All last week, Guardian's game site has been running portions of a big Peter Moore interview. In that interview, we learned that Peter Moore thought developer Rare's skill were "not applicable today", that Peter Moore killed the Dreamcast and fired lots of people and loads of other stuff. The best part? Guardian writer Keith Stuart explains:

I didn't tell EA or Peter that I was planning to run the transcript in its entirety on this site — I'm sure you can guess the reasons. EA have reacted very favourably and with considerable understanding. However, Peter has asked if I run a final word from him, which I think — under the circumstances — is entirely fair.

Oh ho ho! More Moore after the jump:

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Eurogamer today hosted another of their LiveText chat sessions, this time around putting Far Cry 2 producer Louis-Pierre Pharand under the spotlight to answer questions about the fiery sequel. During the chat, Pharand spoke a bit about the multiplayer modes included in the game. The standard Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes will be joined by Capture The Diamond, which is like capture with flag only you're tasked with capturing a magical mushroom diamond instead, and a variation on VIP they've christened Uprising. He also discussed persistency, which will apparently be contained to the match or series of matches you are involved in, much like Shadowrun.

"We decided that all persistency will occur within a match or a define series of matches," Pharand added. "That way, gamers will have a taste of all our great guns quickly. You will get upgrades within classes and it will allow you to be more tactical in your progression, depending of the type maps you play."

Hmm. Wasn't a bit fan of Shadowrun. Then again, Shadowrun didn't come with acres of grassy plains to set fire to, so it balances out.

Four multiplayer modes for Far Cry 2 News [Eurogamer]

Today's Friday, and Guardian's Peter Moore week has drawn to a close. And today, instead of telling us how he killed the Dreamcast (bastard!) or how he thinks Rare is now irrelevant (ouch), Moore talks about how EA's digital distribution and how the end goal is not to become the next Apple:

We need to look three years into the future and say it's going to be a completely different business, because of broadband connections. I am not going to be at the helm of a company that ends up like the music business that refused to stop trying to sell you CDs for £15 because it was a hugely profitable model. And the music consumer says, 'you know, I don't want to pay £15 for 12 tracks of which I want two, I don't want shiny discs anymore'. And so what did the industry do? It started suing its consumers for illegal downloads and, you know, Steve Jobs comes to the rescue to figure out a way to charge you 99 cents or whatever you're paying in the UK... You're being ripped off. We're not going to do that, we're going to evolve, we're going to go faster for the consumer, whatever the consumer wants.

Big words from Moore.

Peter Moore Interview: Part Five [Guardian] [Pic]

Former Microsoft, current EA Sports exec Peter Moore continues to pull no punches in a series of interviews he's done with Guardian's Games Blog. This time around, he explains how not everyone at Microsoft loves being in the console business ("There was a vocal minority that disagreed with videogames as a cultural phenomenon") and dishes on why Microsoft killed the original Xbox ("The hard drive in every Xbox killed us"). But Moore get honest, brutally honest, about Rare. Back in 2002, Microsoft acquired a controlling interest in the company. According to Moore:

I thought ultimately it would be very successful — and you know, Microsoft, we'd had a tough time getting Rare back — Perfect Dark Zero was a launch title and didn't do as well as Perfect Dark...but we were trying all kinds of classic Rare stuff and unfortunately I think the industry had past Rare by — it's a strong statement but what they were good at, new consumers didn't care about anymore, and it was tough because they were trying very hard — Chris and Tim Stamper were still there — to try and recreate the glory years of Rare, which is the reason Microsoft paid a lot of money for them and I spent a lot of time getting on a train to Twycross to meet them. Great people. But their skillsets were from a different time and a different place and were not applicable in today's market.

This honesty from Peter Moore is refreshing and illuminating. But these Rare remarks must really sting. That is, if you're Rare. If not, well.

Peter Moore Interview: Part Three [Games Blog]

I had a handful of minutes to interview Secret Apprentice actor Sam Witwer - he was in high demand all night long at the Force Unleashed launch party. Between signing autographs and climbing the raised stage to throw t-shirts at the raving crowd, I got 10 minutes to speak to the Smallville/Battlestar Galactica/Dexter star.

Witwer managed to pack that ten minutes with a bit about his love of gaming, the excitement of speaking a "certain line" in the game and how the Force Unleashed managed to pack so much chemistry into the game.

For a Sci-Fi Channel superstar, Sam is really down to earth. And a total nerd, too.

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After Peter Moore killed the Dreamcast (damn him!) and fired a buncha people (ouch), he was feeling down. Moore was sick and tired to trying to convince SEGA Japan that it needed to hire foreign developers because the Western market was starting to really take off. Good thing Microsoft exec Robbie Bach called Moore to wish him Merry Christmas and offer him a j-o-b at Microsoft. Moore met with Microsoft to meet with Microsoft sweaty man Steve Ballmer to talk about going head-to-head with Sony. Nintendo, it seems, didn't even enter the equation. According to Moore:

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Tucked into a wide-ranging interview with IGN is this nugget from Cervat Yerli, the CEO of Crytek, developer of Crysis:

It's crazy how the ratio between sales to piracy is probably 1 to 15 to 1 to 20 right now. For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry. I hope with Warhead I hope we improve the situation, but at the same time it may have an impact on [our] PC exclusivity in the future.

Yerli goes on to say that if a game isn't an online multiplayer game, it's up for grabs to piraters, and for that reason the company is spending development effort making Crysis: Warhead more difficult to crack. But if it doesn't pan out, and PC games continue to be pirated at the 15:1 ratio he offers, it's going to affect Crysis' development strategy in the future. "We would only consider full PC exclusives -- if the situation continues like this or gets worse -- I think we would only consider PC exclusive titles that are either online or multiplayer and no more single-player", Yerli says.

So I guess the message is: PC gamers, stop pirating and start snitching on your friends if you want more exclusives out of Crytek. And to show he's serious, he also tells IGN they're working on a non-Crysis console game.

Cevat Yerli Q&A [IGN]

Reader maxax caught an interview with Hideo Kojima in Spiegel Online, the website for German-language Der Speigel, one of Europe's leading mainstream news magazines. Maxax translated it to English on his blog and so we offer up to you here, too.

Kojima explains his brand of antiwar sentiment, which is more or less circumspect about the reasons and results of war rather than outright pacifism. He also pines for a future where smaller, art-house productions are comparatively viable, among a world of titles that are increasingly developed for blockbuster effect, like Grand Theft Auto IV and MGS4.

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You may remember Threewave Software best for the original "Capture The Flag" Quake mod. These days, the studio's known for developing the multiplayer component of several major titles, most recently Touchstone's Turok and EA's Army of Two, and is currently developing the multiplayer for Activision's upcoming Wolfenstein title.

As you may have noticed, many of the devs to which we turn for our hardcore fix seem to be making full-tilt sprints for social networks like Facebook and the casual space. In today's ultra high-risk game development environment, Threewave also thought it'd be prudent to get on the burgeoning social media train, founding Gnosis Games, a casual subdivision with titles like Paparazzi, which according to the studio is a chart-topper on RealArcade, Gamehouse and other casual portals.

Now, Threewave's Gnosis has turned to Facebook. In this case, though, there's a surprising and interesting ulterior motive that's more in line with the hardcore audience than you might guess.

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As the GTA IV launch is once again trotted out as a controversy flashpoint, there's one thing the gaming audience tends to agree on: This game is not for children. Of course, just how zealous they are about enforcing such a mandate varies wildly.

Nonprofit advocacy group the Parents' Television Council takes their position on enforcement beyond just demanding legal consequences for retailers who sell M-rated games to kids under the age of 17. The council wants games like GTA IV locked up behind store counters, like cigarettes, tobacco and porn.

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