Ambition is what drew me to Factor 5.

As a gamer I came to the studio’s work a little late. I missed their Turrican days, their era of making games for the Super Nintendo and Genesis. I came upon them as an N64 gamer, spotting their logo at the intro to Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. That 1999 shooter was one of the first games to utilise the N64’s RAM expansion pack for improved graphics resolution. That was the first hint to me that Factor 5 was a studio interested in pushing technology.

The next game Factor 5 game I played — still before I had become a reporter — was the one that forever charmed me to the studio. It was Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, a new-Trilogy sequel to Rogue Squadron. A hidden feature is what won me over: stuffed into its N64 cart was audio developer commentary for each of the game’s levels. I’d never heard such a thing before.

This was a studio of developers with whom I wanted to speak. And I would.

At the start of the GameCube era, in 2001, I was just beginning to cover games. I played Factor 5 GameCube launch title Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader as a novice reporter at my first E3. It is, to this day, among the best-looking games developed for a Nintendo platform. I don’t remember talking to Factor 5’s U.S. president Julian Eggebrecht then, nor for its 2003 sequel, Rebel Strike. But it was by that second GameCube game that I was writing a freebie column for IGN about the GameCube.

What I wrote about Rebel Strike highlighted the second defining characteristic of Factor 5 for me: they bit off mouthfuls at a time. Rebel Strike was not just a full new game. It house the entirety of its predecessor, re-crafted for split-screen co-op. It contained not just audio commentary but making-of documentaries. But there were signs of rough edges: peculiar dips to black between gameplay and in-engine cutscenes; a group of on-foot side-scrolling levels that played poorly and curiously lacked audio commentary.

In 2006, I finally got paid for something I wrote about Factor 5. I was at MTV and covered the topic of developers using audio commentary. I referenced Factor 5 as a pioneer.

Factor 5 disappeared from my radar after that until I finally met Eggebrecht in person at a Sony event in 2006. He was showing, for the first of several times, the dragon-combat game Lair. He was a champion of PS3 motion control, a booster for the system’s technical prowess and ambitious as ever. He wanted a game with air combat, ground combat, allusions to the ethics of modern war, hooks to the PS3’s web browser, elaborate cutscenes and so much more. There were those two signatures of Factor 5 again, summed up in one word: ambition.

But Lair was rougher than Rebel Strike. Factor 5 barely attempted to hide this. In one of the more open displays of developer frustration with their own game, the studio included commentary in Lair that alluded to the game suffering from what was described as a cure of the dragon games, a problem that they said extended to personal problems among some of the staff. Following up in an e-mail, Eggebrecht said to me in 2007: “I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted.”

Factor 5 faded away again, rumoured over the next two years to have canceled its deal with Sony, possibly returned to working with Nintendo. Then came the news reported in Variety that Factor 5 was one of the studios suffering from having made a deal with the collapsed publisher Brash. I reached out to Eggebrecht again, who all but confirmed that the studio had been making a Superman adventure and expressing hope that the game would still come together.

“With that said,” he wrote to me in November, “Things are obviously in flux and we hope that the game proves to be as indestructible as our hero…”

And then? Today’s news. Factor 5 in the U.S. is no more. I’ve not heard back from Eggebrecht about this turn of events. The statement on the company’s official website indicates that its German parent company still has projects coming.

There may be a future yet for Factor 5. There definitely was a past worth appreciating.

Factor 5 honcho Julian Eggebrecht must be exhausted from constantly “defending” his company’s poorly received PlayStation 3 title Lair and its hit-or-miss SixAxis controls. G4 caught up with the Dragon’s Lair fanboy at Tokyo Game Show to get one more justification out of Mr. Eggebrecht whose game has been retitled Rise From Lair in Japan. I respect what Factor 5 was trying to do, but trying to target gamers who aren’t hardcore with a PS3 game? Simply puzzling.

If you connect you can get a lot of shader effects which would’ve been on the 360 or the PS3…it’s got so much more power compared to the GameCube. If even with the extremely similar shader hardware, the system clockrate is so much higher, you can do so much more advanced things.

So why does he think games aren’t looking better?

Hmmm I don’t know, the hardware is very, very easy to understand. Now the problem might be -and it just might be- is that some studios -or some publishers specifically- are discarding the graphical capabilities automatically simply because it is a Wii title and they’re basically telling the developers “look, we won’t pay for any advanced graphics.”

He admits that the Wii will have difficulty achieving photorealism, but I have a feeling that his conspiracy theory isn’t so far off…if you look at certain titles.

Factor 5’s Julian Eggebrecht on Wii Graphics [flamewaradvance]

Capps was first to respond, saying “We absolutely love the press. Everything they say we immediately put into our game.” Joking, of course, but it’s actually not that far from the truth.With the press, Capps revealed that they’ll actively solicit their feedback because “the press knows games and they know what’s gonna sell” with proposed changes being incorporated as late as six weeks before ship date.

Touching on the hardcore Unreal Tournament userbase, Capps revealed that the team at Epic read forums “all the time”, saying “We take [their complaints] seriously because we need to keep those guys happy because they’re the ones who are going to sell it to another one and a half million users who aren’t so hardcore.”

Backer theorised that the games industry has evolved faster than its Hollywood counterpart because of this interaction with its users.

Lair developer Eggebrecht suggested that developers take those suggestions from hardcore users “with a grain of salt” citing Factor 5’s inference that the hardcore “seem to somehow resent the idea that motion control is the next evolution, or one of the evolutions, where video games will go.” With the hardcore gamer “bashing in our heads” over the use of the SIXAXIS motion detection as the primary control method for the game’s dragon flight, it might seem like Eggebrecht ignored player feedback.

Not so. The team did make motion control concessions based on vocal, negative opinions from the PLAYSTATION 3 game’s Tokyo Game Show demo. Ripping out the motion control for on-foot segments, Eggebrecht called the earlier control scheme “quite frankly, horrible in hindsight” and that listening to hardcore opinions can often be “a blessing and a curse.”

And while some game developers may have a bitter taste left in their mouths by a scathing preview or review of a game, Eggebrecht said “The press isn’t the enemy. If anybody thinks the press is the enemy, that’s stupid. These guys are usually as passionate, if not more so, than you yourself are so work with them.”

Before starting Lair we said we would never use a licensed IP again, but now I’d pray to do one…[but] if you have a small idea…absolutely grab that opportunity.

It seems like the balance of risk to gain for developers could stop this new market craving for big budget original IPs just as quickly as it’s started. Meanwhile, original IPs can easily take off on a platform like XBLA—and it’s a heck of a shorter fall if things don’t work out.

But if Eggebrecht ships a million copies of Lair, we’ll see if he changes his tune and dragons triumph over X-Wings once again.

Eggebrecht revealed his independent studio’s difficulties trying to secure a Sony requested Teen rating for its PLAYSTATION 3 dragon game Lair. With a heavy amount of blood and gore, the game was altered to conform to the ESRB’s sometimes impolitic ratings criteria. Even though the player can burn scores of human infantry to death, showing blood spraying from dragon wounds resulted in a Mature rating.

Similarly, gory moments of airborne creatures exploding in chunks was met with disapproval, forcing more compromising “hugely problematic” changes to Lair.And while some violence may be okay for M-rated software, sex in games is a definite no-no. Eggebrecht longed for a time when games can be taken seriously as an art form, not a “corruptive” medium like cinema, comic books and rock and roll music.

Games with intense graphic sex scenes—sometimes mixed with intense violence—were more than acceptable in movies like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, clips from which Eggebrecht played on stage to underscore his point. But in games, portrayals of sex are strictly verboten. Eggebrecht said this policy “tends to show that games are not being seen even by our own ratings boards as an art form.”

I later spoke to Eggebrecht and GDC president Jamil Moledina about Sin City and 300 creator Frank Miller’s distaste for ratings systems, self-imposed or otherwise. He wrote in the early 90s that ratings systems inherently create restrictions on an artistic medium sometimes before any production on the work has even begun. While Miller’s main concern at the time was for his medium, the comic book, it was becoming clear that his stance on the matter was becoming increasingly, and worryingly, appropriate for the gaming industry.

The Factor 5 president ended his keynote with a call for developers to push the genre’s boundaries or suffer the consequences. He asked for his peers to “show me something that proves on all levels that games are indeed an artform . Push the violence, but also push the sex, and push it in an artistic way where it’s not really gratuitous, but where it gets the brain going.”