What can you say about the downloadable content right now? Will it deliver what people are expecting – ie, a bunch of new missions? Or more than that?

[Pauses] I’m trying to think of something to say that’s not too bland, because I can’t really talk about it. I think it’s really cool, and as an overall package there are two episodes, and each episode works on its own, and as a whole it works well. It adds to the experience in a fun way. If you enjoyed GTAIV, you’ll enjoy it. If you didn’t, it will provide some new things for you to not enjoy.

[Some spoilers lie ahead--ed.]

Is there any way that you can track the decisions players made at crucial points during GTAIV?

I don’t know if it can track exactly those things. I wanted to go through at some point and look at all of those points to get a sense of how people tackled those decisions. What about you – did you kill Darko?

Erm…

You killed him, didn’t you? I can tell from your face.

Completely shot him to pieces, yes.

Interesting. But not everyone did – I know a bunch of people who didn’t. So that worked quite well. What about Dimitri?

Well, on the first playthrough, Roman died. With Kate, though, it was a matter of being so wrapped up in other activities – she would call to arrange a date and there always seemed to be other things that had to be done. You find yourself reaching the conclusion of the game and you haven’t found the opportunity to let her become a big part of your life.

That’s amazing that a game can do that, though. That’s amazingly gratifying because that’s how we want people to respond to it. That’s what we wanted it to feel like. A cinematic narrative but giving you things cinema can’t, which is choice, and feeling that your actions have influenced outcomes. It’s not ‘find a key and get through a door’, it’s more subtle, and there are more inputs than that.

It’s almost like event television, in the way you arrive at work and talk with colleagues about what happened last night, except in this case your experiences obviously have the opportunity to be different. We’re interested in seeing what happens in this respect when the DLC is rolled out.

So am I. It’s like Chinatown Wars in that it’s something totally new. We’ve never done anything episodic at all – the only thing we’ve done remotely similar, I suppose, are the PSP games; new stories in existing worlds, and on a handheld. The idea of sending content down the internet is scary to me in some ways, because I’m old enough to think it’s all got to be on a disc. And the same with Chinatown Wars, to be fiddling around, doing stuff on a DS and trying a totally new platform, and also working with Nintendo, who we’ve never really worked with closely before. It’s new ground and it’ll be interesting. Fun, though. We’re not going to get stuck doing the same thing. Everyone seems convinced that the internet is eventually how you’ll be distributing your games, and this is our first foray into that, and I think Xbox Live is a great environment to be doing that – they’ve got a really vibrant community and insanely popular and efficient ways of getting stuff out to people.