For much of his career, David Jaffe has been known as the man who brought us the Twisted Metal franchise. Today, he's more recognized for last year's God of War. But if Jaffe has his way, you'll remember him as the John Lennon of videogames, turning out a plethora of perfectly crafted "pop songs"--i.e. shorter, lower-budget downloadable games for Sony's e-Distribution Initiative (EDI) service--rather than the costly "operas" that have defined his career to date. We recently sat down with the outspoken Jaffe in his San Diego offices for a demonstration of his first EDI game, Criminal Crackdown, for both PS3 and PSP. But we found out a whole lot more: why he's shifting gears, what this means for the God of War series, and why he likens Xbox Live Arcade to Ashlee Simpson and oldies radio.

What was the genesis of Criminal Crackdown?

Criminal Crackdown was designed to be a cross between Twisted Metal and Bomberman, both for online and 2-4 player splitscreen. The concept is cops and robbers meets basketball. You have criminals running around the environment, with players as a variety of cops and bounty hunters who are trying to catch the criminals with their cars and keep them long enough to get them into the goals--which are the various jails--for different point values.

We wanted to get behind the groups who were producing original content for e-Di, with the intent of differentiating ourselves from the games you see on Xbox Live Arcade, which tend to be retro arcade classics. Which are great, but the idea here was to put out a slew of original content.

I'm a big Xbox Live fan, I do play that service quite a bit. With the fun factor, the originality, the robust set of features that Criminal Crackdown has--I mean, you've got a full game for 4 players, online, offline, 4 different maps, 10-12 different cars. It's a really good value and a lot of fun for players. If it's successful, we hope to support it with downloadable content.

Having worked primarily on big-budget games like Twisted Metal, what was you creative approach to these smaller games?

Coming off God of War, I felt that a lot of the stuff that I had tried and wanted to make work, didn't work; in terms of storytelling and gameplay, emotional response and gameplay. This is an attempt to strip away a lot of the fat that exists in a lot of today's games, to really get to the meat of the interactivity and evoking emotions that we know games evoke really well: competition, tension, anxiety, and the thrill of victory. It was almost a response to the epic-ness of a game like God of War, in that I wanted to do something that I knew spoke to the strengths already existent in the medium, versus trying to push the medium in a different direction.

The way I was describing it to somebody yesterday who'd never heard of EDI, I said, 'God of War, Twisted Metal, Resistance and Gran Turismo, those are like operas. These are like pop songs.' For me, it's been a lot more fun to write pop songs than operas. And in the future, because I think these services are going to be really successful, I think it's actually going to end up being more lucrative to write pop songs, just like in the real world, than operas.

Does the potential for updates and episodes interest you philosophically?

Philosophically, I could care less. I want to please the game player and myself as a game director and game designer. If we have more to say about that particular game, and if the audience is interested, I love the fact that we have a delivery medium and a financial model that will allow us to do that. I'm not one of these guys--I know there are a lot of guys much smarter than me that are very much into the microtransaction model--dollar signs don't really keep me awake at night. Concepts keep me awake at night. It's neat only in the sense that we can give more to the players that actually want more. But I'm not like, 'Oooh, sweet, I can charge them a dime for a missile.'

Is this the only e-Di title you're working on?

No. This is the one closest to completion. This team and I are rolling onto a new one starting in about a month. And there's another one in Santa Monica that we're about to start development on. This is really all I want to be doing now. So as long as my bosses at Sony let me do this, I'll be doing this until the cows come home. Because it's just a lot of fun. And you can get a lot more ideas out there. The first God of War was three years [in the making.] This is about 7 months. That's a really great feeling.

But how do you respond to those fans that say, 'Well, David Jaffe might turn out to be one of the greatest pop songwriters ever, but he wrote amazing operas, and we want more operas from him.'

I would say that there are pop songs by Ashlee Simpson and pop songs by the Beatles. My goal is to write pop songs like the Beatles, not like Ashlee Simpson. If you want Ashlee Simpson pop songs, go to Xbox Live Arcade. Actually, they're the oldies station, because all you're getting is Scramble and Pac-Man.

If you would say that you're a fan of the work that me and the teams do, then what you're really a fan of is work driven by the passion of those teams, and these games reflect the same level of passion we applied to God of War and Twisted Metal. If you're looking for that, come to this game.

But I guarantee you'll get more God of War, 'cause I don't think I have much of a choice. If it was up to me , he would have fallen off the mountain in the first game and actually died. It would have been like, 'All right, we're done. He's dead.' [Laughs.]

Can the fans draft you back into the director's chair on God of War or Twisted Metal, the way they have with Hideo Kojima on the Metal Gear series?

No. Unless they want to draft me by paying me a lot of money. But, no. I don't work that way. Right now, I'm comfortable enough that I can say something as arrogant as that. One day, I may have no choice. Phil [Harrison, president of Sony Worldwide Studios] is a really big believer in this service. It's not just a place to put shovelware. It's our version of HBO original programming. Not everything is suited to a 50-megabyte Blu-Ray disc. It doesn't mean those games don't deserve a platform. This is probably the first time since the arcade days that games of this type have had a viable home. So far, Sony seems really supportive of me staying in this space.