Activision has grown significantly since October last year, too.
MC We got this phone call with all the heads of studios, while we were at Gulliver’s World, which is like a kiddies’ version of Alton Towers.

SC It’s desperately trying to be Disney Land, but it was built in the 1970s with Gully Mouse.

MC It’s full of people wandering around looking lost. It’s embarrassing, and we were there for a Christmas extravaganza with the kids. We had this phone call that was scheduled for all these heads of studios to make this big announcement and it was to announce the merger between Activision and Blizzard. So we went from being the only racing studio for the world’s biggest publisher to the only racing studio in the world’s biggest publisher. We were saying, ‘Shit. Careful what you wish for...’ We’ve the full weight of this monstrosity above us, which has good and bad connotations, because obviously, the greater the expectation, the greater the pressure, and the exposure.

SC All while waiting in the rain outside Santa’s Grotto.



Blur contains characters, a storyline and cutscenes, things that people don’t readily associate with Bizarre, but you explored some of them in The Club. Did the experience of making that inform what you’re doing in Blur?
MC No, not particularly. The Club was interesting. We ended up taking it in a direction that we didn’t start on. Inititally, it was meant to be a technical shooter with a scoring mechanism designed to reward the skill level of the player in a more tangible way, rather than just have it as a story, which is what most shooters are. But Sega got quite nervous about that and wanted to contextualise it and put this storyline on top of it, which wasn’t actually playing to our strengths. I think it probably made it more accessible, perhaps, but it did dilute some of the rawness of the scoring mechanism that was behind the game. I don’t want to say it was the uniqueness of it, but it was part of the goal of it.

It seems to have proven quite influential, though.
MC Yeah, 50 Cent. It’s quite scary. That’s rewarding in its own way, you know. We enjoyed working on the project, and I think Sega might have made more of it if we’d continuted with them onto a sequel.

So they asked for one?
MC Yeah. They wanted us to get a lot closer, but it obviously wasn’t going to work because we were going to Activision. Obviously, they didn’t have anybody to do a sequel, so therefore they weren’t going to put all their efforts into marketing the first one. At that point we’d already stated we weren’t going to go on with it. It was a bit of a shame, but we have to think what will do the company good, and the stability of what Activision could give us was going to be good.

There seems to be a good deal of new interest in The Club going on in forums at the moment.
MC Really? Oh, that’s nice! We always thought it would be a quite a deep game, but not a lot of people got it. It was a bit of a shame. We loved that mechanism, that level of competition, that one-upmanship.



Are you still interested in pursuing a variety of projects in style and size, from big racers to Geometry Wars?
MC Definitely. It’s really interesting doing it that way. Obviously, there’s not the greatest financial gain to be taken from those smaller projects. The bread and butter has always got to be the bigger projects. The smaller projects, like Geometry Wars, generate a feel-good factor around the office. People love playing them and it’s a bit different, We never set the company to make money, we set it up to make games, and doing small, fun projects is what that’s about. It’s just a shame that with iPhone applications and XNA and XBLA the teams have to be so big, and the budgets have to be so big that it’s still outstripping that bedroom coding mentality that we hoped it would be. Geometry Wars was one programmer, a musician, and you can still do that. But most other games need 5, 6, 7 minimum. With budgets, it’s a real shame because I’d love to see games being made by one or two people. But can you compete? It’s really difficult.

You mean it takes a large number of people to significantly jump beyond the bounds of what one person can do today?
MC Yeah, unless you get lucky with that exact right product at that exact right time. We got lucky with Geometry Wars, the fact that in the early days of Live Arcade we could do it. It didn’t require graphics, just a programmer with artistic flair. It’s so hit and miss – look at what Jeff Minter’s been doing, too. He misread the audience, I think. But Steve (Cakebread, Geometry Wars’ creator] with Geometry Wars tried to encapsulate modern thinking around that sort of genre and what people would want to do. We got lucky and Jeff didn’t. But the primary focus has got to be around looking after the bread and butter, which is obviously at this point the racing game.

And Activision is allowing you to retain that breadth of variety?
MC Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s all part of the independent studio model that is bandied around. It works.

You can read an extensive report on Bizarre’s new racer, Blur, in E202.