Sucker Punch's Fleming on Why PS3 Exclusivity is Good and Why He Needed a Break from Sly

While we'll have to wait for the NPD data later this week to see what kind of start Sucker Punch's inFamous had at retail, the critical buzz is certainly there. With an overall Metacritic rating of 85 and a number of scores in the 90s from publications like GameDaily, GameSpot, IGN, 1UP and others, it's clear that Sony has another solid hit, exclusive to PS3. Prior to the game's release, IndustryGamers had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Fleming, co-founder of Sucker Punch (known for the Sly Cooper series) and all around nice guy.

We chatted with Fleming about the vast contrast (and some similarities) between inFamous and Sly, if they'll do another Sly next, why exclusivity on PS3 is good for his team, and if he'd want to work on Wii.  Check out the full Q&A below and enjoy!

IndustryGamers: Similar to Insomniac Games, you guys are independent but you've had a basically exclusive agreement with Sony. The Wii has been a huge success and obviously has a very large installed base compared to PS3, so do you feel as a developer that you're limiting your audience and sales by sticking to just PS3?

Brian Fleming: Our first game was on the N64 but for the last nine years all we've done is work on Sony platforms. From an artist standpoint, you want your work to be seen by as many people as possible, so you could argue that if that was our dominant goal, we'd be working on cross-platform stuff. But I think there's a small selfish component to what we do in that we want to run a business that we truly enjoy, and doing cross-platform, while you would reach more people, it also introduces a whole bunch of problems and compromises and difficulty that doesn't make making games a lot more fun. In fact, I think it subtracts from that. So I think you have to carefully assess what you value; in our case, we value focus, being a relatively small team – we're 60 people competing with games being made by teams two and three times that – and we've been working with these guys at Sony, especially the product development team, for so long [that it benefits us]. They add a lot of value, we get along very well with them, they give us rope when we need rope, they hit us with the stick when we need that, and you know there are a lot of things worse in life than not maximizing on every axis.

I think you can get very caught up on “we have to do cross-platform” and end up failing on axes that might be more important to you, like your happiness, the quality of the games you make, the patience of the publisher when a game is struggling – inFamous struggled for a while before we found our footing – and we appreciate that [Sony's patience] because it made our lives better. At the same time, we're not in this for charity; it's a for profit business and we have a business model that leads us in that direction, but you do have to be careful about being greedy. We love being first-party, so if we did something different I don't think we'd be cross-platform... I think we'd want to do some exclusive on some other platform.

IG: As a designer and someone who values creativity and innovation, are you intrigued by some of the possibilities of what you could do developing on Wii?

BF: The cool thing about the entertainment business is that there are limitless opportunities for innovation. It can be guitars as controllers or deciding tilt is an important feature or Wii's motion sensing. Innovation can be new models for business. The great thing about this whole industry is it's full of innovation. The innovation that's working really well right now is control input device innovation – again Guitar Hero, the [Wii] balance board, the Wii-mote – but these are not the only innovations. Fads come and go, and I'm not saying the Wii's a fad at all. I'm just saying the next innovation is difficult to predict from the previous.

IG: Right, so you sort of sidestepped my question. Are you personally attracted to Wii?

BF: We are attracted to everything – that's the problem.

Much like Fable, you can be good or evil in the game

IG: So if Nintendo came to you, you wouldn't rule it out? If they said, “We love Sucker Punch and would like you to do something for Wii,” you'd consider that?

BF: We'd consider anything – we're an independent business. But we're very happy with our relationship with Sony, so it would have to be a really spectacular [opportunity]. If it was, “Hey we'll greenlight a two-year game,” there's no chance we'd take that right now.

IG: PS3 needs to have a big 2009 and Sony execs have certainly cited inFamous as one of the tent-pole titles along with Killzone 2, Uncharted 2, etc. Do you feel extra pressure as a result of that?

BF: Most of the time we put more pressure on ourselves than the outside. That said, Sony has been very helpful throughout the project, helping put pressure on us to make the game better, so I think it's a really healthy relationship with pressure. It was never about making the “tent-pole game” - we sort of have this rule, which is you don't aim to be a big hit. You endeavor to make a great game and you hope for it to be a hit. And so our focus has always been about “What's the best thing for the game?” We've tried not to get wrapped up in Sony corporate strategy and not to get caught up in the latest and greatest flavor.

Rather, this game is intrinsically about becoming a superhero, and one of the things we can do is to make that a more compelling experience to play in isolation – how do we make the best superhero game that can be made? This game is in part a reaction to playing a lot of bad superhero games, which isn't to say there aren't good ones, but the ratio is pretty low. Well, why is it low? There are lots of reasons, but one of them I think is they were adapting an IP that works really well in a different media than games. But what if you started with, “What is the character, and power set, and environment, and story that would make a great game?” Let's do that with all the trappings; let's make a big triple-A title about that, and that's what this game in a nutshell is about.

IG: Considering that this is another sandbox type game, were you guys inspired by titles like GTA or Crackdown or Saints Row while creating inFamous?

BF: We were in development on this game before Crackdown was announced. I think it was announced just a few months after we started development. As for the GTA phenomenon, clearly [those games] define the open environment experience; and there were superhero games that went into this space as well like the Spider-Man games. I think all those games had an impact on us. We stand on their shoulders. They've experimented and succeeded in certain areas and failed in others, and all of us pay attention to that, but this is our own hybrid of what is an open environment game with fairly big setups. If you play the Prison [level] it's a pretty elaborate setup inside an open environment game, and there's a bunch of those kinds of setups inside the world of inFamous. So for us, I think the biggest fusion element of that is taking our experience of setup gameplay like [we did for] Sly Cooper and fusing it with open environment systemic gameplay. [It's about] “How do those two things meet and what happens when you do that?”

IG: Speaking of Sly, inFamous is obviously a pretty radical departure from that cartoony, family-friendly image. It's a much more mature setting and urban and gritty, so what led you guys to go in this direction? You just needed a change?

BF: I can paint a picture of the two games being radically different, but I also can paint a picture of them being surprisingly similar. ... We felt like we were taking on a lot of new stuff – new IP, human characters, realism, the PS3, a streaming game – and at the same time it's a third-person character action game, which has this traversal model with the world as a jungle gym with lots of setups, so there are mechanical things that are very similar. What we were really trying to do as a group was to say, “Well, we know it's going to take us a while to do our first PS3 game, but not so long that the demographics of the platform were going to be real young.” Our experience with Sly convinced us that it would be helpful for us – and also fun – to create an IP that was better for earlier adopters of new consoles than Sly. And so, we wanted a game where we achieved some of those goals and where we got to tell different stories and live out our power fantasies, but when the time comes, the technology and the approach could all project into the Sly universe as well – so inFamous is not as different as you might think, although aesthetically it's a profound difference.

IG: So you're saying the technology and techniques you've learned working on PS3 for inFamous will be applied to a future game in the Sly universe?

BF: It certainly could, but we are nowhere close to deciding to do a sequel to Sly or a sequel to inFamous. I think we are well positioned to do either of those. On some level, that's our job – to put ourselves in a position to have good options.

IG: Well, I would think since you're known for the Sly franchise that you would want to keep going with that, especially as the demographic on PS3 starts to get younger as you were hinting at earlier.

BF: We love the intellectual property. Our departure from it had more to do with the fact that we've been doing this for six years, demographics are shifting, so let's do something fun and different – for creative reasons and the pure joy of doing something new. Working on new stuff is terribly hard, and you kind of forget that, and it takes you six years of working on something to be dumb enough to try it again.

IG: And of course, creating a new IP is always a risk for any studio.

BF: No question. And you don't want to go through life doing nothing but sequels for your one big IP...

IG: Right, the guys at Bungie sort of felt that way about Halo.

BF: I always think of it as like the rock and roll guys from the '70s who are touring the local Indian casino doing shows and singing the same songs they've been doing for 30 years – I don't even know how you do that. I actually think it was important for us to miss Sly a little bit, to look longingly at it, and then say, “Ok, now's the time; let's go back.”

IG: Since inFamous was your first PS3 title, and some people have talked about difficulties in developing for the PS3, what are some of the lessons learned about PS3 development that you took away from this project?

BF: I think especially in the early going there is a fundamental difference and it was exacerbated by our initial difficulties. In the beginning there were two problems. The first is that the PS3 is intrinsically different, and different isn't necessarily good when you're doing cross-platform work. In fact, different is often bad. For example, I would add that the Wii is really different too. People aren't saying “Oh it's really hard to write code for it.” They're saying “Oh it's challenging” and they've got all these positive spins on it. My take is that it's just different, and so is the PS3, and you've got to overcome the differences if you're going to do games on these platforms. It's not a PC, you can't treat it like a PC... The difference intrinsically did not throw us off. The second thing is initially the tools were not as rich, and there's a huge advantage for the guys making Xbox games in that tools for the Xbox 1 and PC games were closer. So in the early going there was a tools advantage for the Xbox and I think that's largely been reduced. ... I had a conversation with one of our engine guys, and he was saying how he was kind of surprised by how easy it's been [on PS3]. And I don't mean to say, “Oh it's so easy for us,” but once you decide you're going to do it and you translate into Polish, there it is. It's not any better than English – it's just different.

IG: And I'm assuming you share Sony's mindset that Blu-ray is a huge advantage for developers?

BF: We're doing something we could never do in that we have one single worldwide SKU with all the languages, so there's tremendous advantage for us in terms of just having that big capacity. For us and inFamous, the biggest advantage on the platform is the hard drive. That's helped more than the compression benefits of Blu-ray. I'm not in any way marginalizing Blu-ray; we're big supporters of the format. For us, the Cell processor and the SPUs in particular, which are freaks, have been the biggest quantum advantages.

IG: Yeah, I still question Microsoft's decision to sell a SKU with a hard drive, but obviously having a hard drive in every PS3 benefits your design decisions.

BF: It was a massive advantage for making this game – it would have been significantly more work that would not have made the game better if there had been no hard drive. ... The low latency of a hard disk is very valuable, especially in a game like this, which is an open world game.

IG: You talked about the initial difficulties because PS3 is intrinsically different, but how much help has Sony been in providing tools and guidance?

BF: They've been a good partner, and I think the area where they help us the most is gameplay side, not tools and technology side. It's a very experienced product development team, and they've done a good job hitting us with a stick when we needed it; they're like having a good coach.

IG: Do you have conversations with other PS3 developers like Naughty Dog and Insomniac – guys who've leveraged the PS3 – to sort of share your learnings?

BF: We do; I mean, they take pity on us because they're better than us. [laughs] We have a great relationship with Ted [Price] and the guys at Insomniac and Evan [Wells] and Christophe [Balestra] at Naughty Dog. It's like a small fraternity of guys.

IG: Thanks for your time Brian.