Press Play was founded by three graduates who had the noble ambition of fixing what they saw as a gimmicky Flash scene. “Turned out we needed clients,” co-founder and studio director Rune Dittmer laughs, “so we did what everybody else did anyway: advertising games for ice cream and TV shows.” Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of the dream – advergame fatigue spurred the team on to create WiiWare game Max & The Magic Marker, which got the studio noticed. Last year it was acquired by Microsoft and is now working on Max: Curse Of Brotherhood, a spiritual successor to its breakthrough release.
How’s life under Microsoft ownership treating you?
We’re enjoying it a lot. I think the general concept of being independent is a difficult one: if you don’t have any money to do the games you want to do, that’s not independence at all. I think we’ve got very good terms when it comes to creative freedom, and Microsoft has been very hands-off. My boss is in Redmond, so that’s a nine-hour time difference and at least 15 in travel – there’s no microadministration! We feel really free. I guess originally being work-for-hire, then switching to our own IP, we were never afraid of working with partners – we published on iOS with EA, for example, and had all kinds of deals for localised versions of Max. We needed all the funding we could get. With Microsoft that part of it has become easier; the rest has pretty much stayed the same.
In terms of presentation, at least, Curse Of Brotherhood looks like a significant step up from Magic Marker.
The voice acting for the game was done in LA, but we did all the animation here. It was kind of a focus for us a few years back to raise our game, and our graphics, and I’m very glad we succeeded with that. There was a marked difference in terms of interest in the company and job applications once we released the Curse Of Brotherhood footage. It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, they’re a completely different studio than I thought they were…’ For us, we’ve been that studio for two or three years, so the change hasn’t felt that rapid here. We’ve got at least three projects on the go right now – that’s a lot for such a small team.
Multiple projects? Is this easier under Microsoft’s ownership?
Before Microsoft acquired us, it was a necessity to work on more than one title in order to negate risks. Now it’s more a preference for us. And if we’re going to have a constant staff level of around 25 people, we can’t have only one title in the very early stages, because then we’ll have to scale back to five. In order to have a culture where people have job security and enjoy being around, you can’t go back and forth in terms of team size. The challenge is how we do that as games become more service-orientated. We’re just getting started on viewing our games like that. We’ve been focused on shipping dates, and after the shipping date there might be a patch, but the product is done.
How have you found working with Xbox One?
We not really taking the ’what can we do with all this power?’ approach, we’re more interested in what we can do with Kinect. I’m pretty amazed by it, actually, it seems to have a very high fidelity, and compared with what we did with the old Kinect it’s almost latency-free.
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