IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Interview: Vicious Cycle's 10-Year Evolution

Posted February 10, 2010 by David Radd

For all its success, few other major entertainment industries could claim as much upheaval as the gaming industry – witness the many closures, buyouts and consolidations of the past few years as companies have desperately tried to deal with rising development costs and shifting publishing trends. Despite the turbulence of the past ten years, Vicious Cycle has managed to thrive; the developer worked on several outside projects and created and sold its own middleware before eventually being bought out by D3Publisher, which was then purchased by Namco Bandai Games. We talked with Vicious Cycle president and CEO Eric Peterson and vice president and CTO Wayne Harvey about the evolution of the company and what the future may bring.

IndustryGamers: What does it mean to you to be going strong after a decade with development studios closing down left and right?

Eric Peterson: Considering the fact that we had some close calls in our early years, it means a lot. We nearly closed early on because we didn't have a contract.

 Wayne Harvey: That was nine months in.

 EP: We laid someone off and drank our sorrows away and got a fax the next morning showing a contract went through.

WH: In 10 years we've gone through numerous consoles and the recession. We started out as PC developers, but we launched into GCN, PS2 and Xbox. We've also decided to sell our technology in the Vicious Engine and that gave us second life. We also created the Monkey Bar label to make kids titles. 

For five years we did work-for-hire. They needed someone to work on an IP or to put out fires and finish out a project, we were there. Now that we're part of D3Publisher and D3 is part of Namco, we just work with our parent company. Things have been different the past two years; the first eight years it was about hunting down those publishers and drumming up cash for the engine business.

EP: We've done a good job of forming relationships with studios because of that.

 WH:  Being work-for-hire, you have to bend over backwards sometimes for that relationship.

IG: So what's it like now being a smaller part of a large publisher?

EP: Now that I look back at our experiences as an independent studio, I realize it was a simpler time. [laughs] I say that because you have to change your infrastructure and go through red tape when you're part of a larger organization. Now it's like the movie Office Space; you have to fill out your TPS reports and then a week later you get your approval. While it used to be our sole vision, now they have a say and it's their vision of your direction. You also have those growing pains to integrate into a larger organization, and it's also a change being a Western company and integrating into a Japanese company.

IG: Turning to your latest release, the Matt Hazard games feature elements of various made-up games, but had you ever considered adding actual characters from D3 or Namco Bandai?

EP: We actually had talked about drawing in some D3 stuff at the time, but we just never did. It just hit the cutting room floor.

IG: Now Matt Hazard is a pastiche of various games and characters, but it's obvious that his primary inspiration is Duke Nukem. Contrast your experience as an independent developer that's put out several titles since 2003 and 3D Realms, which hasn't released one.

EP: We've always done a game or two a year. We've had to create a lot of games on lower budgets and maybe they're smaller games, but you can always do a quality job within your money allowances. In our experience of working with budgets ranging from a half-million dollars to $10 million, the more money you have, the more easily you can get lost. You need planning and you need people to bring you back down to reality, and if you're going four or more years, it can be easy to get disconnected from that. When you bleed into another console generation, you made a mistake.

We've never had the opportunity to take five or six years to make something. We like shipping products; we don't want to wait such a long time to see our products on the shelves. There's also a massive gamble you're taking. It's like Avatar – you're lucky when it does hit and you think, 'We made a lot of money, thank God.' Other times when you spend $50 million and it doesn't sell, then you're left with people wanting your head.

 WH:  Shorter cycles keep people fresh. And we really do have a good culture.

EP: It's more intimate to have a smaller team. It's no coincidence that there have been smaller titles along with the rise of things like the Steam, PSN and XBLA; I think the gap is widening between indie and AAA . Some people think there's a “B” game rating, and I'm not sure if I see that because the difference is so large in production values between high and low budget. There are more small developers flourishing, and there are fewer big budget titles and they're very high quality and the middle ground hasn't found a home yet. Is it casual Wii? Is it licensed titles? Is it an arcade-like title? That's where it's nice to have smaller titles because you can experiment more. Smaller titles are providing more innovation; larger titles have a formula and are changing less because they don't want to lose that audience.

IG: Tell me about your Matt Hazard sequel and how excited you are to make this into a franchise?

EP: It was our chance to basically give Matt more credibility. We went back to the drawing board and gave him more grounding for where he came from. He started at 2D and became a 3D character later and that's what we based the first game on; we were trying to compete with AAA titles with cover mechanics and third-person shooting. With this new title, Blood Bath and Beyond, we're not looking to emulate larger titles, and that allows us to compete at a smaller level and putting him in a game like Contra or Metal Slug. We're not technically an indie company, but we are trying to feed off of old NES games, like many DLC titles have done. You've got Shadow Complex, which is a 'Metroidvania' clone, Bionic Commando, which basically rips off itself, and in Blood Bath and Beyond we're taking a lot of cues from Contra. We might not have the resources to do a Gears of War, but working in the DLC realm allows us to better establish ourselves, and our reviews are 20 to 30 points better than the original.

IG: How about sales-wise? How is Matt Hazard doing there?

EP:  As far as we can tell, the download-to-purchase rate is good. The DLC is more of an impulse buy and it's easy to react that way because it's a cheaper game. If you were renting something from Gamefly you might feel the same way.

IG: The demo for DLC titles has become really important, and considering where the industry is moving towards digital distribution, it'll only become more important.

EP: Yeah, agreed. With DLC titles, and soon with all console games, your demo will be your marketing.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.