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DICE: David Jaffe Says Calling All Cars Was a 'Mistake'

Posted February 17, 2010 by James Brightman

In one of the first sessions at the D.I.C.E. Summit this week in Las Vegas, David Jaffe had some harsh words for one of his own projects. The God of War creator left Sony to pursue smaller, bite-sized games at his new venture Eat Sleep Play, but his first effort - Calling All Cars - didn't work out exactly how he would have liked. 

In a panel with AppStar's David Crane, hosted by G4's Adam Sessler, Jaffe discussed the difference between casual and traditional video games, and Jaffe admitted that his Calling All Cars game sort of got caught in between. Sessler asked Jaffe if Calling All Cars would be considered casual or hardcore, and Jaffe responded, "Well, I call it a mistake."

The problem was that the market for the PS3 at the time was clearly much more hardcore, so the game simply didn't fit the market. "While the game was cartoony, our gameplay was more hardcore and modeled after some of the great Midway arcade games like NBA Jam," he said. "So we had a casual theme, a hardcore play mechanic, on a machine people just spent $599 for." He added, "If we were to make it again we would have skinned it entirely differently."

Jaffe was very hard on himself, saying that he "made mistakes all over the place." The pricing for the game was also questioned. "All we had was Xbox Live Arcade as the innovator in the space, but there weren't that many games like this at the time. $10 bucks? Why not?" he said, then adding,  "I mean, we didn't completely fail -- we made a little money. But we didn't make enough to do more just like this." Jaffe's not giving up on downloadable titles, however. If anything, the market has grown considerably since Calling All Cars, and publishers and developers have learned a lot about the emerging downloads space. Companies just need to be more careful with their portfolio planning, he said. "There's a smarter way to think about it. Let's think a little more about what the consumer wants." 

Jaffe also noted that his next game might be "in between God of War and Calling All Cars," which perhaps might address some of the issues mentioned above.

[Thanks to 1UP]

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.