Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise Interview

Rare doesn’t do press events. The ever elusive game studio rarely allows anyone onto its impressive campus, yet we joined a lucky group of European game journalists on a recent visit to check out the studio’s upcoming DS title Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise. Ahead of an afternoon with the game we spoke to producer Paul Machacek and came away with a strong sense that Rare is a studio with a clear passion for video games and some extremely talented developers.

VideoGamer.com: The DS seems like the perfect console for Viva Piñata. How come it’s taken so long to arrive on Nintendo’s handheld?

Paul Machacek: The team that has written it actually wrote Diddy Kong Racing on the DS before that and so the timing was purely when we finished the previous project.

VideoGamer.com: With the Xbox 360 sequel arriving later this year, did you consider releasing the DS game ahead of it to get people going with the series before moving to the 360 game?

PM: You know, this game stands on its own. We’ve written it because we believe it’s a really good way to help build a franchise. We love all of these games, as you say there’s a third one coming out as well this year, and we love this franchise to bits. I particularly have a bee in my bonnet that as many people should see this as possible because I think it can appeal to a very wide group of people regardless of what machine it is on and all of the games stand up extremely well on their own.

VideoGamer.com: On the 360 the game had a great critical reception, but I think it’s fair to say that people didn’t expect it to be as in-depth as it was. Have you had to tone down anything when bringing the game to DS in order to make it more accessible to kids?

PM: I think it is a very easy game to get into. I think they all were. We have put the episodes in at the start of this one. You’re all playing the episodes here today, and we’re asking people to do that because you get more out of it if you have a basic understanding. They are very very simple at the start of the game to lead people in. We have changed one or two things so you didn’t have to do quite as many things as you might have had to before. For example every piñata only has one variant, which reduces the amount of variations you can do on the Piñata. We have been very very careful to focus on our target audience, as have the other guys with their audiences. People don’t just write games. They look at who they’re targeting the games at and you have an awful lot of discussions about what will make it good and what is the right thing to do for each individual product.

VideoGamer.com: You mentioned the episodes. Is there going to be any tie-in to the TV series at all?

PM: We were very well aware that a lot of people that might buy our game may have seen the TV show. There’s actually a bit of misnomer about which came first. We were developing the game and the TV show came after that. We were conscious that we wanted to give people direct access to some of those characters. So in the first four episodes you see, we have very popular TV characters in there – we’ve got Hudson, we’ve got Fergie. As soon as those first four episodes are out of the way and you’ve learnt that basic gameplay mechanic, you can go straight into the playground mode, and those characters are available for you to play with. Instant access rather than having to play through the main garden for some distance until you can naturally unlock them. We have a lot of FMVs in the game as well and whilst we’ve got the romance dances in there, there are a lot of scenes taken from the TV series which we have free access to.

VideoGamer.com: There was a story on the internet a few weeks back about how the DS game would link to the 360 game via the LIVE Vision Camera, but it didn’t make the final game…

PM: How reliable is talk on the internet?

VideoGamer.com: I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking (laughs).

PM: You know what. If I spent time actually trying to fend off half of the rumours… we all sit on forums, we all look at Wikipedia. We all look at these sources of incredible journalism that are out there. There are a lot of people speculating a lot of things. I actually dropped a comedy comment deliberately at the end of an IGN interview recently, and sure enough that set off a debate – Oh my god, Rare is doing this. Whatever. We might be doing that, we might not be doing that. I can’t confirm that. But it’s very interesting what people discuss. I’m not getting into that. I don’t want to talk about other people’s speculation.

VideoGamer.com: You’re a Microsoft owned company, yet this is a DS game. How were you allowed to do that? Is it that the DS isn’t seen as a competitor?

PM: Harking back to my previous answer, there’s a lot of speculation on the internet about what we can and can’t do. You know, Microsoft is a company that develops hardware and software. We develop a lot of things on a lot of platforms and there is no clash.

VideoGamer.com: So in terms of developing for handhelds, could the PSP be a potential platform, if it was something you think could work?

PM: Rare has never developed for Sony, and I couldn’t comment on any future plans that we would have right now.

VideoGamer.com: Is the DS something you’re going to look to even more? The 360 had Party Animals. Is that something you’ve thought about for the DS?

PM: I can’t discuss future projects.

VideoGamer.com: The DS game looks really good, with its mixture of 2D and 3D graphics. How have you managed to produce such a good looking game on a handheld?

PM: I was an engineer here for many years. I didn’t do any engineering, but was involved in some of the design on this product. Basically I am the producer so I’m not blowing my own trumpet here. We have a huge amount of talent at Rare. We always have done. We’ve got a great bunch of people. You’ve seen some of them helping out here today. They really really spend a huge amount of time trying to get things absolutely right. You wouldn’t believe the level of ‘is this pixel right or not?’.

All the Piñata in there, we’ve actually taken the models that we already had and they are fully animated in the game. The only thing that we had to do was reduce the polygon counts so they would work on that level of hardware. A huge amount of time and effort was put in trying to get the plants to work, but we got there in the end. The one thing that was very important to us was that at no point did the game turn around and say ‘sorry you can’t do that’ because of some technical reason. We want it to be a space that is a virtual world where we didn’t have to explain any technicalities to the player. They just do whatever they want. They play with their pets.

VideoGamer.com: Is there anything you wanted to include in the DS game that didn’t make it?

PM: Loads of things.

VideoGamer.com: Is there one thing you really wish was in there.

PM: I genuinely can’t think of anything right now. One of the funny things about this project is, you always have that big list of things at the end, and if you’re going to do a sequel it’s always a good start. This has been an unusual project in that it went extremely smooth. I personally feel that the lads on the team absolutely nailed it.

VideoGamer.com: How do you focus test a game aimed at such a young audience?

PM: I just turned 40 and I’m the biggest kid here so I wouldn’t worry about that. We have plenty of very adult kids here. We haven’t had any children play, not formerly. One or two people have taken the game home and shown it to other people. You know, it’s not just kids. There are a lot of people out there who haven’t played a traditional video game before, and we have to attract those people. My wife doesn’t play a lot of games, but she is particularly taken in by the style of this game. When she started playing it sucked her in. It’s very wife friendly if I’m allowed to say that.

VideoGamer.com: Nintendo recently launched the Nintendo Channel on the Wii, which offers DS game demos. Is that something you’ve looked at for Viva Piñata?

PM: Our first port of call is you guys coming here today and hopefully loving the game, as we do. We are discussing other things that we might have a go at, but I can’t discuss those today.

VideoGamer.com: Nintendo market the DS as something you can play as a family. There’s no co-op in VP on DS. Is that something you’ve thought about?

PM: We thought about it. There are a lot of technical challenges in creating the product that we have done. We did have discussions about allowing some sort of co-op mode where two people can play on two machines in the same garden. There is a little bit of wireless connectivity – you can swap crates full of things between DS units – but that’s all we went for.

VideoGamer.com: How much free reign has the DS team had to come up with their own thing?

PM: We did take the models from the first game. We did a lot of work on those. There are a lot of new assets in there. There’s a lot of creativity in there. When you spend some time playing the game you’ll see that there’s actually an awful lot of new things in there. It’s such a huge game it’s very difficult to demonstrate. We want people to spend more time in the garden rather than outside looking at other things, which is why we put a much more direct interface in there. We wanted to increase some of the things that you can do in there. The Taff fly, rather than being just being another Piñata, is something that you can use as a tool, and then you have this chain of events that you can look after.

VideoGamer.com: There’s much talk that the original Viva Piñata didn’t sell all that well…

PM: There’s a lot of internet talk. You know what. We don’t want to discuss all of that talk that’s out there. There’s a lot of chatter. Even if you give someone a real fact, two or three levels of Chinese whispers can turn that one on its head. Viva Piñata sold very well. It’s a very very good game that was critically acclaimed and we love it to death. And that’s why we’ve done more of them. We’re very very proud, the whole company is very proud of these games.

VideoGamer.com: Is that why you decided to bring Piñata back instead of working on a totally new IP? I think many people assumed that after the first game that would be it.

PM: People can assume what they want. We are extremely happy with Viva Piñata. It’s a completely different direction for us. Rare is diversifying in the types of titles it’s trying to write. We’re trying to push forwards. We’re trying to develop a lot of new content. This was something that is very different. We had some incredibly talented people behind some of the key ideas that created that title. We’re not going to walk away from that, we love it. I absolutely love this game. I’ve been here 20 years and I love this game, it’s one of my favourite Rare games. Yeah, I’m sitting here plugging it, but it genuinely is and I’m being straight about that.

VideoGamer.com: Are we going to see more spin-offs?

PM: I cannot discuss future projects (laughs). I cannot do that, sorry.

VideoGamer.com: How are you going to make sure the right people know about Viva Piñata on DS? You seem to have made it more approachable, but are you going to do any more?

PM: It’s not that we’ve made it more approachable for people. We’ve deliberately targeted the audience that we know is there on that platform. And that’s what we would do on any title that we wrote on any platform. You look at your audience and then decide if it’s a good business thing to even go for that. In this case we have no hesitation with Viva Piñata because I cannot iterate enough how much we love that.

VideoGamer.com: Rare has a massive heritage. You’ve got lots of N64 games that are hugely popular. Are we going to see any of those ported to DS? We’ve had Diddy Kong Racing already. Perfect Dark on DS seems like a really good fit.

PM: Yeah, I’ve read those stories. But guess what, I can’t really comment on future projects.

VideoGamer.com: No problem. Thanks for your time.