Ah social networking, how we hate it, but sometimes (and i mean like almost never ever ever) it is actually pretty handy! I mean come on! Introversion!
Though through the magic of Twitter Wuup has been the opportunity to interview creative director of Introversion Chris Delay. When we sent the guy’s a private message on their new Twitter – asking them if they’d be up for a little interview, we didn’t expect them to say yes after knowing how busy they are! with the upcoming Subversion, but we were wrong,! So we quickly ceased the moment, and thought of 15 questions. We didn’t know what to ask so some of them are just your typical journalism questions ‘Wuup Style’!
Introversion
Bill and I (alan), have played every introversion game to date, including Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia and Multiwinia – they’re simplicity and innovation has never ceased to impress us. Alan actually has two copies of Uplink, because he lost the firs t one. The first one was a retail copy, and had a card which you had to match lines to access the game! Awesome!
Special thanks to everyone at Introversion, especially Jack who made this happen!
Q: How’s the weather?
A: Bizaare! Snow, hail, frosts, storms, blizzards, flooding, you name it, we’ve got it!
Q: What games do you play as inspiration?
A: I find all good games to be inspirational, but the ones that really inspire me are often not the ones I enjoy playing the most, but the ones that achieve something truly incredible. For example, Dwarf Fortress and Eve Online are both games that I have totally failed to get into as enjoyable game experiences, but they both achieve something incredible that I find very inspirational.
Q: What can we expect to see from you in the next 5 years?
A: Well we’ve got Subversion coming out, more on that below. We’ve also got Darwinia+ coming out this Summer, which is an XBLA package containing Darwinia and Multiwinia. The team here are doing a fantastic job on putting this together and we’ll be going live in the next few days with a Darwinia+ dev website which will give all the ins and outs about the project. A lot of people are curious about what goes into creating a console game and Microsoft have given us unprecedented freedom to talk about working on an XBLA title which is great. Longer term we’ve got our eye on some more console work and of course we’ll be working on new IP – we’ll be writing about these on the blog as we get a bit further into them.
Q: How has steam changed the way you reach gamers?
A: Digital distribution solutions like Steam have made a massive difference to the independent games sector over the past few years. If you compare the indie sector in 2001 when we started with how it is now, it’s amazing, and I reckon this has a lot to do with the fact that it’s now a lot easier to get your games out there. Originally you had to try to go down the retail route and that could be really tough, you had to work your way through a confusing minefield of retailers and distributers who’d take a big chunk of the revenue pie. You’d end up competing for shelf space with the big AAA titles and no prizes for guessing who’d win! With a system like Steam, you’ve got instant access to millions of gamers and the returns are much more indie friendly.
Q: Was it an easy decision to open up game development to the public on subversion?
A: Not at all – it required a lot of arm twisting from the rest of the team to persuade me to go ahead with this. I was really worried about opening up the development but the rest of the guys made me realise that operating under a shroud of complete secrecy wasn’t doing us any favours, fans understandably lose interest and move on if you don’t include them in what you’re doing. Subversion has been a really interesting project to work on from a design point of view and I’m glad we’ve made that available to the fans. Plus, I guess I remember thinking how cool it would be to read a developer diary from a major game – there have been so few in the past and rarely include any juicy details. The process of game development is absolutely fascinating to me, and I want others to see it. Movies like Lord of the Rings come with “making of” documentaries that are often longer than the movie itself, diving into every technical detail of how they shot every scene and how they curled every hair in Gimli’s beard, but somehow games are released, they get their two pages, and that’s the last you hear of them. Our blog is an attempt to make the process more interesting, internally and externally.
Q: At wuup we’ve been following the subversion development blog with great interest. Will we start to see elements of gameplay?
A: Yes, you will, watch this space… ?
Q: Will there be an Uplink 2?
A: Let’s just say fans of Uplink, will probably enjoy Subversion. ?
Q: What do you think would happen if you combined all your previous games into one mega game?
A: There’d be chaos and quite possibly murder – after Darwinia+ is out I think we’d all like to lay this one to rest, the idea of revisiting Darwinia again wouldn’t go down well…
Q: How much coffee does the team drink on average?
A: We have a curious mix of those who don’t drink any coffee at all, to those who should probably take out shares in coffee plantations. I realised during my early Uplink development days, when I was also working full time, that coffee was critical to the continuation of the project. That said I’ve dropped back to about 2 a day now!
Q: Defcon, Multiwinia, Uplink, are all games about mass murder, devastation, do you guys know something we don’t?
A: Does this say something about our characters? Probably. But I’m going to lay the blame squarely at the films of the 1980s, such as Wargames, since these were the primary influences for these games.
Q: Do you ever get tired of being asked the same questions in interviews? (we hope we’ve been original with this one)?
A: Haha, yes, we have a stockpile of answers for those questions we’ve been asked literally hundreds of times. .
Q: What is your take on piracy and PC gaming (i.e DRM)?
A: Yeah, I’ve talked about this quite a lot in the past – check out here for my full rant! http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1046&highlight=piracy
Q: At Wuup we are beginning to get sick of all the mainstream clones, as introversion grows will you continue to fight the good fight?
A: Yes I believe so; we’ve got no interest in working on projects that don’t enable us to maintain our independent creativity. Our primary aim is to keep making original, high-quality games that are a lot of fun to play – without that Introversion doesn’t really exist. The real challenge for us is to keep ourselves financially viable in these tough, competitive times, because it’s the finances that enable us to remain independent.
Q: Who came up with ‘Survival of the flattest’?
A: Actually I’m not entirely sure; it was probably the result of one of many drunken arguments while we were on the road at conferences trying to figure out what an earth we were going to call Multiwinia. The trouble with the name Multiwinia was that it made a lot of sense to people who already knew Darwinia, but didn’t mean anything to those who were new to it. We thought a tagline would help clear things up – in reflection I’m not sure it did, but we thought it was good fun at the time.
Q: Bill (at Wuup) say’s, can we have a Defcon t-shirt?
A: Sadly looks like we’ve run out Bill – the T-shirts have all mysteriously vanished from the office. Clearly someone on the team has a stockpile somewhere!
Now you’ve read the interview! Hope you’ve enjoyed it! Go buy everything they’ve made now from:
The Introversion Software Website – Great Games
