Note: This Q&A with Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe originally ran on Level Up in three separate installments, from October 16th-18th 2007. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.

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Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe

Straight, no chaser, with a dash of profanity: that's the best way to describe a conversation with noted videogame designer David Jaffe. This summer, having previously stated a desire to produce "pop songs" (shorter, more arcade-y games like Calling All Cars) instead of the "operas" (big AAA franchises like Twisted Metal and God of War) that he'd been known for, Jaffe announced his departure from Sony Computer Entertainment to start up a new company called Eat Sleep Play with former Incognito boss Scott Campbell. As with Bungie and Microsoft, ties remain between Eat Sleep Play and Sony, in the form of an agreement for Jaffe's new shop to produce three games for Playstation platforms; separately, he also plans to make short session games for the PC.

Back in July, on his last day as a Sony employee, we spoke with Jaffe over the phone in what would prove to be a wide-ranging discussion covering why he felt he had to leave Sony; how developers are currently compensated; and what he hopes to accomplish at Eat Sleep Play. In Part I of our three-part Q&A with Jaffe, he explains the circumstances that led to his departure from Sony to co-found Eat Sleep Play, why both money and creative freedom matter to him tremendously—but not necessarily in that order—and why he wishes that he could be as beloved as Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and Epic Games' Cliff "Cliffyb" Bleszinski. Read on.

You were just telling me that you're walking into your soon-to-be old office. How does it feel to be leaving Sony?

Let's see. It's weird because in so many ways not a lot is changing. I mean, I'm still working with the same team, in the same capacity. I've worked with those guys at Incognito; we're just in the same company now. Me and Scott [Campbell], the co-presidents of Eat Sleep Play, are still reporting to Allen Becker who runs Santa Monica, so the day-to-day operations of our new business don't really change. So I don't think that part feels any different.

When I first told my boss that we were leaving, there was a little bit of nostalgia; not sadness because we're totally excited to do this and there's never been a question of should we do it. Once we made the decision to do it about eight months ago, we've never been like, "Yeah, let's rethink that." But I do remember driving from, Santa Monica back to San Diego and I had, downloaded the "Dreamgirls" soundtrack--it was kind of big at the time and I don't know if you've seen the movie, but there's this song they sing that on their farewell tour and that was playing right as I was driving away from Sony after I told my boss, "Okay, we're leaving." And I got a little misty eyed. What the hell was that song called?

Oh, well it's online fortunately, so you can always look it up.

Yeah, I'll look it up. But anyway, the first few days there was a sense of not regret, but a little bit of sadness. Now it's just, "We're all so excited to be doing this." This is really something I think I should have done right after God of War finished. I really enjoyed working on Calling All Cars. I'm really proud of how that product came out. But the reality of it is there's been about a year and a half of me sort of denying the inevitable. I was really meant to do this after God of War wrapped up.

I remember being at the DICE conference in 2006 where you talked about the process of making God of War. You also talked about being torn between wanting to strike out on your own and wanting to be better compensated for your work relative to how people are compensated in other entertainment industries, but not necessarily wanting to leave Sony for that better compensation. At the same time, I'd been hearing through the grapevine about the challenges facing developers like Lorne Lanning, who couldn't get the same kind of deals they'd gotten in previous generations to make the games they wanted at the budgets they wanted and still retain ownership of their IP. So as I was listening to your comments, I remember thinking to myself "Dave sounds naive, but he's not naive about his naivete," if that makes sense.

Fair enough, yeah.

There was a wishfulness that it could be the way you wanted but a sense that it couldn't. What was going on at the time with you professionally and personally? What were you thinking about in terms of striking out on your own?

Well, the thing that's important to be aware of in that respect is that I've seen people online today and in the last couple of days since we've made the announcement saying, "Oh, well now he's going to get to have creative control. That's why he's doing this." And it's like, that's so incorrect. Since I've started—and it speaks less to me and more to my bosses in sort of how much faith they had in me at Sony—I've pretty much had 95 percent creative control over the projects I've worked on. I mean, yeah, every now and then there's a sticking point we have to go to battle over. But it really wasn't about that.

So at DICE, the struggle was like I get half of the puzzle. I'm allowed to be expressive and creative and I get the fame as it is in the videogame industry that comes along with that. Sony doesn't deny that to me or the team, so I was getting all of that. But the struggle at the time was like, "You know, I'm never going to make much more money than I'm making now." And it's not that I was poorly compensated; it was that I was looking at what the titles that I had played a significant role in were contributing to Sony's bottom line, and then I was looking at my bonus checks—which were very lucrative compared to other companies to be sure. But there was still such a significant discrepancy that I was like, "You know this just doesn't sit well with me," you know, in a soulful way.

It was like, "Okay now, Jaffe, come into work and do it again. Give us another title that makes us that much money,"—not that it's all me, but in terms of my contributions—and I was like, "I can't." I couldn't do it anymore. It was literally a sort of depression where my spirit or my brain was like, "Yeah, we're going to kind of shut you down a little bit because there's no f---ing way you're going to do that again." That's what was going on at DICE.

Since then, there's been a couple of things. A shift has begun to occur in the industry where there is more excitement and more money floating around for smaller games. Not just from a financial standpoint, but there is an emerging audience for those kinds of games both from the hardcore nature—things like Geometry Wars and Calling All Cars—as well as on the much more casual side like Bejeweled, Mystery Case Files and things like that. And when you look at the budgets of those games, the ability to actually create games in that space with your own money becomes a very realistic proposition.

That opens up a whole new world of financial possibilities. You're able to make games for a publisher quicker, recoup your cost and then get into royalties quicker—and then with those royalties you can actually fund the next game. Or with your own money that you already have, you can actually fund the game. If you are fortunate enough to make a good game that connects with the public—be it the casual public or the hardcore public—whether or not you're making your money off of royalties, you can give yourself a much better deal because you own the IP. Potentially you're even publishing it. Or if you're building a company that owns several IP that are really powerful and lucrative in that space, there actually begins to be the possibility of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And for me, that was enough to go "Okay, there is this window that has opened up," and maybe we'll make it through the window. Maybe we won't.

The casual space, as exciting as it is and as much press as it has gotten, certainly hasn't yet generated the kind of revenue yet that a lot of people are excited that it might. It could be the next mobile phone scenario where it really never takes off. But even if you look at it on the PC download side, with hits like Diner Dash and Bejeweled, there's certainly money to be made in that space. I would rather take the pay cut that we're taking to form this new venture, and I would rather risk a lot of the security that we have here at Sony to actually have the opportunity to have both pieces of the puzzle. So that's the long answer.

We like long answers.

There you go. Those are the only kind I can give unfortunately.

You mentioned what people have been saying online. I understand you what you're saying about the money. I remember getting my first job out of college and I'd never been taught to negotiate, so I didn't. And a friend of mine got more money working essentially the same position because he negotiated. That taught me, "You know what? It's always about the money." Even when it's not about the money, it's always about the money. But a lot of those same people online are going to look at what you just said and turn it into "It's just about the money," or "It's only about the money." Not that you even care what people think but-—

I do care. That's not accurate. Sure, I care what people think. I'd love it if I could find a way to be honest and truthful and not give people the PR spin and at the same time be as liked as [Nintendo design legend Shigeru] Miyamoto and Cliffyb [Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski]. I'd love that. That would be awesome to have people who don't take swipes at me every five f---ing sentences I say. But I'd rather be honest than give you a bunch of PR bulls--t because that stuff makes me physically ill. But I know your question and there's two answers to that question.

The first one is I would have continued doing passionate, exciting work—at least that I found passionate and exciting—whether I'm a Sony employee or not. I appreciate you asking the question, because for me it's just a given. It would never occur to me to bring it up to you. The money—doing something for the money only works for me if the first part is taken care of which is, "Am I doing work that I'm excited about and jazzed about and that I think is really cool?" And so that is always the first part, because I would never do anything for money unless it was a means to an end, which was to allow me to sort of sustain myself creatively.

I mean, that's the way I'm raising my kid. I told my kid the other day, she was asking-—it doesn't matter; I'm not going to get into personal stuff. But the point is I'm always telling them, "Look, you either do a job you love or you do a job you don't love with the express intent of getting money so you can do a job that you love." It never occurs to me to speak to that, because it's just so much part of me that of course I'm going to be coming into work—whether it's Eat Sleep Play or whether it was with Sony—and doing work that I feel is really exciting and really, really cool. And so assuming that that part had already been taken care of, which it was in both cases, then it was "Okay, now let's deal with the money issue," because it's a business and that's a very real aspect. Like I said, when I see the kind of money that these titles generate for the company, just doesn't seem fair for a significant number of contributors to those titles not to get theirs.

So that's my answer to that. Yeah, there are going to be people who turn it into "It's about money for Jaffe," and it's unfortunate, because that's not the case. But money is a part of it. Money is certainly an aspect of it, absolutely.

Next: Jaffe expands on his plans for Eat Sleep Play--and explains why he's so upfront about his exit strategy. To see his company's new logo, click here.

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Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe 

In Part I of our three-part Q&A with David Jaffe, he talked about the reasons behind his departure from Sony--where he created such blockbuster franchises as Twisted Metal and God of War--to co-found Eat Sleep Play with former Incognito boss Scott Campbell. In today's installment, Jaffe explains the challenge some top developers face in being fairly compensated for their work relative to the revenues they bring in, discusses his hopes to eventually cash out of Eat Sleep Play for a big windfall, and talks about his desire to work on experimental games once he's gotten truly paid.

You're very connected in the industry, you've worked with a number of people and you've met a number of people over the years. Do you get a sense that the concerns that you had about the remuneration to people in your position relative to the remuneration to the publishers is a growing concern among creative people in the industry?

Gee, here's the good news--and I hope it comes through in your writing how honest I am--I could either stall you while I look up "remuneration" or I could just ask you what the hell it means, because I have no clue.

Well, it just means "payment." You know, like the money coming back to you.

Okay, so ask me again.

So the question is, do you get the sense from talking to other developers that they feel like creative people relative to the businesspeople are not getting a fair share of the revenues they could both in industry itself and then relative to other media?

Well, in the industry itself, I mean certainly. I've only talked to Lorne [Lanning, co-founder of Oddworld Inhabitants] a couple of times, I don't know him that well, but when we've talked that certainly was a point of frustration with Lorne. The thing to remember is if you look at a lot of the games, if you look at why games make money, there's a number of reasons.

I know people who work on games that are licenses, be they sports franchises or be they the new Pixar film. Those games make a lot of money, but you don't really hear a lot of those guys grousing about it because they know that while they've done a good admirable job--and they're going to be compensated like most employees in the game industry would be--they know why those games are selling: it's because it's a Spider-Man game or a Pixar game or what not. If they can make a great or even good game, fine.

If you're looking at more original IP that has really connected with gamers, you really have three scenarios. Either it's from Japan, and culturally when it comes to this issue--at least this is what I've been told a number of times--they genuinely aren't expected, because of the culture to make a windfall. [Metal gear Solid creator Hideo] Kojima is not expecting to make a crap ton of money and [Nintendo chief designer Shigeru] Miyamoto is not expecting to make a crap ton of money. I don't really know the scenario in Japan but that's obviously where a lot of the key original IP comes from.

Then if you look at individual developers like Bungie or BioWare or Epic, those guys are very well compensated. I get the sense when I talk to certain guys in those realms that they don't really have the issues that I would have. Some of that may be that I was working for a publisher and they're working directly for a developer, maybe they got a better deal. I hear it from some people, but I don't hear it from all people. Let's put it this way. I haven't heard it from the guys at Epic. My understanding is they're all very happy and satisfied with what they've seen from a game like Gears of War.

So is it an isolated case? I don't think so. But it's not all over the place. I think some people do simply have better deals. The thing to remember is I was an employee of a publisher. If I was a developer and we had made this deal in the beginning, and we had made three or four hit games, maybe we could have negotiated that kind of deal. Eat Sleep Play is going to put us in a position to do that.

After you made the decision eight months ago to say, "All right, I should have done this after God of War, but we're doing it now," what advice did you get about setting up your own company?

You talked about negotiating--I certainly tried to negotiate with Sony before we left and said "Look, let's make something work here," and we never could come to an agreement over what we felt was fair compensation and what they felt was fair compensation. After that, when we decided "Let's set up our own company," the great thing about this is that we're not plagued with a lot of the issues that a lot of startups face because I'm in business with Scott Campbell. He's built a company before. He sold a company before.

These guys who I'm teamed up with--all the guys who used to be Incognito--they've done it before. We've worked together as a team for years. We have Sony's backing. We have Sony's blessing and support, so it's not like I'm the guy sitting there going, "All right, how do I get the 401(k) plans working?" or "How do I make sure payroll hits this Friday?" because I have a partner who's really strong at management and running the company while I'm dealing with the design, the creative and all of that. It really is a great partnership that's worked for over ten years, and there really hasn't been those startup growing pains because a lot of these guys have already been through it before.

Now in terms of--

You know, I did get this one guy on my blog. He posted anonymously, like the coward he is when he got wind that I might be doing this, and he called me "kiddo." Like, "Good luck, kiddo, you're going to need it. Wait until you get out there in the real world," because apparently he works as a developer as well. I'm not saying he's wrong and we're not going to encounter our own share challenges. Of course we will, I mean everybody does, but it's like with that kind of attitude I'm like, "Of course you're having a s--tty time. You have a f---ing bad attitude." So that was the advice that I got. It reminds me that we are going to face challenges, but to face everything like we always have, with a positive attitude, and we'll probably come through it.

In terms of the games you've announced, you've announced, a remake of Twisted Metal Head-On for PS2.

Well it's not really a remake. What we're doing is we're doing a port of the PSP title to the PS2. We're upping it to 60 frames. We're re-resing all the textures to make it look a lot better. We're going to go in and do some minor tweaking to that game, minor tweaking to that game regarding pick-up placement, ramming speeds, under the hood stuff to make it play better for the system. Then we're also including in that port five to seven levels from Twisted Metal Black II which was never released; we're going to get that all polished up. We're also shooting a documentary about the history of all the Twisted Metals and bringing back all of the key players in the series, from the guy who did the concept art on the first batch of cars--including Sweet Tooth--all the way up to people who worked on [Twisted Metal] Head-On just to give it a really good send off and give players a real incentive to give this version of the game a try.

Where did the idea for the documentary come from?

When I knew we were going to be putting on new levels from Twisted Metal Black--I'm a gamer and a consumer and I love the idea of going into a store and looking at the back of a box and going "Ooh, look what else I get?" So it really came from going, "What else can we put on this disk? What else can we give consumers so that they don't bypass it and go, 'It's just a port, who needs it?'" They need to feel that there's a compelling reason to purchase and enjoy this title, so the initial idea came from going, "What else can we give the players to make them get jazzed about this?"

Most new companies--most companies period--operate on a five-year plan. What's your equivalent of crawl-walk-run, or do you plan to just hit the ground running? We had that conversation where you talked about wanting to do pop songs as opposed to operas.

Yes.

Is that still operative? Or are you still--

It is, it is. The plan--

Well down the line, might you do something different?

No, no, no, no, no. You never know, but we have no intention to become BioWare or Bungie. What we want to do is really make a name for ourselves in the small game space or the medium-to-small game space, both on the console side and the hardcore gamer side, and on the casual side. So when you say, "What is the long-term game plan?" the timeline is TBD depending on a handful of factors, but it's to build original IP eventually on the PC side and own that IP. Then on the console side, the plan is to continue our very positive relationship with Sony and really try to work with them to build some great titles for the sort of small-to-medium game space. And down the road we certainly would like to sell the company based on the value that we have as a developer as well as an owner of hopefully a handful of really strong PC casual IP games.

I think that's another thing--because you're such a personality online--that some of your fans and haters alike would have a hard time understanding because you're so upfront about things like "Hey down the road, we'd like to sell the company." What--

Yeah, of course--

What's--

I'd love to sell the company.

What's your--

Not now. I don't want to do like you know let's put it this way: the goal is not to look at each in ten years and high five each other and say "Hey, sweet, we kept the lights on for ten years."

Got it.

We want to build a company with some significant value and then sell it and then do it again. I mean, it's like we want to keep making games. It's important to do this. I caught myself for a few weeks there--about a month ago or about six weeks ago--starting to worry about the company and not the games, and that was a real kind of kick in the pants for me. I said, "Wait a minute. The company is irrelevant. The games are what matter. The company is just sort of a nest to couch these games that have to be amazing, and your spirit and soul and energy and passion has got to go into that. Don't worry about a lot of this other stuff that's either (a) irrelevant or (b) is in better hands with Scott's hands than mine who's better at dealing with those kinds of issues."

Certainly games are the most important thing to us, both as gamers and consumers and also as people who run this business but at the same time, who doesn't want to make money? Look, I'd love to make money if I can do it on our own terms and make a lot of money and have a great place to live and have my kid's college fund. S--t, yeah, I want to pay for all that stuff. I don't know why that would make people online turn against me.

Geoff Keighley asked me the last time we did an interview, "Well what's the plan after that?" Me, I want to make enough money where I don't have to worry about money and then I'd love to go into more experimental game design. I'd love to make emotional games work. I don't see how they could work. But if I could be in a position where I don't have to worry about where my next paycheck is coming from and I could just kind of f--k around with that and see what I could do. Not to the level of Chris Crawford and never release anything, but do it to the point where I can really say, "Is there something here beyond pure play mechanics? Can you piggyback emotional content onto pure play mechanics?" I'd love to do that stuff. So selling the company is just one step on the plan to getting to that.

But using the nest in your example, if you build something great, why would you want to fly the coop if you're rocking and rolling and making great games? From what you're saying, you're looking this as if there are stages and there's a stage beyond even this that you--

Yes. You never know what's going to happen, but hopefully the company will be successful and we'll be able to sell it, we'll all make a nice chunk of change, we'll all have sort of our futures taken care of and then we can focus on other things. But if we're making great games and the nest is hopping and people are digging it, we don't want to abandon the players. We don't want to let them down and we'd want to keep making those games but I'm not talking two years from now. I'm talking--

Right.

--five to ten years from now if we're fortunate. On one hand it's like, "Ah, don't give your plan away." Who gives a s--t? The reality of it is, is it's a plan. You never know what's going to happen tomorrow. We could hit on the next big thing for Sony and we're like, "Dude we're making so much in royalties and we love this and the fans love it. Let's just do this for ten more years." Maybe we'll make enough in royalties to retire and not worry about money. Who knows, maybe all of our games will fail. I have absolutely no clue how it's going to go, obviously. But I'm comfortable saying this is the fantasy, and it will be fun to talk down the road and see how close we are coming to achieving that. But s--t man, I don't have any pride over this. You think I don't want to be like the guys at Harmonix? Hell, I'd love a payday like that. Hell yeah.

Next: In which Jaffe dissects gamers' responses to Calling All Cars--and why he believes his $10 games must be able to go toe to toe with $60 titles.

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Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe during his Sony days

In Part I of our three-part interview with Eat Sleep Play co-founder David Jaffe, conducted in July, he revealed the thought process that led to his departure from Sony. In Part II, he discussed his concerns about how people who create but do not own original IP are compensated by the publishers who employ. In today's third and final installment, Jaffe shares the lessons he learned while developing the Playstation Network download title Calling All Cars, his ambitions to create downloadable games that can compete with their $60 brethren, and explains why we shouldn't hold our collective breath waiting for him to make epic games again—even on the PSP. Read on.

What were the main lessons you learned from working on Calling All Cars that you're bringing to the new company?

Well, a couple of really good ones. I wouldn't say the biggest, but one of the biggest ones—I'm actually doing a post-mortem on my blog next week about this, because I've really been thinking about "What did I learn from that experience?" And one of the things I learned was that you have to design your game—and that includes mechanics and thematic—to speak to the audience that owns the system. I had made this assumption, which was an incorrect assumption, that because the game was $10 people would be like, "Ah, it's cartoony. I usually buy military hardcore stuff, but you know what? I'm going to give it a try. It's just ten bucks." It would be an impulse buy.

The reality of it is—and I know that this happened with a number of people who bought the game—but nowhere near as many people were able to get over the thematic hump being unappealing to them, because they're looking for games that are testosterone-fueled. The number of people who got over the hump because the price was so low was significantly lower than the number of people who responded to that game in exact same way they would if it had been a $60 game, which was "Thematically this just doesn't appeal to me."

That was a really big lesson that we're carrying forward. Even though we're in the less expensive game space from a development and a selling standpoint, we have to continue to be very respectful of who our main audience just like we've been on the $60 titles. We did that from a gameplay standpoint on Calling All Cars, but from a thematic standpoint we definitely did not. The other lesson from a gameplay standpoint was that $10 is still a lot of money. You're not forgiven for the fact that it's only $10. There are expectations even if you do a lot of things really right. Anything you put out there, even though it's $10, gets judged like it's $60.

Got it.

We got dinged all over the place on, "The single player game wasn't as rich as the multiplayer game." Well, I thought it was incredibly obvious that this game was designed to be a multiplayer game. Now that's not saying the multiplayer game was perfect, because there were definitely some flaws there that we learned from as well. But I assumed people would be like "Okay, the single player game is there train me, but it's really about going online." I assumed anybody who got the game would have been able to get online because that's how they got the game.

Absolutely.

But it turned out that we got dinged in reviews. We got dinged online in forums because people were like "The single player game is really kind of boring." It's like a sports game—the single player game was never meant to be anything other than training. It's really about the multiplayer game. So don't put anything out there assuming because it's $10 that you're going to be forgiven a little bit. If I were to make Calling All Cars again, I would have ripped out the single player entirely and just said "Look, it's a multiplayer game. That's what you get." I would have made sure people knew it before they bought it and then it would have been judged on the merits that we shipped. It wouldn't have been judged like I assumed it was going to be judged, which was "Oh, it's ten bucks. The single player is kind of okay but really all about the multiplayer."

I'm rambling, but that's—

Not at all.

I'm percolating all of this right now because I'm actually in the process of writing something about it, but there were a good five to ten things that I learned from it. I think in a lot of ways I learned more from this game, because while it was successful and got some pretty good reviews, it was not as big as God of War. It was not as big as Twisted Metal. So that really made us go, "All right, let's figure out why, so next time we step up to the plate we can apply those lessons to what we're doing."

Just a few more questions.

Sure.

So it's a three game deal with Sony?

We're doing the port [of Twisted Metal Head-On] which is not part of the three game deal, then we're going to go and do console and handheld exclusives with Sony for these first three games.

You mentioned PC as well. What's the plan for how you guys want to approach PCs? Is that going to be browser-based, Flash games, download—what are you thinking?

We're not really prepared to talk about our PC plan at the moment. We're definitely excited about the casual space, but right now all of our energy and focus is going towards making sure that fans of Sony and fans of the Playstation really get good stuff. I would definitely love to share with you down the road our PC ideas and plans, but right now we're really focused on getting Twisted Metal done and starting on the first game.

How many people are at the company? How much do you think you'll want to do in-house versus how much you'll want to outsource and do elsewhere?

It depends. On day one I think the number is about 25 or 26. We don't really want to grow more than about 35 to 40 if that, and I don't know if we'll ever get that big. So outsourcing certain things down the road is definitely something we're looking at. Certainly not to the level of like a—what are those guys who did Stubbs the Zombie called? Heavy Load?

Wideload.

Wideload. Yeah, we definitely don't have a model like that. We are a one-stop shop development house. But certainly—as is becoming the case more and more even if you don't have a Wideload structure—we may be outsourcing, be it music, be it cut scenes or be it actual in-game assets like know textures and models and animation. It's something that's becoming more and more prevalent, and I think we'll probably jump on that bandwagon from time to time. But it's not a major aspect of our structure.

In terms of the promotion of small games, I've had this conversation with people at Sony-—both execs and PR—and I've talked to people who've been dealing with challenges in terms of dealing with Xbox Live. In both cases it seems like the games—the PSN games, Xbox Live Arcade games—really don't get that much of a PR push.

Right.

In your case, because you're Dave Jaffe, you had done God War and PSN downloads were new enough, there was a lot of attention paid to Calling All Cars. But in general, a game like Super Stardust HD—

Yes.

—which is getting a strong grassroots following, there was little attention. It showed up at a few events, but there just wasn't anything really sustained behind it. In the case of Xbox Live arcade, I've talked to people making games for it who are basically being told by Microsoft, "Don't do any PR for this—we'll take care of it." But it seems like Microsoft is pretty much using these games to promote the Xbox Live Arcade Service. So there's a week of PR the game that comes out and that's it. It goes away and then the next game comes out. So when you look at that structure, what do you think needs to happen on the PR front and the marketing front to elevate these smaller games?

Well, I don't know if that's an accurate assessment, if I may say. Because if you look at something like Warhawk, I mean Warhawk has been promoted all over the place and will continue to be. Yes, it's coming out on Blu-Ray, but it's also a PSN title. Same thing with SOCOM. A lot of it has to do with "Is the game worth the time?" There's two ways you can promote it, right? You can promote the service—which you're right, they are doing—or you can promote the individual game. I think up until this point—and including Calling All Cars—they've been doing it this way.

You know, these smaller games are interesting. They sort of merit an appreciative nod at worst and like you said, a grassroots fan base at best. But there hasn't been a game on either system yet that I think has really been able to compete with the noise of big games like say Grand Turismo or Heavenly Sword or God of War or whatever. And so I think until that happens, until we as the makers and creators of smaller games are able to find a way to bust through the noise of the bigger games, then that will continue to happen. Looking at the movies, you rarely hear about an independent film over the roar of the big summer movies. But every now and then an indie film is so good and so compelling and so interesting that it does become what people are talking about, and that is the thing that gets the push and the cover of Entertainment Weekly, when "Blair Witch" gets on there or something like that.

The other thing is when you say, "What did you learn from Calling All Cars?" that's exactly what we learned. Whether we succeed or fail, I guarantee you we're going into our first original PSP title or PS3 title for Sony with that intent, in the DNA of the design which is, "Okay, the appreciative nods are not good enough for us. We want a hit. We want a lot of people to play and love our game. We want to be able to stand toe to toe with the big $60 Blu-Ray titles." It's not going to come from doing really cool, nice-looking arcade games that are appreciated and people pat us on the head and say, "Hey, that's really cool you're keeping that alive." It's going to come from being able to go toe to toe with these bigger titles on certain levels.

Obviously we can't go toe to toe when it comes to scope, because we're not spending that kind of money. So we have to kind of outdo them in other realms and we have definitely applied that thinking to our first title. And hopefully when you see it in six, eight, ten months down the line, you'll agree that its thematic and design will be something that has people talking about it as much as they're talking about the next big game from one of these huge developers.

Lastly, a personal interest of mine that we've talked about before is what you were trying to do with Homeland. In terms of the PSP titles you'll be working on, are those also going to be primarily intended for download? Or will those be full spec PSP games on the scope of, say, God of War PSP?

Well first of all, we haven't announced if we're on Blu-Ray, if we're on PSN, if we're on handheld. All we've really announced is that we are exclusive to Sony in those areas for three titles. So where we end up landing has not been announced yet. That's the first thing. The second thing is that the team that we have built and the company that we've put together, we really are more about sort of mechanics-driven gameplay. If you look at the things that we've done—Twisted Metal, Warhawk, Jet Moto—that's the kind of stuff you can expect to see from us.

One of the things I learned from Heartland is that while the team that I'm working with technically and creatively is more than capable of doing a game like Heartland, it really comes down to: what is your team really passionate about? What do they like to play? What do they like to make? And the biggest lesson I learned was you can't fit a square peg into a round hole, and that's what I was trying to do with this team. It wasn't a good fit. So I don't think you'll see anything from this company that is going to try to compete with the God of Wars and the Gears of Wars and things like that. We're really more about fun, pick up and play, arcade, multiplayer, just having a really good time, at least on the Sony end. Now on the PC end, I can't really speak to that yet, but that's what I would say to that.

Great. Well David, you've given me plenty of time. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Well it's my last day. Nobody's got me doing anything. So I'm kind of just trying to get my f---ing computers from IT and get out of here.

Are you going to make it to Comic-Con or are you done?

No, I went for the first day. I had so much fun but it was so, so crowded. It was insanely crowded and Thursday's usually kind of like the low point. I'm like, "There's no way I'm going back for that thing." It's just absolutely a mad house. It was like E3 on Thursdays, so I don't want to think about what it's going to be like tomorrow. But it was awesome. It was a blast. You've been before, yeah?

No, I've actually never been.

Oh, you should totally go. You can't make it this year, obviously, but you should go next year. It's awesome.

Maybe next time.

So this is going to be on your blog or what?

Absolutely.

Awesome. Very cool man. I'm looking forward to it.