How did you get started in the games industry? I started testing games and making tea back in 1990. It was the 8-bit console, 16-bit computer era.
The Final Boss
Every month an industry leader wraps up MCV/DEVELOP with their unique insight
You’ve mentioned that your time working with Bullfrog on Dungeon Keeper 2 was a career highlight. Assuming you’ve had quite a few others since, where does it rank? Dungeon Keeper 2, along with many other Bullfrog titles, were a load of fun to work on. There were an amazingly talented group of people trying out new ideas. Along the way you wondered where the games were going to be amazing or whether we’d explode before we reached the finish line. Sometimes the former, sometimes the latter as it turned out. As an achievement it’s definitely up there, but as anyone who’s worked in games for a while will tell you, there are all kinds of highs for all kinds of reasons.
Your time with Computer Artworks corresponds with the release of The Thing, which was ahead of its time in many ways. How do you look back on that game - especially with it being unavailable since and consequently largely forgotten? The Thing was a great game and is something of a fan favourite. I can’t take too much credit as I joined towards the tail end.
Probably the game you’re most synonymous with is Buzz!, which along with Wii Sports helped take gaming into the mainstream. How do you look back on that period and the series in particular? We had a lot of fun with Buzz. The thing I look back on is the fact that it took the games industry such a long time to realise that the market was bigger than teenagers in their bedroom - Singstar, Buzz, EyeToy and Wii all showed that anyone will play a game if you present them with the right experience. It taught me such a lot and we had a pretty wild time.
As smartphones became evermore dominant in peoples’ lives you continued to innovate in the realm of casual gaming. What was the appeal?
I like trying new things in the games industry. When 2bn players arrived in the form of mobile gamers, that seemed like too big an event to ignore. I like learning new things and mobile offers a whole new way of thinking about games production: new play patterns, new monetisation, new marketing and new retention mechanics.
David Amor, CEO of Playmint
“I’ve learned that the canvas for the kind of games you can make is larger than you imagine”
54 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2023
You established Playmint in 2021, in order to utilise blockchain technology and capitalise on the trend for NFTs, which is still a controversial area for many within the industry. How has the noise around NFTs changed the discussion around web3 adoption? An NFT is a technology primitive in the same way as a webpage is a technology primitive; it really depends on what you do with it. It seems clumsy to assume that all games that use blockchain or NFTs are exploitative in some way, although I acknowledge that it can be hard to read past the headlines. To me, it’s the most interesting technology that’s come to the games industry in years.
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