“There’s no innovation going on in games right now.” You know the first time that I heard that sentence? 1987.
It has always been the same, and it will continue to be the same. People also say that there’s no innovation in films and books, and then there’s a flash of writing, a clear blue sky, and you get a Harry Potter.Here we are in 2008, and I’ll admit that in interactive entertainment, it’s an awful lot harder to be innovative just for innovation’s sake. Today we’ve got budgets to worry about, costs to recoup and audiences to reach. I used to do games where innovation was the core of the game. Populous, the first game I ever did, was one of those games.
But nevertheless, there still is an enormous amount of innovation going on right now in videogames. Look at the quality of graphics, for instance. Look at a screenshot of a videogame today and compare it to one four years ago. We used to throw tons of different status bars and maps on screen. Today we have more condensed readouts that give gamers all the information they need. It’s just a small example of how innovation can seep into a game without innovation being the reason a game exists.
And innovation can’t afford to be alone. There is true innovation when it’s balanced with drama. I’ve made so many mistakes where I’ve just thought the innovation alone was enough. In Black and White, I didn’t think I had to worry about the story or drama, because we had this great big land with great big creatures—that should be enough, right? No, it wasn’t enough. I should have gone that extra mile to balance drama with innovation. But the world craves new things. It’s a hunger that we have as human beings for something new. It’s very rare when something truly original comes around.
Over the past five years, TV has gone through incredible revolutions; advancements that I hope videogames can emulate. I’ll use one of my personal favorites as an example: Battlestar Galactica. It’s a great series. The original series from the late 1970s was the cheesiest, most rubbish thing ever. When you were a kid, it was one of the last things you forced yourself to watch if there was nothing else on TV.
But in a stroke of genius, someone took this worthless show and said, “We’re going to make one of the most dramatic science fiction series the world has ever known.” That was a fantastic innovation. 24 was a fantastic innovation. Lost was a fantastic innovation. Amazing things are happening in the TV world. We could be coming up with our own golden theory for games in a few years with Live and online gaming.
We’ll have our gem that will be our 24 or our Lost, and it will change the world. I wouldn’t like to predict what that gem is. It’ll probably be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. We’re still exploring how powerful Xbox Live can be, finding out new, little things that we can do with that service. The small, ambient innovation going on is so simple, but before you know it, a little tiny thing has become a really big thing, and I think that’s a really fascinating progression.