six months to a year.

VideoGamer.com: Without saying anything to anyone?

DJ: Yeah.

VideoGamer.com: How do you keep quiet?

DJ: Because nine out of ten… if I’ve given up after three months, it’s just like an internal test for me. If I’m not keeping revisiting that and trying to put more flesh on the idea and thinking how will this work, how will that work? It’s a great test for me, because if after two or three months I let it drop I know it’s not going anywhere. But after six months or 12 months it’s still there, it’s still eating away at me, and I keep saying I can solve this, I can solve that, that’ll work – then typically that’s how long it takes. I have to incubate an idea. You’ve got to think of so much these days. It’s not just the game, it’s how do you turn it into a franchise? Where do you go after one? What does two look like? Is there enough scope to turn this into a franchise? Those kind of thoughts you have to have right away. So no, I don’t think it’ll ever happen like that again. It’s a very well thought out carefully thought out, long term process you go through these days.

APB is due out for PC early next year.