1st March 2003, 1:50 PM
And the Dyak interview:
There's also a quicktime interview snippet, but I can't post that.
Just don't post this at n-philes, Derek!
Quote:Silicon Knights GameCube Interview
We chat with company president Denis Dyack about Eternal Darkness, Too Human, and the future of the second-party developer.
February 28, 2003 - Earlier today we met up with Silicon Knights' president Denis Dyack at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. The spirited development head, having shed some 135 pounds since we last saw him, was just barely recognizable, but couldn't have looked better. The night before Dyack and Silicon Knights took home the Interactive Achievement Award for an outstanding achievement in character and story for Eternal Darkness.
We chatted about Eternal Darkness and, of course, Too Human, over the course of an hour. While Dyack was tight-lipped about specifics, he did have quite a lot to say about both, and about the industry in general. Following, that interview.
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IGNcube: What is your secret to losing weight?
[Laughter]
Denis Dyack: Well, back about two and a half years ago, I was at the point where I thought that I better start losing some weight. Making videogames all the time is not exactly conducive to losing weight. So what I did was called the Bernstein Program and basically you cut back on all carbohydrates. You can have some protein, but not high protein, and then some vegetables. It's really effective. I lost about 135 pounds in five months. And I've kept it off for a year.
The great thing is that I get to go to the insurance company now and say, hey, I lost weight, and I get a cheaper rate now [laughs]. So anyway...
IGNcube: Everyone loved Eternal Darkness. It was critically acclaimed across the board. You guys just won the award for best storyline. Why didn't the game sell better?
Denis Dyack: That's a good question and one that we've put a lot of thought into. Certainly it didn't sell horribly, thank God, but I look at it like a very successful independent film. My favorite film of all-time is Blade Runner. I'm a really big fan of the movie and think it was absolutely way ahead of its time. However, it failed at the box office. It failed horribly.
So we look at Eternal Darkness and we know what we can do to change things. Certainly keeping the content in there is not going to be a problem, but we're probably in the future not going to be quite as subtle. When I look around the IGN boards about Eternal Darkness, I see questions in there and think, well, wasn't that obvious? Some of the things we put in that we thought were sneaky people haven't even noticed yet. So we think that maybe we were too subtle and that maybe we need to put more action in.
If you look at games that I personally find very appealing, like Metal Gear Solid, they have huge amounts of flash and they've got the content as well. So I think that's the direction we're going to go in next time.
The new and improved Denis Dyack.
With Eternal Darkness, and I think this was in your review, if you sit down and play it for more than two hours you really get hooked. But if you only play it for 10 minutes, people will just go, the game is not here.
So yeah, I really can't fully explain why it [didn't do better]. But it's just like I can't explain why Blade Runner didn't do better at the box office either. But I loved it and we're really happy and there's not much we would have changed with it except for some more flash.
IGNcube: How big now is Silicon Knights?
Denis Dyack: Oh, I can see where this is going. We're over 75 people now.
IGNcube: Now everybody wants to know, how many projects are you working on for GameCube?
Denis Dyack: Well, the number of projects I can't say, but I can say projects. Unfortunately, though I'd love to tell you, we haven't made any announcements yet. But forthcoming, at E3, you'll have some information and you'll probably have lots to talk about.
IGNcube: Would this 'information' relate to multiple GCN projects or one game?
Denis Dyack: That's a good question and I don't know the answer to that yet. It's possible that it could be [more than one], but it's unlikely. We'll do the best we can at E3.
IGNcube: What is the status of Too Human?
Denis Dyack: [Pauses] The status of Too Human is... [ponders] ... the status of Too Human is good.
IGNcube: What do you mean by good exactly?
Denis Dyack: We're not going to make any announcements on Too Human until the time is right. When we can, you know I want to talk about that more than anything else, but it's just not the time yet. Sorry.
IGNcube: Eternal Darkness had a solid 3D engine going for it. What can we look forward to in technology from Silicon Knights' future GCN projects?
Denis Dyack: Well, a lot better. We actually wanted to do significantly more with the 3D engine in Eternal Darkness. And speaking of Too Human, it was running on a subset of the Too Human engine. Some smaller parts of it. We can actually do a lot more with the hardware and we're going to do a lot more with the hardware in our future projects. We'll be pushing the hardware significantly further with our next games.
IGNcube: With Eternal Darkness, you had so much FMV that you had to compress it down and the quality suffered. With that in mind, do you still feel Nintendo chose the right disc-size medium with GCN? And second, are you looking into DIVX for GameCube?
Denis Dyack: Well, certainly DIVX. We always look into technology that's useful. If it's the right answer we'll definitely go into that direction.
As far as the size of discs, I really think that it's very manageable and Eternal Darkness is a good example of that. Take Splinter Cell as an example -- there were very few cinematics in the game and we had more than six hours with Eternal Darkness. And then there's the issue of piracy, which is a big deal. I think that in the future it will become more and more of a big deal. Just look at the music industry and how MP3s have literally nearly destroyed it. So I wouldn't take anything back. Sure, sometimes it's nicer to have a little more disc room, but I think we've shown pretty adequately that it's not necessary.
IGNcube: Is there the possibility that your future projects could use multiple discs?
Denis Dyack: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. No question, no problem. That's never been an issue. If we really would have felt it was necessary, we could have gone with two discs for Eternal Darkness. There are some rumors floating around on the Internet that Nintendo won't allow you to go over one disc, but that's not true.
IGNcube: You worked really closely with Nintendo EAD on Eternal Darkness. Are you still doing that on your current projects for GameCube?
Denis Dyack: Uh-huh. Actually, it's almost a misnomer when we say we worked 'with' Nintendo. It's almost the same team.
IGNcube: Yeah. Can you explain to readers how you're partnering with EAD? How the process works?
Denis Dyack: I think I can. Basically, our teams are formed from members of EAD and Silicon Knights together and we work all the time. Often we'll fly to Japan and they'll come down often, and we do lots of conference calls.
I guess some people see it as a traditional third-party relationship with a publisher where some people set the schedules and you have producers, but it's not like that at all. Everyone is working really hard. Eternal Darkness was very much a collaboration and really feel like we're part of the family. People ask, well, did Miyamoto-san have significant input? The answer is yeah, tremendous amounts. It's their project just as much as it is ours. We're the same group.
IGNcube: At Space World 2000, we saw an FMV clip of Too Human for GCN. Can you explain to us what was going on in that clip?
Denis Dyack: If I did that I'd give away a lot of the marbles. I wish I could, I really wish I could comment on it. But when you see more stuff there will be some changes. Some better changes. We were actually very unhappy with that FMV. So, much like Eternal Darkness when it showed so long ago, I wonder if that was a mistake [showing that clip].
IGNcube: Too Human started out as a PlayStation game and a couple years ago you revealed some story details on that now-cancelled version of the title. Will the GCN game feature the same premise and storyline or will there be changes?
Denis Dyack: The good thing is that nobody really knew the story. However, there are some changes. They're all good and positive. But I think talking about Too Human at this point might be a bit early. This is true of all our games: anything you saw before we were with Nintendo will be a lot better with Nintendo. Even Legacy of Kain, which we were really proud of, would have been a lot better with Nintendo.
So all of that Too Human stuff you saw on the previous sites, we certainly don't go through radical changes or anything. Look for a significant melding of story and gameplay. More so than what you would have seen before.
IGNcube: Can you continue to produce games with thoughtful content and deep storylines of Eternal Darkness caliber?
Denis Dyack: We want to do more. We want to do more. So the answer is yes. I would say that they're going to get significantly better on many levels. I think with Eternal Darkness we took a step forward, but we're still very far away from our goal. This is an art form. If we're going to continue to make videogames an art form, there needs to be more content and we need to take it further.
Eternal Darkness was really the first finished product collaboration in our group. Next time we'll be able to take it further and do more. We'll be able to analyze some of the issues with Eternal Darkness. How are we going to take it to the mass market? What are we going to do to make sure it's more appealing instantly? Plus we're going to make the content better, more striking, and really try to hit the mark more so that we can take non-linear content to the next level where people start taking it as seriously as books.
IGNcube: Games are naturally becoming more like movies. Do you think games then need to be treated with the same production values of major movies? Given the same opportunity to flourish?
Denis Dyack: I actually consider the movie industry a subset of the videogame industry and I think it's going to go that way. The reason I say that is because the movie industry delivers linear content. Even if you look at a movie like Pulp Fiction, which is one of my favorite movies, even though people say it's a non-linear movie you still see it from beginning to end. Videogames, however, are really non-linear and what that means is that players are doing to do things in orders that you can't predict. As soon as you have something like that it changes everything. So all of the things you do, say as a director in a movie, you can cue the music here and there and you can make people feel a certain way. In a game, you can't always anticipate that. Initially Hollywood thought it could come into the games industry and do very well, but then it realized that the normal method is broken and all of those things that it knows just don't quite work.
What we did was look back into history and to figures like Aristotle and back when they were doing stage plays where the audience would interact with the actors on stage. That -- some 2,000 years ago -- is closer to videogames than the movies we have today.
At the end of the day, yes, the production values will continue to rise. With Eternal Darkness, which is just a small example, it was almost like we had three directors cuts of a movie -- slightly different stories and how you played it. Generally that's what they do after a movie has been released, the director's cut version. That's what we're doing now in the first cut. So if you give it 10 years or so, it's just going to get bigger. I think you're seeing a lot of creativity in our industry now. What's the hottest thing in the movie industry now? Videogame and comics. I think it's totally a matter of time before we're totally dominant.
IGNcube: What didn't you like about Eternal Darkness?
Denis Dyack: Well, I've already said we're very happy with it. But I think I would like to have put a difficulty setting in there. I hated the fact that some people got stuck and never saw the rest of the game. Certainly I'd liked to have balanced out the magic system slightly differently. I think that's really about it.
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IGNcube will have the remainder of the interview with Denis Dyack later today.
There's also a quicktime interview snippet, but I can't post that.
Just don't post this at n-philes, Derek!