Invizimal War

Yes - but on the other hand I'd say that the swing into positivity in Spain has been huge in the past three years. Since the industry really began picking up speed here in Spain things have changed a lot.

The social acceptance of videogames has changed a lot, and that's really good news for all of us. In the end, we're in the business of entertaining people - which is a really nice thing to do - and in a way we make people's lives better.

Every kid that gets Invizimals and plays it, we're giving him an atom of happiness in the end. So I think the whole backlash about videogames is something that the industry should possibly have cared about sooner - because our response should have been stronger from the beginning.

Well, there's a lot of stuff I can't talk about, but basically we'd been working in Invizimals internally for a while - one of those ideas that was on the backburner in the studio for something like nine months. It was actually a Plan B, as we were working on a DS game... but we showed it to another publisher - not Sony - and the response was way better than we'd anticipated.

That publisher then tried to make a deal happen, but it didn't come through because there was a level of complexity in there with regards to the camera and so on. They told us we should go to Sony with the idea... but we thought that nobody from Spain had ever gone to Sony, so it didn't look very viable - but we went for it anyway.

We went to Sony Europe and, much to our surprise, they were really impressed with the game.

Now that I'm older and wiser I look back and think I was stupid, because it was a very easy pitch - an original IP, exclusive to the PSP, and also because of the camera it's very hard for it to suffer from piracy. So the business model works really well for Sony.

In the early days of Invizimals we had a few references for augmented reality in terms of commercial gains, and those games were great in terms of experimentation but they weren't really commercial successes.

So when Invizimals was being developed, our main concern with Sony was usability - to make sure we could get the right experience across to consumers and that they understood it. The core idea for us was making sure people had fun, and that it wasn't like some kind of test or experiment.

I guess we made it - we were number one in several countries and sold over 400,000 units, so we were very happy on a personal level. But we also think that it's really good news for the industry that a game that was experimental, or tries to break new ground at least, is successful.

We're suffering a lack of really creative titles out there right now, especially in the bigger budget ranges - but I love the idea that we might open the doors for other studios to keep on doing creative stuff, in the same way that Patapon did on the PSP some years ago.

The problem is, if you make those kinds of games, you can make or break it - for example, everyone thinks Ico was an amazing game, but it didn't succeed on the commercial side. It's not so common to find a game that is successful but at the same time experimental.