Some very interesting interview stuff from Bizarre about PGR, Forza, Blur, The Club, Microsoft, Activision, etc.
QUOTE
What was behind your decision go from independence to being part of a major publisher?
MC I’m not going to slag [Microsoft] off in an evil way, but obviously we worked on PGR4 for them, and I think that PGR4 was the strongest Gotham game we did – the most fully rounded. But towards the end of that project they wanted us to bring it in early, to chop six weeks off development. But the way we work is really right up to the wire, so basically the game is nowhere near finished at six weeks to go, so we had to dig our heels in and say that our contract said that we’re to bring the game in on this day, and that’s what we were going to do because we cannot compromise the work that the lads have been doing, and the quality of the game. They didn’t realise how bad a situation it would have been – we needed that extra six weeks, and it got us concerned with the future with Microsoft. We were talking with Activision, and then they were the third biggest publisher in the world and with no racing studio, or racing title; they tried for ten years to come up with a racing franchise and hadn’t managed it. We were getting disillusioned with Microsoft and they were getting corporate and cocky as well because of the shift in power between them and Sony.
SC And their main focus was always on the Forza team.
MC And that was at the expense of us. They brought out the Forza [Xbox 360 console] bundle. And that was disappointing, because the guys worked so hard on [PGR4]. It just didn’t get the exposure and the marketing – it got the critical acclaim, but wasn’t as commercially successful as the other projects. We knew that Activision didn’t have this racing title that it wanted and we got closer and closer and eventually instead of us working for them on other projects, the whole acquisition came about. At that point we were around 160 people, and the bank balance was shrinking – still sustainable but we could see that instead of having three years of buffer, we would have six months of buffer. So we thought that it made sense for Activision to basically take all of our projects, with the racing game being the primary focus.
Was remaining independent important to you?
MC Absolutely. That was part of the Activision thing, because it operates under the independent studio model, which basically allows us to run just as we work. All they do is to put in the financial hooks and we take on one person [in-house] who’s the direct link to the financial part.
SC And we’re getting unbelievable marketing and PR support.
MC That was part of it. They were the third biggest publisher at the time, and they can market and promote a game far in excess of what Microsoft did. They’re really strong, and that’s something we’ve really desired. Microsoft always had – I’m painting a bad picture; we had a really good relationship right up to the very end – but they always had other agendas, which were primarily about selling Xbox. We were there at launch for Xbox with PGR1, PGR2 was about the Live service, and that crippled us. Everybody thought, ‘I’m not buying that,’ because they promoted it as a Live game, but it wasn’t Live only. Then PGR3 was 360 launch game.
Which suffered from a small installed base?
SC Yeah.
MC And we only got the hardware less than six months before it was on the floor, which was crazy and painful at the same time. PGR4 was the first game that we had the full ability to do what the game requires. We still had to sell Xboxes, and still try to be technical and clever and whizzy and show the power of the console and the Live service. But obviously Forza was hanging over it and they had a much greater stake in that.
Blur contains characters, a storyline and cutscenes, things that people don’t readily associate with Bizarre, but you explored some of them in The Club. Did the experience of making that inform what you’re doing in Blur?
MC No, not particularly. The Club was interesting. We ended up taking it in a direction that we didn’t start on. Inititally, it was meant to be a technical shooter with a scoring mechanism designed to reward the skill level of the player in a more tangible way, rather than just have it as a story, which is what most shooters are. But Sega got quite nervous about that and wanted to contextualise it and put this storyline on top of it, which wasn’t actually playing to our strengths. I think it probably made it more accessible, perhaps, but it did dilute some of the rawness of the scoring mechanism that was behind the game. I don’t want to say it was the uniqueness of it, but it was part of the goal of it.
It seems to have proven quite influential, though.
MC Yeah, 50 Cent. It’s quite scary. That’s rewarding in its own way, you know. We enjoyed working on the project, and I think Sega might have made more of it if we’d continuted with them onto a sequel.
So they asked for one?
MC Yeah. They wanted us to get a lot closer, but it obviously wasn’t going to work because we were going to Activision. Obviously, they didn’t have anybody to do a sequel, so therefore they weren’t going to put all their efforts into marketing the first one. At that point we’d already stated we weren’t going to go on with it. It was a bit of a shame, but we have to think what will do the company good, and the stability of what Activision could give us was going to be good.
There seems to be a good deal of new interest in The Club going on in forums at the moment.
MC Really? Oh, that’s nice! We always thought it would be a quite a deep game, but not a lot of people got it. It was a bit of a shame. We loved that mechanism, that level of competition, that one-upmanship.
