Eutechnyx' Todd Eckert

Maybe, but one of the interesting things about it is even if you own a Ferrari, you don't care about anything other than Ferraris, you'll still want to know about Lotus because you'll want to be able to malign them.

Or you'll want to look a Lamborghini because you're going to be going to be racing against Lamborghini. So you'll think "it's really got more horsepower, wow."

I don't think it's a bubble because it's human nature. It's not artificially inflated, it's just the way people think. You can look at Korea, I was just there a couple of weeks ago, and there aren't really videogame stores, that aren't record stores. The whole country the government put broadband everywhere. So if you have the option of sitting there and downloading a game when it comes out, or you get in your car - and Seoul's an amazingly congested place - and drive somewhere with a store, what are you going to do?

The other difficult thing is, and I think that's true for any artistic medium, I've always felt that the greatest bookstores or record stores what not necessarily the ones that had what you were looking for, they were the ones that had stuff that was just great, that you didn't know existed. And blogs sort of fulfil that, but it's never the same as the person in the store speaking to you, these amazingly tangential conversations, and going home with all these things you didn't expect to buy. So it's figuring out a way to harness that.

With games, as you go into online field, we have to be much more clever in showing people what it's about. It's one of the reasons that we're going marketing campaigns with some of the car companies and some other relevant associated people with the game.

We're currently working on pretty much every SKU you can think of. So we got two games that are PS3 and 360 games, and one of them on Wii too. Online, ACR will be available through phones and iPad and whatever. So we're kind of embracing all of it. The consoles obviously have legs for a while longer, but there are certain benefits to... we work with Sony and Microsoft all the time, so I don't want to malign them... but there is something awfully attractive about not having to pay that Sony or Microsoft fee.

Yeah, although I thought Steve Job's answer for the antenna problems was hilarious.

Phones, no. iPad maybe, but I still think that there's a reason that people continue to go to movies and theatres and that's because when it's condensed on the back of an airplane seat it's not the same thing. I was just talking to someone about Heavy Rain which is my favourite game of the last year, and I love the fact that technology's getting to the point where you can express, give an emotion beyond aggression. People always said that games are incredibly violent - I think a lot of that came from the fact that the technology was so limited that you couldn't do anything other than have a guy pick up a brick and hit another guy with it.

I think as facial animation technology continues to improve, which is something we're working very deeply on, and you're able to express things like empathy and humour, people's pupils dilating and all that kind of crap, you're able to have much more meaningful self-experiences within games.

Um... yes... Although...

They generally don't cry though. [Laughs].

We did a game called Street Racing Syndicate which had online connectivity. And we soon saw that Europeans like racing circuits with a gazillion different twists, really really difficult. Americans wanted to have four mile strips which were straight, so you can go balls-out fast, turn around and do it again. Simple. It was a good indication of what people liked. So it's obviously it's not localised into American, but it is sort of.

How many people in the UK are going to care about late 60s American muscle cars? Probably far fewer than care about them in Wisconsin. So you do put more focus in different areas, and since ACR is a truly global game we will be pushing different content to different people.