World of Warcaft is important. The developers tell Kotaku they even dared to dream that they’d some day get a million subscribers. But to tell the story of the fifth anniversary of WoW, we first have to look at the game that started 15 years ago, Warcraft.

It All Started On Arrakis

In 1992, Westwood Studios released a game that changed the way real-time strategy games were made. It was Dune II, the first RTS to incorporate mouse movement, resource gathering, technology trees, and unique weapons and units per faction, all elements that are still being used in RTS games today.

The game caught the eyes and imaginations of several members of Silicon & Synapse, a game development studio that had mainly focused on porting games from other studios. After a brief stint as Chaos Games the studio took on the name Blizzard Entertainment in 1994.

As Blizzard art director Sam “Samwise” Didier explains it, the team’s fascination with Dune II led directly to the development of its first blockbuster hit, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

“Back in the Jurassic period we all loved playing games like Dune II. We got inspired and thought this game was awesome and wanted to make something like it. We were all big fans of Dungeons and Dragons and Tolkien, and we wanted to make a fantasy world real-time strategy game.”

Taking cues from existing titles was the norm for Blizzard in the early days. Samwise points to another early Blizzard title, The Lost Vikings, which was born out of the team’s love for PC puzzle game Lemmings from DMA Design, the studio that would go on to become Rockstar North of Grand Theft Auto fame.

So Blizzard took the formula established in Dune II and expanded upon it in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, adding goals beyond simply building your army and decimating your enemies. Players found themselves rescuing friendly forces from enemy camps, assassinating key members of the opposition, and rebuilding ruined towns. It was also the first RTS game to feature hand-to-hand combat and magic.

One more important innovation was borrowed from a decidedly different sort of game – Doom. Inspired by the fun of playing Doom together, Blizzard added the ability to play multiplayer battles via modem and local area network to Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a feature that would become a key feature of the RTS genre.

Expanding The Story

While Orcs & Humans laid the groundwork for games to come, it was relatively light on story. Blizzard rectified that oversight with the game’s 1995 sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, elevating Azeroth from game setting to fully realised fictional world.

The game saw the Orcs and Humans gather allies in the Trolls, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Gnomes, laying the foundations for the Alliance and the Horde as we know them today. The game and it’s expansion pack, Beyond the Dark Portal, introduced characters and locations that would play a large part in the games to come.

Tides of Darkness also expanded on the multiplayer of the original game. In 1999, Blizzard released both the game and its expansion as Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, allowing players to engage in multiplayer matches over the internet using the Battle.net service introduced with 1997’s Diablo.

Class Clowns And Failed Comedians

Along with solidifying the world of Azeroth and strengthening the foundation for the fiction that would grow with each new game in the franchise, Warcraft II also established another signature feature of the series: its sense of humor.

“We had lots of class clowns and failed comedians on the team,” explains Didier. “We never really took it too seriously. We wanted really cool characters and events while making fun classic fantasy stereotypes. We included anything we thought was cool, serious or humorous.”

For instance, clicking on a unit once in Warcraft II elicits a normal verbal response. Click repeatedly on a unit for no reason and they become annoyed, spouting humorous phrases like “are you still touching me?” Samwise cites this feature as a prime example of adding humor to a game without alienating those craving a serious experience. “Only the people who wanted the comedy had to deal with it.”

The Lost Chapter

As Warcraft was inspired by Dune II, Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans was inspired by classic LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. Development on this adventure game began soon after the completion of Warcraft II. Using a combination of cartoons and point and click adventure gameplay it would tell the story of the Orcs trapped in Azeroth following the destruction of the Dark Portal, and the rise of the famed Orc warchief Thrall, Sadly, the game never saw the light of day.

In a move that Blizzard would later repeat with StarCraft side-story Ghost, the company canceled the game days before the 1998 E3 Expo in Atlanta, despite the game being mostly complete. The animation was finished, the puzzles in place, and even the voice over work had been fully recorded, but Blizzard felt the game wasn’t up to their high standards.

In an announcement issued on the 22nd of May, 2008, Blizzard explained the cancellation to fans. “The decision centered around the level of value that we want to give our customers. In essence, it was a case of stepping up and really proving to ourselves and gamers that we will not sell out on the quality of our games.”

When asked if there was ever a chance of Adventures being released, Samwise was skeptical. “We’re not taking the old one and finishing it. It wasn’t up to par and we’d have to polish the hell out of it. DVDs are really popular because of deleted scenes, but when you watch them you can see why they weren’t included in the movie. That’s what Warcraft Adventures is.”

Still, Blizzard felt the story of Thrall too important to gloss over, commissioning Star Trek novelist Christie Golden to write Warcraft: Lord of the Clans, a novel that bridges the gap between Warcraft II and the next game in the series, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

Further Evolution

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, released in 2002, delved deeper into the lore of the series than ever before. It chronicles the rise and fall of Arthas Menethil, the prince who would become the Lich King; introduces the Night Elves and the Undead; and introduces the Burning Legion, the demonic scourge of the Warcraft universe.

Deviating from previous entries in the series, Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, integrates storytelling into the gameplay itself, rather than feeding the player through mission briefings. This allowed for a more seamless and immersive game, further cementing Blizzard’s reputation as top-notch storytellers.

Warcraft III, like Warcraft II, included a World Editor program, allowing players to craft their own scenarios and maps, and players took full advantage of the feature, creating their own game types. One such custom game, defence of the Ancients, gave rise to a new sub-genre of RTS, in which players control a single champion that gains levels and abilities as it battles alongside computer-controlled units. defence of the Ancients-inspired games like Gas Powered Games’ Demigod and the recently released League of Legends from Riot Games serve as a lasting reminder to the legacy of Warcraft III.

Welcome To Our World

In early 2000, Blizzard’s development team found themselves fascinated by another type of game.

“Everyone here had been playing a bunch of Everquest and Ultima Online,” says Samwise Didier. “It goes all the way back to the whole Lost Vikings/Lemmings thing. It was a genre we enjoyed, and Warcraft was a good fit.”

Blizzard announced World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer take on the Warcraft universe in 2001, and for three years fans eagerly awaited their chance to take their first steps into the world of Azeroth, unfettered by the rules of the real-time strategy genre.

The game would pick up the story four years after the events of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, with the world split into two major factions – the Alliance and the Horde. Players would experience the battle for Azeroth from an entirely new, more personal point-of-view.

As the 2004 release approached, Blizzard was aware it had something special on its hands, though some members of the development team had more faith than others. World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack relates a particularly amusing story about a pep talk given by Blizzard co-founder and lead designer Allen Adham.

“Allen Adham got everyone on the team in a room to talk about how great his confidence was in the game, and how he thought we had something great. He said, ‘One day this game will have a million subscribers.’ No one believed that. We thought it was crazy. We thought, ‘You’re a liar.’ There was no way that any game would have a million subscribers.”

World of Warcraft launched in North America on November 23, 2004. Fan reaction to the release was so massive that the game was plagued with downtime and server queues for the first week, as Blizzard opened new worlds to deal with the exploding population. By December 2005, the game had 3.5 million subscribers. By December of 2008, that number had jumped to 11.5 million.

How does a PC game attract 11.5 million players? World of Warcraft game director Tom Chilton says the game has something for everyone.

“It’s easy to learn, but hard to master, which attracts different sorts of gamers. The hard to master part keeps the hardcore players around, while the casual players enjoy the wide variety of things to do,” Chilton explains. “Ultimately it’s just a really good game.”

Massively Mainstream Appeal

The success that World of Warcraft has achieved over the past five years is nothing short of astounding. It was the best-selling PC game of 2005 and 2006 according to NPD data, knocked from the top spot in 2007 by its own expansion, The Burning Crusade. In 2008 the game’s second expansion, The Frozen Throne, took the top spot.

The success of the game goes far beyond sales numbers. World of Warcraft has become a pop culture phenomenon. It’s been used to advertise products like Coke and Toyota, while its own advertisements have feature pop culture icons such as Mr. T and William Shatner. A 2007 episode of Comedy Central’s cartoon South Park, “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” won the 2007 Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program.

Like Super Mario Bros. or Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft is a game that has gained recognition far beyond its already expansive audience. For a fantasy game that is strictly PC-based, that’s no mean feat.

The Future

So where will the World of Warcraft be in another five years? Tom Chilton delivers a blissfully blurry outlook for the world’s most popular subscription-based MMO.

“One of the cool things is: who knows where it will go next? The world itself is filled with so many possibilities. We’ve got outer space demons. We’re about to add little green guys and werewolves (in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion). There are so many different directions you can go in. Magic, guns, machines – anything we want to come up with we can fit into the World of Warcraft with no problem.”

And the continuing success of World of Warcraft doesn’t preclude the possibility of a Warcraft IV. Just don’t expect it any time soon, with teams tied up with Diablo III and StarCraft II.

Real-time strategy or massively multiplayer, the Warcraft universe continues to make its mark on the world, with each new game and expansion adding layer upon layer to a tale that J. Allen Brack believes could go on forever.

“We’ve got quite a bit to do before we run out of ideas. New people are constantly joining the team, bringing their own ideas with them. The full story will never truly be written.”

Check back all week for more stories related to World of Warcraft’s fifth anniversary.

My chat with Patrice begins with me relating how at E3 this year I’d asked fellow Ubisoft Montreal creative director Maxime Béland to describe his game, Splinter Cell: Conviction, in just one word.

“Panther,” Maxime had said back then, without pausing to think.

I tell Patrice I thought that one word encapsulated everything that was different about Conviction, compared to the previous games. So I ask Patrice if he had one word for Assassin’s Creed II. At first, he looks a little surprised.

“Two,” he says, after a few moments.

Two? I repeat.

“No, really. Two. Because for me it’s my first sequel.”

I was surprised to learn that, after serving as creative director on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Patrice did not work on any of that game’s successors. After Sands of Time shipped he went straight to work on the first Assassin’s Creed. So how did he approach making a sequel for the very first time?

“Everything that was in the first one is still there,” said Patrice. “We wanted worked on the pillars of the game, making them better, getting rid of the frustration, and we wanted to change the main character. It’s the real sequel; it’s not 1.5, it’s not more of the same.

“It really is Assassin’s Creed TWO,” he says, emphasising that word again, before smiling. “I’m sorry I don’t have as good a word as Max.”

Patrice then shoots down my suggestion that perhaps Assassin’s Creed II is everything he wanted the first game to be.

“No,” he says, firmly. “The first game was a game about a warrior monk during the Crusades, and that was the game we wanted to make. Going to Italy is not something we wanted to do in the first game. Did we learn? Did we come back with some ideas for which we didn’t have the time? For sure. But it’s not the game I wanted to make in the first place.”

The games industry can have a strange attitude towards sequel, and so can the fans. We see developers deliberately changing the mood or tone between sequels, as Ubisoft themselves did with the choice to make the Prince darker and carry more attitude in Warrior Within. Yet at other times, we see sequels arrive where, really, very little seems to have changed.

“Sometimes we react in the games industry a lot,” says Patrice. “You give the game to the world and you take the feedback. I wanted to do a sequel and so I said to the team, ‘Look, we’re going to change a lot of stuff, but it still has to be part of the overall [Assassin's Creed series].’

“I don’t know why in the games industry, we change so much between sequels. But not all of us do it. You look at the Japanese, once they establish something they like to repeat it. Look at someting like Metal Gear Solid and you can feel pretty confident about the pillars, but it is the story that will change.

“Here it is like that too,” he says. “The story will change, but the pillars are pretty much the same. The character moves the same, we kept the control scheme. We kept this idea of having an ancestor and we kept Desmond as the guy in the present. We kept the basic core mechanic of the fights, the free-running, the climbing. But we did put some stuff aside.”

Patrice wasn’t shy when it came to changing major aspects of the first, such as the entire structure. The first game was all about numbers, he tells me. There were three cities divided into three districts where you had to do six investigations and eventually carry out nine assassinations. It was all very regimented and predictable, exposing the bare framework of the game and pulling you out of the experience.

“The structure of the first game is gone,” confirms Patrice. “We went for a more organic, more narratively driven game structure.”

In large part, this is because the new assassin, Ezio, is a very different person to Altair, the original game’s protagonist. Where Altair remained apart from society, Ezio is very much a part of his. As such, his story weaves through the cities he travels to and people he meets along the way.

“In the first one it was this monk warrior who had no life at all except killing people and the creed was really important to him,” says Patrice, explaining the difference between the two characters. “Now, Ezio, he’s got a life. He knows people, he is part of society.

“The first one was very serious, maybe too much. But here we’re making jokes, there is some comic relief. For example, in the relationship between Ezio and Leonardo Da Vinci, they’re friends, they act like friends. It’s not like [adopts serious voice] ‘Oh, you’re Ezio the assassin and you’re Leonardo, the most intelligent person on earth.’ No. One time Ezio is pissed off at Leo and he’ll say ‘Oh, look, he’s trying to invent some piece of shit!’ You know, they’re real people… except he doesn’t say ‘piece of shit’ because all the swearing is in Italian!”

“When you see it,” he continues, “you’ll feel that maybe we went in a different direction. But I think it’s because we’re not talking about the same guy. So, for sure, that different guy in that different period of time has given us different ideas. It has nothing to do with a reaction to the first one; it’s just that Ezio is not Altair, and Altair is not Ezio.

“But it’s still an Assassin’s Creed game. You’ll still do viewpoints… there’s a bunch of stuff like that that repeats, that are good. You’ll still do the ‘leap of faith’ because it’s fun. Ezio is not Altair, but he’s got it in his blood.”

It appears that Patrice and his team have really taken on board criticism of the weaknesses of the first game, while at the same time amplifying its strengths. The outward appearance may seem different, but underneath that Assassin’s Creed blood still flows. Isn’t that what we really want from a sequel?

Part 1: Harada Explains: Why Tekken Is Different From Other Fighting Games
Part 2: How Katsuhiro Harada Achieved Game Balance In Tekken 6

The lag in Tekken 6’s online play is unacceptably bad and Namco Bandai knows it. They’ve vaguely said that a downloadable patch will be available “as soon as it has passed rigorous testing procedures”. Clearly, they did not do enough rigorous testing on one of the game’s key components before releasing it.

Incidentally, when we asked you what you wanted to ask Harada-san, the question over online play was raised. So when I asked him if he thinks there’s a market for online play in fighting games… he had to stop and think about it.

He turned to look at the plasma TV on the wall and didn’t say anything for, like, 15 seconds. I was fully aware that he was pondering his answer, but it was awkward because I only had three minutes left to ask a lot of questions, and here was Mr Tekken, intensely watching a demo of… Tekken. When he finally spoke, he brought attention to the ramifications of online play on something relatively unique to fighting games: atmosphere.

It’s a good question. Traditionally in arcades, you would often fight side-by-side against someone you didn’t know. You also get to fight side-by-side with the home console version, but you are fighting against family and friends. You always know your opponent, so the atmosphere isn’t the same. Now you’re online against a friend or maybe someone you don’t know, but you’re far away — you can’t see their reaction or anything.

He likens the offline experience to martial arts tournaments — just being there as a spectator is exciting, and that’s what makes them popular, he said. “The whole atmosphere, the people fighting, the people watching, the interaction between the two fighters … that is something that isn’t present in online and it’s sad because it would really add to the experience.”

Harada is candid, perhaps unintentionally, about Tekken 6’s substandard netcode. “Fighting games aren’t really tailored to online play at the moment because of the lag,” he said. “But as technology evolves and the infrastructure gets better, and you have much less latency, perhaps that kind of participation — whether that be avatars watching or whatever — can be recreated.”

Here’s a video demonstrating the lagginess:

So is technology (or the lack thereof) at least partly to blame for the crap online experience in Tekken 6? How the game recreates that “participation” remains to be seen, but Harada is embracing the challenge of delivering a seamless online multiplayer experience, and this is apparent in his answer to my final question:

“So what’s next for Mr Tekken?”

He laughs, but I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s a nervous laugh. Maybe he’s happy that he can finally get rid of me. Maybe it’s because I called him “Mr Tekken” to his face. Unfortunately, his answer is more obliging than revealing:

There are two products we’re working on at the moment that haven’t been announced yet, so we can’t say much. But one thing I will say is [we’re focusing on] the versus aspect, and it’s not necessarily one player versus one.

How would you interpret that? And what’s your Tekken 6 experience been like so far?

Tekken 6 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was released in Australia on November 5. Namco Bandai did not give me a copy of the game. I have not played Tekken since I was a kid, and even then I sucked at it.

Zeschuk told me he’s been a fan of Bethesda’s game for the best part of two decades, from all the way back to Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall right up to Fallout 3. He says he admires how Bethesda specialises, producing games that are distinctively theirs.

“For me, Bethesda is probably the best in the world in terms of creating a sense of place,” he says. “The world seems so real it actually feels like you’re there. I think if you were to describe their superpower, that would be it. Fallout 3 was utterly believable as the area around Washington DC.

“Another thing that was actually very productive we learned from Oblivion is how a game is the sum of its parts, but often something greater than that. If you picked Oblivion apart, you could nitpick about certain things, but when you put it all together it was just a spectacular package. And in fact, it’s that package that’s the impressive thing. And I think that was a great learning for our Dragon Age.”

In parallel, Zeschuk believes what makes a Bioware game utterly distinctive is the high level of integration of story into the overall experience:

“There’s folks that do similar stuff, but I think you could almost say they do it in the Bioware style. We were the first to do it that way. If you look at, for example, how story is presented in a Final Fantasy, it’s very different to what we do. I think if you can identify a Final Fantasy style game then I think you should be able to identify a Bioware style game.

“Another we do – and maybe it’s not in the easily identifiable way – is we never compromise,” he continues. “By that I mean we never release a game with features or elements that are not as good as they could be. You can always disagree with the way it was implemented or what was implemented, but I think when we do put a feature in a game we do a good job of it.

I asked Zeschuk if he would agree that perhaps Bethesda makes the more ambitious games but that they lack the polish of a Bioware game.

“I think that raw ambition comes through in both our products,” he says. “And somehow what [Bethesda] build is magnified in some way. I mean, you can never polish every single aspect in a game the size we make; we just have to make sure we polish the right stuff.”

Zeschuk laughed when I then ask him if that was why Dragon Age has taken six years to make.

“Yeah, somewhat!” he says. “I think it was really daunting to create, in our minds, the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. I think it’s reflective of why there has never been a Baldur’s Gate 3. You know, you have this beloved product, and its very distinctive and detailed, and it’s very hard to recreat them or create a game in a similar vein. The sheer amount of stuff you have to put in it – that’s just an incredible undertaking.”

Can you identify what makes Bioware and Bethesda games unique or distinctive from each other? What style of RPG do you prefer to play?

For Part 1 of the interview, see here: Harada Explains: Why Tekken Is Different From Other Fighting Games
 
From a story perspective, new characters are easily justified by their individual motives for fighting in the tournament. A pink-haired robot, a fat martial arts legend and a Spanish bull fighter are among eight characters introduced in Tekken 6, bringing the total number of characters in the fighting game series to 42. Harada says that achieving game balance with so many characters came down to three things.

“We have a specific team for game balancing, so there’s a few people we have assigned to each character and also the game in general,” Harada explains. “They’re solely dedicated to that aspect of the game.”

Fan feedback is a recurring theme throughout the interview, and Harada refers to it again here by saying that subjective data from a worldwide fan base is an important influence in balancing the game. He also says that the team depends on objective data pulled from servers. “The arcade versions are all tied to a central server, so we’re able to gain a lot of objective data about the win-loss ratios for each character, and other data like perfect wins.”

“Balancing [the game] is something that we can do because the Tekken team has been doing it for close to 15 years now.”

A dedicated team, hard data and experience. If you’ve already picked up the game, do you think they got it right?

Harada-san was in Sydney last week for the worldwide launch of Tekken 6 on PS3 and XBox 360. Armed with your questions, I had a one-on-one chat with him about the past, present and future of Tekken, and more specifically, how it compares to a competing game he contributed towards: Soulcalibur.

He says that Soulcalibur’s animation was based on the code used for Tekken, but players will note that the games’ mechanics are “radically different” from each other. In fact, the two teams had completely different philosophies on what a fighting game should look like.

“[The team behind] Soulcalibur especially had this thing where they wanted to develop the fighting game that they’re working on in a totally different way that Tekken has been created,” says Harada. “So the two cultures of the teams involved, the way that they think about fighting games and what fighting games should be, and how they should be made is quite different … the whole thought process was so radically different from Tekken.”

Harada stresses the different ways of thinking between the two teams, rather than anything from a technological standpoint. But he does add that interaction between the two teams has started to increase recently…

We move on to marketability and how Tekken differentiates itself from Soulcalibur and other 3D fighting games like Virtua Fighter. Harada doesn’t hesitate in pointing out that the Tekken series had a shaky start. “Tekken 1 and 2 weren’t really popular in the arcades when they first came out,” he says. “We were nowhere near Virtua Fighter in terms of popularity. It’s only recently that everyone’s said Tekken is probably at the top of the fighting game franchise.”

Gaining and maintaining competitive advantage all comes down to Tekken’s unique gameplay, and Harada says that it’s precisely this that makes Tekken so popular:

If you compare Tekken to Virtual Fighter, the direction each game takes is quite different. Virtua Fighter is based on rock-paper-scissors — if your opponent does this and you do that, 100 per cent of the outcome will always be the same. It’s pretty easy to understand and it’s constant. Tekken isn’t so constant — if you do this and your opponent does that, the outcome will vary. There are factors like the distancing, the angle of your characters and such. When the team looked further into why it makes the game so interesting and satisfying to the player, we thought more about the offensive, the attack. For example, if you launch your opponent into the air by doing the aerial juggle — something that most people think of when they think of Tekken gameplay — it’s so satisfying because getting your opponent into that position, and being able to damage them and decrease their health bar so rapidly just felt really good.

Improving on that experience was — and continues to be — a critical factor in Tekken’s development, and it spawned the bounce combo system in Tekken 6.

“The bounce combo system,” Harada explains, “increases the variety of moves you have available, and if you carry your opponent to the wall you can attack them even more. So just the sheer satisfaction of damaging your opponent so one-sidedly is something that feels really good about Tekken.”

“Just trying to hone that aspect of the game really led to Tekken being unique. It clicked with the users.”

Tekken 6 hits shelves this Thursday, November 5. Will you be picking up the game?

Due to launch before the end of the year, the Aussie edition of Game Informer will be published by Citrus Media and backed by EB Games. Much of Game Informer’s success overseas is down to its relationship with Gamestop, the biggest games retailer in the US and owner of EB Games. Gamestop customers get cheap subscriptions, you see. And with a readership of that size, Game Informer is often the first print publication to bring news of the biggest games.

We caught up with Game Informer Australia’s launch editor Chris Stead, former editor of Australian GamePro and Gameplayer.com.au, for a quick chat about what you can expect.

Hey Chris, when’s the first issue out?
The first issue will be available before Christmas. Your readers should sign-up to the Facebook group Game Informer Australia to get updated on exact dates in the coming weeks.

So you’re the editor, but who else do you have on the local staff?
I’m the editor. We will have a local freelance team as well, headed up by Adam Mathew who I believe is one of the great reviewers on the local scene.

What’s the relationship with EB? Will EB members get it free?
EB Games will play a huge role in our distribution model, but that is the extent of the relationship. You’ll be able to pick the magazine up at the counter when you’re doing your games shopping at the bargain price of $4.95 and we’ve briefed the EB staff on just why Game Informer is considered the number 1 games magazine on the planet, so they’ll be helping us get the word out there. You’ll also be able to pick up a pretty amazing subscription offer through the stores. And that’s where the relationship stops – the magazine’s editorial independence is complete, it is solely distribution.

Will it be distributed in store and newsagents?
As well as picking it up at EB, you will be able to find it at newsagents across the country for the same price. However, I believe that most Aussie gamers will feel compelled to subscribe once they get the product in their hands and get a feel for just how ahead of the game it is… especially as subscribing is so cheap. The way we’re positioning it and the content that we have, it’ll be a no-brainer.

What’s your mission statement for the mag?
To give Australian gamers the respect they deserve by getting them access to the biggest and best world exclusives first, and to ensure that the local scene gets representation in the world’s number one gaming publication.

How do you see Game Informer as compared to your most obvious competitor, Hyper?
I am a big fan of Hyper: like many (if not all) journos in the local industry I had my ‘levelling-up’ period through the mag back in the ’90s and that affection remains. Game Informer is on another level, however. The US magazine gets the biggest and the best things first, even ahead of online. I have access to all that content, plus the opportunities that I generate locally as well. It’s powerful stuff, especially as we will be going on sale more-or-less alongside the US – we’re a concurrent publication, not an out-dated port, which I hope shows the level of respect we have for the local gamers. That said, Hyper has battled through plenty of challenges over the last two decades, and I am sure the competition will work to the benefit of both mags’ editorial.

Won’t you just be pimping EB preorders and used games?
Editorially we will not be pimping anything that we don’t think the locals will enjoy reading. I guess sometimes that may be a pre-order if it is stupid cool (like night vision goggles). But that’ll be it. I can’t see any reason to talk up used games at all: really Game Informer is all about the present and future.

And finally… isn’t print dead?
Not at all. The US magazine has 3.6 million subscribers, which is a pretty long way from dead. I’ve just spent two-and-a-half years running a games website and to be honest, I think the anarchy of the medium acts to undermine it. In general, good editorial falls flat, and crap editorial rakes in the hits and there’s too much pressure to deliver traffic on an hourly basis for a lot of sites: editorial quality is the first thing to buckle. I am really looking forward to focusing over the course of a month on one product and channelling all that is awesome into it. With the unmissable cover features that the lads over in the US consistently nail and our price point, I think we’ll be offering something that will more than compete with online. It’s certainly going to be a fun finding out!

Thanks Chris. I’m curious to hear from you: do you still buy games magazines? If so, which ones? And are you interested in Game Informer?

The brown-eyed, pigtailed 22-year-old, who describes herself as a “reality porn star”, just signed on with porn powerhouse Digital Playground and her first movie is set for a December 29 release.

But that’s her public face. Her secret life is one of guilty, geeky pleasures: LAN parties, Star Trek, World of Warcraft and building and modding her own PCs.

“I started playing video games when I was 13 or 14, when Age of Empires came out, and I’ve been playing ever since,” Alexis told Kotaku in a recent interview.

Alexis refers to her gaming habits as her “alter life”, an interesting choice of words for someone in her business.

“I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since it came out and have played every expansion since,” she said. “I play Tiger Woods and other games. I love it, it’s my alter life.”

Unlike some other adult actors and actresses who form industry guilds or use their real names in game, Alexis prefers to play anonymously.

“My alternate live is very nerdy,” she said. “I love playing people online and them not knowing who I am. It is really relaxing for me, kind of an escape, you know?

“I kind of have tried to maintain my anonymity. It’s the one place I can play and not have people talk to me about what I do. For me, it’s not about talking to people, it’s about bashing people.”

Alexis says she has a lot of characters in World of Warcraft, her favourite game, including a level 72 Night Elf Druid, a level 44 Tauren Hunter and a level 64 Blood Elf Mage.

“I usually try to play female characters,” she said. “I keep a couple of guy characters too. I have several different accounts, so they have different names.”

Alexis’ self-professed love of gaming goes far beyond your typical mainstream gamer. Her other hobby is building and modding computers.

“I have a couple of different computers,” she said. “I have a PC I built out for gaming, a Mac Pro for editing and site building and I have a server back up I host my stuff off of. I also have a Toshiba laptop.”

“I’m pretty spoiled.”

Alexis sounds proudest of her main computer, one she built herself and installed in a homemade transparent, baby-blue plexiglass case.

“I have water-cooling in there, I picked up the new i7975 extreme edition CPU,” she said. “I have it set up as a dual boot with XP 32-bit and Vista 64.

“I don’t have Windows 7 yet, but I’m excited about picking it up. I’m going to try out the 32 and 64 to see which makes more sense.”

She says she didn’t get into PC modding and building until she went to college.

“I got hooked up with a bunch of kids that got into LAN tournaments,” she said. “I wanted to compete and be a bad arse with a cool machine.

“I really just enjoy it, it’s so different than anything else I do. It keeps me fresh and going.”

Alexis says she’s never had the chance to combine her career with her love of gaming culture, something like World of Whorecraft, but she would jump at the opportunity.

“If Digital Playgrounds decides to do something like that, role-playing or fantasy, I’d would love to do it,” she said. “I’m a big Star Trek fan too.”

I asked Alexis if she gets annoyed that people are surprised that an attractive adult actress like herself would play video games.

“It’s not annoying, it’s a little surprising,” she said. “I’ve met a lot of cool women that play video games through LAN tournies. What surprises people is that I’m hot and a porn star and a player, but that has nothing to do with it, gaming is so popular now.”

“My gaming should be about what I do, not who I am.”

Instead the reinvention of Disney’s animated world will strive to both entice children and enlighten adult with a meaty, moralistic story, famed game designer Warren Spector told Kotaku today.

In Disney Epic Mickey, gamers take on the role of an edgier Mickey Mouse, using the Wii remote to wield magical paint and thinner to reshape around them. Mickey uses these abilities as he fights his way through a cartoon wasteland in what Disney describes as an “adventure-platforming game with light role-playing elements”.

Spector says that the game won’t support the Wii Remote’s MotionPlus technology because the technology became available to developers too late to the studio.

“We played with it and I think that it would be a great fit for our core mechanic, but the best I can say is that in the future we’d love to do more with it,” he said.

In the game’s fiction Yen Sid, the sorcerer first seen in 1940s Fantasia during The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, creates a Cartoon Wasteland for Disney’s forgotten and retired creations. The first inhabitant of this wasteland is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney’s first cartoon star created in 1927.

As the years pass Oswald starts to resent Mickey’s growing fame. When Disney’s mouse accidentally warps Oswald’s Cartoon Wasteland by spilling paint thinner on it, Mickey is drawn into the warped world.

“Having Warren combine creativity and innovation with one of the world’s most famous characters takes Mickey back to his creative roots and allows fans to deepen their engagement with him as a character — especially in video games,” said Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios.

Spector says that he was drawn to the idea of working on this tale of Disney fiction both because it was a chance to “mess around with one of the world’s most recognisable icons” and a chance to tell a story that is interesting to both children and adults.

“We are telling a story in this game that is more sophisticated than save the princess or you are the last space marine on Earth,” Spector said. “I think what you will find is that there is some commentary about consumerism and what is truly important in life.”

“If I went much further than that it would be the height of pretension.”

But, Spector admits, there are some allusions in the game to T.S. Elliots’s modernist and deeply influential poem The Waste Land.

In the Waste Land a hero is drawn to a kingdom made sterile by the wounding of its king. To restore the king and the land, the hero must go on a quest. The concept of the poem draws on prevalent proto-themes like the Grail legend.

And while Spector, who started his career as an academic, admits that he’s aware of the potential connection, he doesn’t want people to draw too many connections.

“You have to throw in literary references every once in awhile,” he said.

What seems to have influenced Spector more is a children’s book author who deals with heady ideas like theology, philosophy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

“What Philip Pullman does is inspiration in everything I want to do,” he said. “You can make something that appeals to kids but is interesting to adults as well.

In December 2007, Spector wrote on his blog about how much he would love to create a game based on Pullman’s Golden Compass. At the time he was already in the midst of working on Disney Epic Mickey, he said.

“I had my first discussion with Disney in September 2005, then boring business stuff happened and then we did concept art and then we separated for awhile and came back together,” he said.

In September 2007 Disney acquired Spector’s studio, Junction Point Studios, which was well into game concept work.

I asked Spector if creating a game based on such a beloved and widely known character had satisfied the itch he expressed in his blog about Golden Compass.

“To some extent it did,” he said. “But if you ever stop itching it’s time to retire.

“I think getting the opportunity to play in the playground that Disney offers, that is what this opportunity is really about for me.”

“When you say you’re messing with Mickey Mouse people’s eyes really light up.”

While Spector’s vision of Mickey seems to be darker than the character’s most recognisable appearances, there are still lines the game won’t be crossing.

“There are lines, lines you don’t want to cross,” he said. “When you talk about Mickey Mouse, people are like ‘Give him a gun, give him a knife,’” he said. “I don’t want to do that. Why would you want to do that?

“There are lines you don’t cross. I discovered there are lines that (Mickey Mouse) used to cross that are now uncrossable. He did some pretty crazy stuff, but nowadays times have changed.”

What Mickey will be doing in the game is allowing gamers to make moral decisions about how to change the world around them with paint and thinner. Those decisions will have consequences that affect the environment, interactions with other characters, and even Mickey’s appearance and abilities.

“The core of this game is the idea of choice and consequence, and how that defines both the character and the player,” Spector wrote in a prepared statement. “By putting the mischievous Mickey in an unfamiliar place and asking him to make choices—to help other cartoon characters or choose his own path—the game forces players to deal with the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, players must ask themselves, ‘What kind of hero am I?’ Each player will come up with a different answer.”

The initial concept for the Wii-exclusive game was born at Disney Interactive Studios’ Think Tank, Spector told Kotaku.

“The idea of a wasteland with lost characters, Oswald’s return, the Phantom Blog — that stuff existed, that core was there when they pitched it to me,” Spector said. “They were all sitting there showing me this stuff in Power Point saying ‘You don’t have to do all of this, you can ignore it’ and I thought ‘Why would I ignore this, it’s fantastic.’”

While the heart of the idea came from the Think Tank, the way the game and its look evolved is all Spector and his team.

The team spent huge amounts of time in Disney’s many vast archives, pulling concept art and files.

“I’m a research junkie,” Spector said. “I started out as an academic and film historian so I had shelves and shelves and shelves of books and articles. I came into this with a good background. But Disney has amazing resources. I spent a bunch of time out there digging through files.”

During one of his earliest visits Spector was shocked to have one of the archivists apologise for having only scanned 90,000 images so far.

“Honestly, you could spend days digging through the stuff we dug out of the archives.”

One thing that surprisingly didn’t inspire Disney Epic Mickey was Square-Enix’ hugely popular role-playing game Kingdom Hearts.

“I played the Kingdom Hearts games, but they weren’t much of an inspiration,” Spector said. “They treated the Disney characters much more conventionally than I wanted to.

“They are not reintroducing or reimagining as much as they are offering these characters as folks you are going to interact with in a new medium.”

Spector was coy about how much inspiration the game developers are drawing from the Disney theme parks.

“You might sort of, kind of recognise some scenes,” he said. “I don’t want to give too much away.”

The designer, best known for making games like Deus Ex and Thief, said that he wasn’t worried about moving from typically adult-themed games to one that may be viewed as being more for children or families.

“When this opportunity arose I had to decide, do I want to keep working on this original stuff I’ve been doing or do I want to mess around with one of the world’s most recognisable icons,” he said. “The opportunity to work with something this recognisable and profound comes around once in a lifetime. The decision was pretty straight forward.

“I’m not making a game for kids, I’m making a game gamers will be happy with.”

Please note that the belt is his. We shot this a couple of weeks ago in New York City at an EA event.

Jump to about 3:40 for the start of the interview:

In the interview, the Hip Hop Gamer refers to a video post I did for my previous employer back in March. In it, I forecast that the Xbox 360 would lack many big titles for the holiday ‘09 season. Turns out, some of the details changed, but I was pretty much right.

Stephen Totilo PS3 Lineup Much Stronger Than Xbox360 This Holiday Season [HipHopGamer.com]