Realtime Worlds' David Jones

I think there are a few things. First of all, we've got quite a healthy recruitment target. We already have 230 members of staff, which is a fair number, plus good people in the UK is a limited resource - there's always going to be competition for those people.

In respect to where we are, for people in the UK - yes, I think there is an issue. If you're from Manchester, or Birmingham, or London, and you've got family there, then it's always an issue. We do extremely well with people, say, coming over from Europe - for somebody coming from Birmingham, they'll know it's much smaller, and wonder what the nightlife is like. Dundee is small town in Scotland, so right away there's a culture check.

But for people in the US or Europe, for them, they're just coming to the UK - so those things are pretty inconsequential.

Yes, we have done - it's partly about getting people to Dundee, but it's also part of my desire to make a career in the games industry a terrific long-term career. It is a tough industry to work in, and in the past it's all been about big projects, lots of crunch, badly-managed.

But the industry's trying to evolve, people want to work better, and put better practices in place... but at the end of the day those things go out the window when we've got milestones and deadlines.

I have a personal problem with that. I look at the Pixars of this world - those guys have huge respect in the movie industry. They have the returns on investment, and they can actually invest a lot more on things like training and professions, and making sure they always have the resources and equipment they need.

I've always felt that the industry's suffered in that respect. We want to change that, we want the industry to be seen to be a great place to work, a great place to build a career with a good life balance. So we do things like paid overtime, which very few companies do.

Well, obviously we created the original, and you want to be associated with success, so we want to see it go on and do great things. It has such a strong following now, but it was one of those products that came out of nowhere, and I think that was indicative of some of the problems in the industry before - Microsoft didn't quite know what it was, didn't quite know how to market it. It was one of those sandbox games, and I think the success caught Microsoft by surprise a little bit.

We were always ready to start work on the sequel, and get cracking, but one of the big problems facing developers is that you have to know what you're working on about four or five months before your project ends - so at that point we tried to have a discussion, get things kicked off... but in the end we decided to plough ahead with APB.

The bottom line is that what we thought would happen is that a sequel would be done by a studio somewhere... maybe one of the internal studios, or others that they've worked with, and that would be the way it went forward.

I think it was unfortunate that it had to be with a start-up in Dundee... it is challenging to get enough developers in one region as it is, so that was the only little big of negativity to the story.

Yeah, it's just one of those awkward moments. In terms of the franchise, as always - as with anything we've created - we're always keen to see it do great things. This is like a bump in the road... was there really no way it could have been done by one of the studios Microsoft shut down...?

Exactly. That was the only negative thing. I was a bit miffed at Microsoft that it happened that way, but you live and learn.