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Tameem Antoniades

Ninja Theory's creative director on multi-platform games and the challenge of independence

As a pioneer of new IP on the then-fledgling PlayStation 3 platform with Heavenly Sword, Ninja Theory's work was held up as a showcase for what was possible on Sony's shiny new console. But as an independent developer the team's next move needed to go multi-platform, and late last year the company announced a deal with Namco Bandai to publish Enslaved, an action-adventure title that will be available for the Xbox 360 as well.

Here, creative director and company co-founder Tameem Antoniades discusses some of the ongoing challenges of independent development, looks back on the post-Heavenly Sword period and talks about how publishers' attitudes towards game content have changed.

GamesIndustry.biz We've not heard a huge amount from Ninja Theory in a while - other than the Namco Bandai publishing deal - so how have things been going?
Tameem Antoniades

Good actually - pretty much keeping a low profile, which is good. When you're starting up you need to announce yourselves, make yourselves known, and right now we're quite happy with the projects we're working on - and happy to work under the radar, just concentrate on getting the development done.

It's only now that we're ramping up with the push to get Enslaved out and visible - but it's very refreshing, compared to working on Heavenly Sword and announcing it around two years before it shipped... and doing demos every three months - it's a big strain.

GamesIndustry.biz Well, Heavenly Sword was a bit of a picture-boy for the PlayStation 3 tech - so I guess from that perspective Sony was keen to get that visibility... but it must have been a tough process for a first title.
Tameem Antoniades

It was tough - but our objective was to break into the triple-A development stratosphere, kicking and screaming. So it felt like a very difficult birth, but that's what we needed to do in order to grow. Now that we've got that game out - and it's the same team now working on Enslaved - it's more like we're consolidating our skillset, the way we work, and I'm quite enjoying it. It feels like the team is pretty tight - everyone knows what they've got to do, everyone knows what the limitations are, the hardware's not changing... it's nice, I've never been in that situation before.

The first game was Kung Fu Chaos on the Xbox, which was a next-gen platform - then it was straight into the PS3, and now we're doing multi-platform, and we can focus on the game.

GamesIndustry.biz Has it been a positive process taking all of the learning from Heavenly Sword and, to an extent, being able to boil it down into better production methods, improved efficiencies and so on?
Tameem Antoniades

Yes - with Heavenly Sword we had a long development time. I think it took about five years in all, from beginning to end, and I'd say three quarters of that was building tech. And even then our toolset was extremely limited - there's only so much that one team can do, building technology from scratch and then building a game.

So it's been a breath of fresh air being able to start a new project, knowing what the limitations of the hardware is and say: "This is the game we're gonna do, this is the engine we're gonna use," and just go ahead and do it... thanks to Unreal.

GamesIndustry.biz And when you've made that level of investment in tech, I guess it makes it a no-brainer to continue on with a platform in order to be able to reuse it?
Tameem Antoniades

Well, for Heavenly Sword we built all the tech from scratch because we started so early that there weren't really tools and tech out there for us to use, it was very rudimentary - so we had to.

But under our exclusivity mandate [with Sony] all of that tech is exclusive to the PS3, so going multi-platform meant that we couldn't use it. So we had to start all over again.