Author, director painter and game designer Clive Barker

In July, we sat opposite writer-director-painter-game designer Clive Barker in a midtown Manhattan hotel suite for an interview. What began as a discussion of his horror-themed first-person shooter Jericho—developed by Mercury Steam and published by Codemasters for release Tuesday October 23rd on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Windows—quickly evolved into a wide-ranging hour-long conversation about art, censorship, his love of working in multiple media and the current state of horror movies. Today, in Part I of our four-part Q&A with Barker, he talks about the explorer who inspired Jericho, his plans for games in the series, and his thoughts about Roger Ebert's critique of videogames.

Where did the idea for Jericho come from? Where did it begin?

From two sources. A long time ago I found some books by a guy called Wilfred Thesiger, an Englishman, who was the first man—the first white man—to cross the Rub' al Khali [part of the Arabian Desert]. The word means "the Empty Quarter"; the emptiest place on the planet. Thesiger crossed in the '20s and then again in the '30s, and it was thought to be basically impossible. Even the Bedouin, who obviously were very familiar with it—this was their country, their land—went only in extremis. If they really, really had to, they crossed it.

[Aside to another man in the hotel suite.] Thank you, baby. This is my husband, David.

It's a pleasure to meet you, David.

And just a little aside on the Thesiger thing: I decided I wanted to use this image of emptiness and I used it first in a book called "Weaveworld," which I wrote back in the '80s. And maybe five or six years later, I was going through HarperCollins—which has these big, old offices which they've had since the 19th century in London—and I saw this incredibly old man hidden by piles of books, just pulling them down slowly and very, very, very carefully inscribing them. Nobody was with him and I thought, "I know who that guy is—that's Wilfred Thesiger. I swear that's Wilfred Thesiger." I went in and it was, and he signed a book for me and it was great. I had always wanted to go back there. I thought it was a very—it was just deserts, eerie places, and after the success of "Weaveworld," I wanted to go back to that and put something really villainous into the Empty Quarter.

I began to conceive of this sort of Russian doll analogy of a place within a place within a place within a place. And in order to pursue your objective—which in this case is to actually do what most people in horror games and movies don't do; that is, most players are running away from the bad guy—these guys have one clear instruction, which is move towards the bad guy. And he is—it is, because frankly, we don't know what gender it is—it is concealed within rings of the warriors that it has defeated over the years. The most recent are World War II soldiers who were able to contain it, but only that. And the survivors of that that conflict are sort of its creatures now. It's turned them to its side.

Now, within that then you get the Crusaders. Within that you get the Romans. Within that you get Sumerians. And eventually, somewhere in the middle, you get it and whatever place it lives in. And as you've probably seen—I mean, did you see Rome or—

Female publicist: He saw Rome last week on Friday. I showed him a little bit of the crusades that you were looking at yesterday.

The cool thing is that obviously these people have inherited these ghosts, these remnants of inherited, brought with them their dreamed worlds. They're living in this very dead but uncorruptable state and transformed by the presence of this evil. Our Jericho team, who it will emerge—if this game does well, the Jericho team will do two more gigs, at least two more that I will be involved in. I don't want this to be something that runs like the "Hellraiser" things have, for so long that actually you go, "Stop, stop, stop. You're killing me here." I want these guys to have the kind of credibility that would come with just using them very carefully and respectfully. I know what the second one and third one are going to roughly be so there's a trilogy which will be Barker's Jericho. If somebody wants to take Jericho and do something else with it, well, that's their thing, you know.

Stephen King's "Jericho"?

Yeah, right. Or maybe "Tom and Jericho." Work with me. [Laughs.] It's a nice tease because you're getting closer and closer to the villain, and whatever the villain is, it's not what you expect. Its location, its place of play, is nothing like anything you've encountered in the game.

So there's been lots of pieces that have come together for this and made it very pleasurable. For instance, the idea of marrying up what I'll call the Tom Clancy soldier thing—we were very weapon pre-occupied to get those details right. Very much. With proper behavior as soldiers and then, marrying that with pyromancy--you know, the magicking of fire; the raising of fire with psychic abilities—with psychokinetic abilities; that seemed to me like a nice combination.

Finally, to say that any of these people are—they're all for burning, all these Christians [referring to the game's heroes] are for burning—it may be that if we go back to Jericho it might be a whole new team. But I just like the idea that you know going into the game that nobody is really safe.

Is this a case where you own the rights to Jericho, and you're licensing it to Codemasters—

Yeah, I own it as a movie, for instance, and as a comic book or as a book.It's funny, actually—it isn't strictly a license, because it pre-existed as an idea, but not as an idea in another medium. Unless my brain is another medium.

It might well be, right? You have a fertile brain.

Exactly. Why not? Yeah, okay, from another medium: as inspired by Clive's brain.

Is the game going to be the first expression of Jericho?

Yes. You mean, will I have preceded it with anything?

Yeah.

No. It was very important to me that I respect the medium. It was interesting, the only time I got a little hot under the collar during the interviews here today was when somebody quoted Roger Ebert as saying that games could never be art, which I thought was just a stupid thing to say. I mean, who knows what the future holds for this medium? I'm sure the first people reading, you know—I guess the first novel is really, "Robinson Crusoe." I'm sure there were plenty of people saying, "Oh, the novel, it's not gonna hold on. No, it's not gonna last."

Male publicist: Speaking of novels...

Yes, thank you. [Hands me a book.] That's the novel which I have coming out a month from, a month after this game. And then, in the early part of next year the movie directed by a Japanese director called Mr. [Ryuhei] Kitamura who did one of my short stories called "Midnight Meat Train," which is a story set in New York, in fact. So, I've really gone back to the scary story, this novel here "Mr. B. Gone." First Jericho, "Mister B. Gone," then "Midnight Meat Train;" three pretty damn dark things.

Going back to the Roger Ebert quote, what's interesting is you're one of those artists who work in a variety of media, and the other media that you've worked in were each at one point seen as disreputable.

Very good, very good.

It was true even for the novel—

Comic books—

—comic books and movies.

And certainly movies, yeah.

So when you hear people like Ebert say that; when "300" came out and there were a lot of critics who in dissing the movie they said, "It's like a videogame"—

Did they say that?

Yeah, they used it as a pejorative. What do you think that stems from?

I think it stems from a very old idea of high art and low art that we've had in this country and actually originates, I think, in England. Very snobby idea about the fact that it's as much as anything about the people who produce the art as there is about the art form itself. The assumption is that the people who write comics are really people who simply can't write novels.

Which is odd because I read comics and certainly your countrymen have been at the forefront of some of the best storytelling in the medium, better than many of their American counterparts. Some of the most imaginative writing right now is happening in comics.

Oh, I agree. And yet, even Alan [Moore] was passionate about having a go at a novel or two. Neil [Gaiman] has certainly gone to play in those kinds of areas. I think there is a piece of snobbery that is associated with the "purity" of the form, and it's a very dumb notion, I think. If you look back at reviews of impressionism—I mean, I actually just finished reading a book on this very subject. What are the major points that people were aghast at—besides the technique, of course: "They're just smudges. Who knows what they are?"—was the subject matter. The subject matter was so domestic, was so commonplace. How could anything so commonplace possibly be art?

Bigotry is easy, you know. Carving off a little corner of the cultural world and saying, the novel, or classical painting; that is painting that takes classical subjects as its oar, the Christian legend as the subject to its material. Those high arts feel a little threatened when this other stuff comes along. I believe eventually there'll be a "War and Peace" of gaming. It'll happen. Just as "Watchmen" came along and—how long ago was "Watchmen," 12 years, longer?

It's been out for a while. There was also "Maus," by Art Spiegelman.

"Maus," amazing. There are these big, complex, profound works which could only exist in that form. They certainly wouldn't work any other way. And, so making any kind of judgment, any kind of pre-judgment about the material, seems to me to be dumb, frankly.

Next: Barker the novelist on what Barker the game designer has to throw out the window when working on interactive titles like Jericho. Also, find out what he thinks of film critic Roger Ebert—and the British Board of Film Classification's original decision to ban Manhunt 2.