Interview: Insomniac Games' Ted Price on going multiplatform, EA Partners
After announcing a new Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 project with EA Partners, Insomniac Games faces a bombardment of questions from fans and press. We fired off some of our own earlier today in an interview with Insomniac CEO Ted Price and EA Partners' Global Marketing VP, Craig Rechenmacher, and while the prolific developer remains tight-lipped when it comes to discussing the details of the new project, we learned more about the partnership's motivation and scope.
Joystiq: This announcement, is this for a single game? Or is this for the entire franchise?
Ted Price: This is for a single game.
Why not a franchise? Why start with a single game deal?
Ted: At Insomniac we actually tend to do game to game deals. We do one deal at a time and our goal is, though, to have a longterm relationship with anybody we work with. As you know we worked with Sony for 14 years and it has been great, and we're looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship with EAP as well.
Craig Rechenmacher (EAP): Yeah, from our standpoint, we're announcing a one-game deal, but our job is to make this first product a massive success. And if we do that, this is gonna be a long-term relationship.
With this announcement, is Insomniac creating more games or spending more individual time on each game it ships?
Ted: Well, it's easy for me to answer the last question -- we are definitely spending more time on games these days than we used to. As you may remember, back in the PlayStation One and PlayStation 2 days, we had one team and we were releasing a game a year. And that was a pretty brutal pace for us. However, as the year stretched on, we began to increase the size of the teams and lengthen our production time to add more polish to the game and have more time to tune them. And now we're continuing to do that, making sure the games we release are the absolute best they can be. Having multiple teams also gives us the luxury of sort of leapfrogging -- having staggered releases -- so that we can have a consistent stream of releases over the years. However, as we've moved into the PlayStation 3, we have lengthened our development times.
Joystiq: This announcement, is this for a single game? Or is this for the entire franchise?
Ted Price: This is for a single game.
Why not a franchise? Why start with a single game deal?
Ted: At Insomniac we actually tend to do game to game deals. We do one deal at a time and our goal is, though, to have a longterm relationship with anybody we work with. As you know we worked with Sony for 14 years and it has been great, and we're looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship with EAP as well.
Craig Rechenmacher (EAP): Yeah, from our standpoint, we're announcing a one-game deal, but our job is to make this first product a massive success. And if we do that, this is gonna be a long-term relationship.
With this announcement, is Insomniac creating more games or spending more individual time on each game it ships?
Ted: Well, it's easy for me to answer the last question -- we are definitely spending more time on games these days than we used to. As you may remember, back in the PlayStation One and PlayStation 2 days, we had one team and we were releasing a game a year. And that was a pretty brutal pace for us. However, as the year stretched on, we began to increase the size of the teams and lengthen our production time to add more polish to the game and have more time to tune them. And now we're continuing to do that, making sure the games we release are the absolute best they can be. Having multiple teams also gives us the luxury of sort of leapfrogging -- having staggered releases -- so that we can have a consistent stream of releases over the years. However, as we've moved into the PlayStation 3, we have lengthened our development times.
