So, exciting times, Peter?
It’s an amazing experience, really, to be part of this big announcement from Microsoft, and then unveiling all the Milo And Kate stuff, which you know, I’ve found it very hard to restrain myself from talking about that in the months previous. And then announcing my creative director role. It’s all very exciting.
How did the position come about – was it something you wanted or did Microsoft come to you?
Microsoft came to me and said, ‘It would be incredibly helpful to have someone such as yourself to creatively guide – and I want to stress that – it’s a creative guidance role. I’m not going to go into studios and start designing their games. It’s just using my experience to help people through the development process. Especially now, developing and designing a game is incredibly challenging, with new input devices, cameras and Natal and God knows what else. It’s very useful to have someone at a senior level who can sit down with the designers and say, ‘Have you considered this? Is this the right direction?’ as opposed to going in and asking them why they did the game. So this is a guidance role. The people at Rare are super, super smart and I learn probably more from the designers there than they do from me, so it’s very much working with them.
That’s one side of the role. The other is really to have a strong link between Europe and Redmond, because with the distance it’s very, very hard for people on both sides to be able to keep up to date. There needs to be creative direction for the products. When it was suggested to me, I first said, ‘Well, I’ve got a lot of design stuff on my plate, so I can’t take on any more design.’ But it wasn’t to do with that. So I’m still going to be actively involved with the design of anything at Lionhead.
So do you think until now MGS’ European studios have lacked creative direction?
Yeah, you know I think it’s really useful to have someone, whether it’s me or someone like me, who can be a touchstone for the creative endeavours we all get up to. Even now, even though the industry is 20, 30 years old, we all develop as islands. And having someone creative saying, ‘Look, why don’t we all point in this direction and reach these quality levels,’ is really useful. Especially with someone like Microsoft, because Microsoft has a huge number of things. Just with my experience with Milo and Microsoft Research, there’s a massive amount of technology and smart ideas within Microsoft Corporation, and just having someone like me that can be a conduit to that I think is incredibly useful.
Are there any particular aims you would like to achieve with the games that will come out of European Microsoft Games Studios over the next few years?
I think it’s really to push the boundaries of what is being created and make sure all the ideas that are being implemented to their fullest extent, and to get to the core and passion of what people want to create, and make sure that’s what’s being authored. For me, it’s very simple. It’s making sure the product is as good as it can be. If you were to measure any effect that I had, then hopefully the products get a little bit better.
Do you want to create any sort of unified identity to the games coming out of these studios?
I think probably, and this is not me going in there with big ideas and saying, ‘Lets design this game,’ I’m fascinated by innovation and the creative endeavour and absolutely fascinated by giving core and casual gamers an experience they maybe haven’t had before. Whether that be a piece of technology which is exploited creatively, or whether it be taking someone’s idea and saying, ‘OK, that’s a great idea – why don’t we really centre an experience around that?’ I would hope that over time, you’re going to see some probably subtle changes at the start, but far more of a strong creative approach to the games.
You’re remaining in your position there, but what does your appointment mean for Lionhead?
I am the studio head and the head of design and I get involved, but it’s only the incredibly talented people at Lionhead that do the fundamental stuff that enables me to do that. So I’ve got an amazing team of people supporting me, and allowing me to do amazing, interesting stuff while they get on with absolutely essential mechanical stuff. So I still have my weekly reports meeting and we go through what’s happening at Lionhead, and I have my weekly meeting on – I almost told you what that product was… The Milo And Kate team and the other team. And I think the rhythm of that is going to keep going on. This creative director role I’ve been doing for a few months now, so everyone’s used to it.
What attracts you to working with Microsoft in particular?
I think, to me, the press briefing said it all. If you are a creative person, like I am, working in an organisation which first of all takes on those enormous – and this isn’t me being corporate, it’s a fact – if you look at Natal, it is a very big step forward, not a little step, which I find fascinating. And Microsoft especially has this fascination with creative approaches and innovation. The other side is that it’s a vast corporation that has unbelievably smart people in it. A lot of the time they are islands themselves, and having someone like myself going in and saying, ‘Look, why don’t we use this in this game?’ – I’ll give you a perfect example: we’re using the handwriting recognition out of Windows 7, object recognition from Microsoft Research, facial recognition – one of the reasons why Milo looks so amazing is that all this tech has been worked on by these incredibly smart people. I’m like a kid in a candy shop, taking the bits you want to use, and blending them together in unique ways.
So you’d say it’s time Microsoft realises all its many assets it has at its disposal?
Yeah, I think this is a problem a lot of companies have, big and small. I know just from Lionhead that it’s hard to get people to inspire each other if they’re just three desks away, and when you’re a much larger corporation it’s very useful to have someone that can go around hungrily grabbing all the fascinating stuff. And there’s a lot of fascinating stuff there.
What have you found most inspiring at E3 so far this year?
I haven’t any time to look around yet because I’ve been incredibly busy. What I usually do is on the second or third day I start asking journalists what they think is really impressive, and that’s where I get most of my opinions from! I saw the press briefings and I thought that – and I thought the Sony one wasn’t as strong as the Microsoft one.