Enslaved's Tameem Antoniades
"Just look at the music industry. Most music is utter, utter trash."
When you've got names that come on that above-the-line cost as we call it, we go to the publisher and it's up to them whether they think it's worthwhile or not.
No, no I don't think so. Our attitude is to do the best we can. Lindsay Shaw the actress: she's never worked, she's 19, she isn't famous, but she was really good when we did the casting - she was just an amazingly good actress. Names won't necessarily sell more units. It might help with publicity but it's not like movies where you hang the movie on a name.
Yeah, but it was a healthy clash. I'd say it was more exploratory. The dialogue is the framework in which the character emerges, so it was more a discussion about who that character is and how he's going to emerge, and once we'd done a few scenes, Andy was quite complimentary. He said, "It works really well off the page - the scenes work really well." Alex has got that art down to a tee in terms of allowing the actors to fill in the gaps.
No, not at all.
The game is much more varied, it's much more fun. It's easily the best game we've done by a long way. There isn't going to be any problems with that aspect. The storytelling... Our objective was to break away from cut-scenes telling the story as much as possible, so a lot of the story happens in voice-over. We got the actors back in, we wrote a full VO script, Alex would look at the whole game and write scripts as we were playing it and the actors would go over the game and ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement] over the game footage. It never feels like there's a story in the cut-scene and then there's a big void of gameplay where there's nothing happening, which Heavenly Sword could be accused of doing.
No, no, it can, and actually what you saw was from a couple of months ago, and we're continuing to refine those moments. It's down to the artists on his face to nail it.
I don't know, actually. I don't know. We haven't really talked about it, to be honest. But he's definitely someone I would love to work with again.
Yeah, well we've been working together for like four years, maybe five, and we spend a lot of time together: six weeks in New Zealand, four weeks in LA. He's a great guy and I really like him and consider him a friend.
I was actually invited to be an extra in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.
Just look at the music industry. Most music is utter, utter trash.
No, no I'm not! But a lot of music is not stuff you or I would probably want to listen to. The musicians that define the music industry, the people like Tom Waits, Muse, they're the landmarks. The most we can wish for is to have, at some level, the game remembered, because games are so disposable; after a few weeks on sale they disappear. The only way you can achieve any level of staying power is to affect people. With a lot of games, people won't remember them a couple of months after playing them, and that's a damn shame. You don't want to spend years working on a game for it to be forgotten and traded in for an equally similar game, so we have to make our games different.