The Hard Cell

It's funny. We would talk to publishers and they would tell us the same thing, 'Nintendo is untouchable, nobody competes with Nintendo, don't even bother with original games'. And we thought, why? Nobody could give us that answer. The only answer would be 'because it's Nintendo'. They have advantages of course but there's no reason why gamers wouldn't buy a game from somebody else that was like a Nintendo game. A lot of ways, in the DS space, we sought to emulate Nintendo and its mass-market appeal. How the art is inoffensive - Nintendogs, Brain Age, everybody plays them. For us, we added our hook to Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life. We cornered the market by saying, 'look, even Nintendo doesn't have what we have'.

And it's done really well. NPD just reported Super Scribblenauts was the best selling third-party IP on DS, and last year Scribblenauts was. We're up there with Nintendo. The market can have multiple winners.

I think it's interesting. We've been playing with it at last year's Nintendo conference, it's cool.

Everyone's sceptical about everything, right? But if you look at Nintendo's track record on handheld and they never lost. Why would you ever not bet on them? That doesn't make sense. Every single competitor who's ever gone against them has been crushed. It's not like they barely beat them, they've been crushed. Sony's come the closest and the new thing, the NGP, that looks interesting too.

Maybe console, maybe more digital, maybe more handheld. What's cool right now is where the company's at we have so many opportunities that we can't even capitalise on all of them. A lot of publishers want to work with us, first-parties want to work with us. We're thinking what we can do, but again, it's about not biting off more than we can chew.

We're very much a one/two game studio, we're not going to take on five or six projects and try and do them all. We want to make sure the things we work on is the stuff we're really interested in. It has to be original, it has to be on a platform that we think is going to be commercially viable and it has to be something that people want to work on. We might miss out on a lot of opportunities but it's about what we want to work on.

In a lot of was when we first started we got into mobile because it was the only way you could get into the industry, because there was no indie games scene, the was no XBLA, there was nothing. You made mobile games and hoped to make enough money to make something bigger. If the iPhone was around when we started we definitely would have been on that. It's a great platform, it solves all the issues that we complained about seven years ago - standardisation of screen size, operators, it was so fragmented.

With mobile it was just a name on a screen, you didn't get reviews, there were no demos. So you just bought The Incredible Hulk The Movie: The Game and hoped for the best. We did okay but they weren't the blockbusters, there wasn't the Harry Potter of mobile. And now all that's changed, it's a much better market, I really like the iPhone market.

I think there's opportunities but you've got to be careful about riding a whole company on it. Especially as experimentation, you can have just a few people on it. Hybrid's 30-40 people and even DS games are 30 people. Whereas with iPhone you can screw around, iterate, try different things. You're not making tons of money and bank-rolling the whole company but you can still make decent money.