26 MCV 15/10/10
MCV INTERVIEW JAMIE KING, PRESIDENT, 4MM GAMES
Rap Party
The press have been making excitable noises about Def Jam Rapstar, but sales of music games are generally in decline. Aren’t you a little worried that this niche has already reached saturation point? No, Def Jam Rapstar is a complete breath of fresh air, and it’s going to reinvigorate the music genre. I think it’s going to surprise everyone with just how fun and viral it is.
What is it about hip-hop that you love? It’s uplifting, it’s really poignant social commentary, it’s flamboyant, it’s full of swagger. There’s lots of bravado. I can’t rap, I can’t sing – I never will – but for a brief moment in time I forget. With the phoneme recognition technology we’ve got, you have to get the lyrics right, and in Battle Mode you really start trying. You’re getting, for a moment, to be a bit like Biggie. It’s really cool, and slightly larger than life. There’s a lot of aspiration. Getting away from our weekly lives, and our jobs. There is this brief moment of ‘Oh!’ It’s just fun and glamourous, and super competitive. It comes as a surprise just how much non- hip-hop fans will come into the room, work their way forwards, grab the mic and compete. And that’s why I’m very confident we have a good franchise here. There’s replayability here.
What’s happening post-release? Are you planning another one? We’re going to support this heavily with downloadable content, and keep feeding the community. We’re already talking about what we’re doing for the next one. We know we can’t just rinse it out and just put in new songs. There’s got to be gameplay innovations in there, and that will be a challenge. But we’re very serious about this, and about Def Jam Rapstar becoming a franchise.
4mm was working on an MMO. What happened to that? We worked on Cement Factory [a paintball game targeted at teenagers], and got it through pre-production, but
STARTING OVER:
King co-founded Rockstar Games. We asked how his past experiences at Rockstar shaped 4mm as a company, and what inspired him to strike out on his own:
“THERE ARE A lot of things that didn’t turn out how I expected. I’d been at Rockstar for 11 years, and I think it was a natural time for me to move on. It was definitely a good time. They had the next generation technology up and running, and all the next big games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemptionwere started, so it wasn’t a problem when I left. “Now, I’m not a resume guy. I did not want to have to go to the West Coast, and go and interview at existing publishers and say ‘Can I have a job please?’. Especially after coming from Rockstar, right? I wanted to stay in New York, so I had to start my own company to have a job in games. “And when Rockstar’s CTO
Gary [Foreman] left, he came and found me and said ‘I quit, I’ve gotta do something!’ “And Nick Perrett, our CEO,
he really cares about building a proper company that’s world class. “Investment group Autumn
Games backed us, and said they wanted to work with the best in the industry, and that was two years ago. I don’t know how they raised the money they did in the height of a financial meltdown. They were really ballsy, and they were really smart. They believed in Def Jam. They believed in Rapstar, and even when everyone around them was telling them no, and giving them a hard time, and everyone else was going broke, no-one was opening the cheque book, and wouldn’t do a big budget triple-A title, they haven’t flinched once. “Fuck me, I’m just so grateful
to them, I don’t know how they did it.”
all the finance we raised has gone on Def Jam Rapstar, so it’s kind of on hold for now. We’re not worried about that.
What’s this collaboration with TV channel NBC you’re also working on? Yeah, they have formed an all action sports group, which is skateboarding, motocross, BMX freestyling, wakeboarding, and some other stuff. They have an annual tour – it’s like the X-Games. The next one’s in Vegas, and we are making free-to-play 3D action sports titles in a browser to support it. It’s the beginnings of an online world based around action sports.
Are you building that side of the business as you go along? Yeah, completely. Later in October we’re announcing the first sport that we’ve started working on, and we’re
very excited to be working with NBC and old media – their distribution reach is enormous. We’re going to take on the social gaming upstarts and the free-to- play models coming over from Korea. I think MMOs have a lot of life in them. We’re just at the beginning. There’s so much potential, and it’s transforming the industry in ways that people don’t realise. Over the next 40 years, there’s so much good stuff to be done, and we are very focused, long-term, on digital distribution and the move away from the ‘ship and forget’ model.
Talking of which, how do you view the High Street retail space right now? Is it going to keep contracting as many people predict? You know, I don’t know. Years ago I read a great article, and it discussed the inbuilt resistance from the bricks and
With the launch of rap game Def Jam Rapstar just around the corner, Kristan Reed sat down with 4mm Games’ president Jamie King to talk hip-hop, MMOs, NBC, and the future of retail...
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