GDGT + AOL = ZOMG.

To make sense of the deal, we talked with Ryan Block, the cofounder of GDGT and a former editor at AOL’s Engadget, this morning. What followed was an insightful conversation on where AOL has been and where it’s headed — with GDGT’s help.

VentureBeat: What will change in GDGT’s operations? And how will the site fit into AOL?

Ryan Block: We’ve always considered ourselves a design and engineering company first. That’s different from Engadget, which was a content company, and the design and engineering were in service with that. … The fit there for us is not only GDGT as a property itself — we’re filling an interesting hole in AOL’s lineup — but it’s also about our team.

So part of what I’m going to be doing is taking existing AOL design and engineering folks, as well as the team I built at GDGT, and kind of expanding the scope of what we’re working on … We’re going to apply the same sensibilities around creating a great holistic product experience to other sites around the [AOL tech] portfolio.

VentureBeat: Is this a response to the Verge and all the money Vox Media is throwing at design?

Block: This is the biggest investment I know of that AOL has ever made in these properties and in the future of its technology content as well. It’s not just with GDGT as a property itself, but with the way we’re going to start to organize and build. Those guys [AOL] realize we’re going to compete, and we’ll continue to compete in the tech space of the future.

It’s not just about the words on the page — which is more important than ever since there’s more competition than there’s ever been — but the bar has been raised in general around design, engineering, site experience, features — all these things.

We live in a world now where everything has an app, and those apps are great and amazing holistic experiences that combine the best of the form factor with cloud services. … We’ve come to expect a very high standard of interactivity. And the reality is there’s a lot of work to be done with some of these sites, and that’s what we’re going to do.

If you’ve ever used GDGT, you know it’s highly interactive, highly dynamic, it’s those kinds of experiences we want to bring.

VentureBeat: Why is now a good time for the AOL acquisition?

Block: We’ve been continuously iterating and evolving and getting really happy with where the site was going. Around the same time as we were thinking about what could happen next, AOL reached out, and we entered conversations. We actually had some other offers, and frankly, we had offers that might have been a little more financially interesting. But we chose AOL. We thought it was the best fit. The leadership team there is amazing. They’ve really done a 180 in the last two years. And a lot of the people that I don’t think were up to the task have been shown the door, and the people there now are great.

I don’t know if you saw Jay Kirsch’s post on church and state [Kirsch is president of AOL's technology and entertainment group], but to have a high-ranking business manager who thinks about content that way, it feels very uncommon to me. It feels very rare and precious that somebody actually gets it at that level. For us, it’s the right team, the right deal, the right time, and the right place. We didn’t really want to do something else, this was the outcome that we wanted.

VentureBeat: Any chance you’ll return to blogging in your new role?

Block: I’m definitely going to contribute to Engadget, TechCrunch, and other sites within the network wherever I can. Peter [Rojas, GDGT's other co-founder] is definitely going to contribute, probably more than I will, and taking more of an active advisory role in the direction of editorial across the group. That’s actually very similar with what we’ve done with GDGT. … I’ll be more like a columnist than anything else.

I’m not taking a direct editorial role. For example, Tim Stevens is still in charge of Engadget. The way I’d think about it is in terms of a mind/body duality, where the words on the page and everything having to do with the edit product is the existing Engadget team [the mind]. My team are the personal trainers, and we’re going to work out the body. We’re going to take everything that surrounds that [the mind], all the experiences that encompass it, and work on that.

VentureBeat: Are you worried at all about how the GDGT community will respond to the acquisition? I noticed that you made it really easy for existing members to delete their accounts.

Block: I think that’s the right thing to do. I think that’s the polite thing to do for people to give them a chance to opt out — and to be very clear about that up front. AOL has been really cool, really supportive throughout this entire process. I have to hand it to them.

We’ve done this before. The last time we brought it into a group that understood our business and then almost immediately, that whole management team was reshuffled, and we got stuck with a bunch of people who really had no business running a Popsicle stick. That’s changed enormously.

Even back then we were able to take a property within AOL and make it great. Engadget ultimately won out against all its competitors, and that was with not a terribly impressive investment on AOL’s part in 2005 and 2006. I’m not super-worried about it. I think AOL is a pretty good place for certain brands to land. I think they’re going to be excellent stewards for GDGT, and they’re going to be a good home for our team.

I think they have the receptors necessary for our DNA. That is maybe the most important thing to me.

Photo: Kris Krug/Flickr

Update: Image gallery added 1/29/13.

Former KingsIsle Entertainment vice president and creative director Todd Coleman recently announced his departure from the company. KingsIsle is an Austin, Texas-based studio best known for their online free-to-play game, Wizard101, and more recently Pirate101.

Coleman helped found KingsIsle, and he was a major force behind the launch Wizard101 and Pirate101. He, along with Elie Akilian, David Nichols, and Josef Hall, built the company in 2005. GamesBeat interviewed Coleman over the phone to ask him about his time with KingsIsle and his future plans.

GamesBeat: How do you feel right now?

Todd Coleman: It’s funny. So I told the team earlier this week. As soon as I told the team, I was feeling mostly just heartbroken. I was the first guy hired here in Austin to fill our development arm.

The ideas behind the products I had a large part of these. Wizard101, Pirate101 — both these characters, and these stories, a lot of them came out of my head and the heads of the people that I work with. I’m leaving a lot of that behind, so it started with a lot of heartbreak.

[Thursday] morning was when I turned the corner, and even though I still feel sad, the excitement’s been gaining and building. I got another dose of it when I had to announce it to the company. As much as I hate leaving it behind … I’m also incredibly excited about what the future hold for me. It’s a whole new horizon.

GamesBeat: What did founding KingsIsle and Wizard101 teach you about taking risks?

Coleman: KingsIsle was actually the third startup that I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of. The first was a technology company where the technology was solid, but we just couldn’t really sell it. The second one was my first game company, where the excitement form the market was really good, but the technology just didn’t come together. Both of those were acquired, but they weren’t home runs.

I came here, and I started working with Elie [Akillian] and Josef [Hall] and David [Nichols] to build this company, and everything worked. We had the right mix of the right people with the right idea at the right time, with guidance from Elie, and it all clicked, and it all worked. This time this one wasn’t mine. The other two startups were mine and Josefs. We set out to create them from the beginning. This one, we were here from the beginning, but it wasn’t ours. I’ve been kind of feeling the entrepreneurial itch, and I don’t know how to explain it to people who have never felt it before. It has been competing with me ever since we launched Pirate … and eventually I made the decision that I couldn’t wait. I had to go and I had to give it a shot.

Coleman

GamesBeat: You once said publishers thought you were crazy for pursuing a family-friendly game. Did you think you were crazy at the time?

Coleman: No. I like to pick ideas for companies that are doing what other people are not. I don’t like to go head-to-head. My preference is to go for something that sounds a little crazy, but ignites passion and belief that “Wow! This could be really cool!” I know other people may not see it, and maybe nobody else has done it. That adds to the feeling of “what it could be.”

Again, it’s hard. This is the part of the creative process I really love. It’s not a scientific formula, where you add “this variable” and “this variable” and “this variable,” and the next thing you know, you’ve got a startup.

To me, the right idea is a combination of gut feeling, timing, belief that people will like it, even if they don’t even know yet that they will like it. It’s … a big conglomeration of all these elements together that make you say, “OK, this is the one that I have to do — this is the vision that I have to pursue.”

GamesBeat: You did free-to-play before it sounded like a viable business plan. Was making it free originally partly the result of it being aimed at children? I understand one of your fears was parents trusting KingsIsle with their credit cards. Was free-to-play a direct result of this?

Coleman: I wouldn’t say that it was caused by that. There was a concern early on that parents wouldn’t trust anybody unless they had a name like Microsoft or Disney. Luckily for us, the market matured underneath us as we were working on the product. By the time it came out, that turned out to be a silly concern. But it was a real, valid concern that we talked about back when we originally started.

The micropayments were interesting, because when we were launching, it was still a relatively unknown business model here in the U.S. It had seen success overseas, but we had an idea that it might be an interesting thing to try. It wasn’t a major part of our strategy initially. I just buried a vendor in the game in one of the zones that would sell items for micropayments. It wasn’t something we spent a lot of time advertising or talking about — it was just kind of an offshoot thing we put in the corner, and once we launched, it started making a little of money. We said, “Well, that’s making a little bit of money, so let’s leave it there.”

A couple months later we looked at it again, and we say, “Hey! That’s making more money.” We have a mechanism, so our subscriber-base is picking up. We had some people who did our subscription base because they like the idea of not being nickel and dimed, as they call it. We had other people who liked the idea of micropayments, because they didn’t like the idea of their credit card being hit every month automatically whether they’re playing or not. We thought, “This has some merit to offer both. I can pay for the game however I like. I can buy an all-you-can eat buffet, or I can buy it piecemeal.”

And then what we found was that our best customers were the ones who were buying the subscription — and then they were buying stuff in the micropayment shop. Over time, it just earned its own place at the table. It continued to grow and gain momentum and as it did better we put more effort into it. We redid the interface, and we made it more front and center in the game and we started increasing our offering and fleshing out the catalog. It built its own momentum, and it’s a major part of our business now. I think we were a pioneer in that area, but it wasn’t all by design. I think it was somewhat by design, somewhat by just being open to the opportunity and recognizing what was happening and jumping on it.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Maps for the iPhone is here, and it’s glorious. In only a few hours after launching, it’s become the top free iPhone app on the App Store.

It’s not hard to see why: The Google Maps iPhone app is gorgeously designed (just like the Gmail iPhone app, which launched last week), and it finally gives iOS 6 users a full-featured alternative to Apple’s troubled Map app.

To learn more about how Google approached building the long-awaited app, we chatted with Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps for mobile. Graf joined Google last year as director of its Mobile Apps Lab after founding the cloud-based video publishing platform Kyte in 2005. In April (shortly before Apple announced iOS 6 and its own map app), he took charge of the mobile maps team.

VentureBeat: How long have you been working on this?

Daniel Graf: We haven’t announced that. Usually Google doesn’t comment on how long it works on a product … what I can say is that it’s probably longer than what you would expect.

Creating a mapping application from the ground up is actually quite challenging from a technical point. It’s not just rendering some pictures and text. Rendering a map is similar to creating a 3D game, where you have a 3D rendering engine, which we created. To have the performance you see now, where you can zoom and pan at this speed is quite a challenge. And of course, hooking it up to all of the data sources we have on Google came on top of it.

VentureBeat: The design really falls in line with the new Gmail App on iOS and Google Now on iOS and Android. Is this a new, consistent style for Google on mobile?

Graf: I think what you’ve experienced on Google properties on the desktop over the last couple years, we have now kind of a streamlined design — a very delightful design which puts the product on the foreground. If you look at our app, the map is really the U.I. There aren’t many menus, but if you actually play around with it, you’ll see all of the features are actually here. You’re not actually missing anything.

You’re right — on the mobile side, of course, all of the mobile development teams collaborate closely to get this one Google experience onto mobile devices.

VentureBeat: It seems vastly improved over what we’ve been seeing in Google’s apps before. Is this something you’ve pushing since you joined the company last year?

Graf: This is always a team effort — there’s no individual part of this. I’m very happy to be a part of the team.

VentureBeat: Do you have any sense how Google approached mobile app design before you joined the team?

Graf: Mobile apps really only took off a few years ago with the smartphones. In the beginning, before you run, you have to walk, and before you walk, you have to crawl. So there were the crawling efforts, and I think now we’re on the walking side — and hopefully soon we’ll be running. I don’t think this is attached to me, this is just what’s happening in the industry overall. We’re seeing better and better designed products.

As you pointed out, it’s quite nice that Gmail launched last week; you can see a common design theme there. If you actually look at the app store rating, we’re at four-and-a-half stars now. We don’t get that quite often, and we’re pleased about that.

VentureBeat: Are you surprised by the quick uptake on the app?

Graf: [Laughs] You can never expect anything like that. We knew that there was the demand — people loved Google Maps in general. Our statement has always been that we want to be on all major platforms. Looking at the numbers, we are impressed.

VentureBeat: Was the Apple approval process difficult?

Graf: We work with Apple on a daily basis, and on many levels, Google and Apple have a very deep relationship. On the map side, all I can say is that we have a friendly relationship. You see the app out there now,  and everything is working smooth. I think everyone around the table is happy about this today.

VentureBeat: Is it the same team building the iOS and Android versions of the app?

Graf: I’m responsible for all mobile platforms.

VentureBeat: Why are you pushing new designs on iOS first? It seems that, historically, Android has received updates like this first.

Graf: If you look at the Android Play store, users are very happy with what we have there — we have a working solution there. On iOS, we didn’t have one. Obviously, our priority was focused on iOS and iPhone in recent months. Moving forward, our goal is always to have the best experience on every platform.

We’re not saying, “We’re going to have feature parity everywhere,” but we definitely want a seamless experience on all platforms.

VentureBeat: Should we expect an updated version of Google Maps on Android to look like this eventually?

Graf: If you look back, we update on Android very frequently. We’re not planning to push that moving forward.

VentureBeat: What exactly are you trying to accomplish with the Google Maps SDK and the new URL scheme for developers?

Graf: With Google in general, it’s not just about our applications, the way we design it. We want to enable an ecosystem. And that’s what we did here as well. Maps has a long history with APIs on the web, and on iOS our goal was the moment we launched the app, we wanted to launch the ecosystem.

VentureBeat: Do you think Apple would ever let third-party apps like Google Maps replace its built-in apps?

Graf: You’d have to ask Apple about that.We made this app, it’s on the app store, it’s out there now, and that’s all we care about.

VentureBeat: How important was it for you to keep public transportation within the app? That’s one big difference from Apple’s Maps app.

Graf: It’s absolutely essential. I think there’s a few things we really wanted to hit on with this new experience. We had the opportunity here to design something from the ground up, so design was our main focus, to have the best experience out there that nails all your use cases.

In most metropolitan areas a lot of people don’t need a car. Google has been known to have quite a comprehensive solution around the globe. We actually cover over a million transit spots — that’s not 100 percent coverage around the world. But in major metropolitan areas, we think we have very good coverage.

VentureBeat: When will we see an iPad version of the Google Maps app?

Graf: We usually don’t comment on future product releases. It is functional on the iPad — it’s not an optimized iPad experience at this point. But you can imagine that smartphones are the top priority for mapping, and mobile mapping is primarily used on smartphones. I would say stay tuned.

Top photo: Daniel Graf/Google+

Google chief executive Larry Page hasn’t given many interviews since landing the top job last April. And a vocal cord injury he’s suffered from much of the year has made him doubly quiet. We finally heard from him again at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in October, and now Fortune has published its own lengthy interview with Page.

The conversation covers the usual topics: Google’s relationship with Apple, and how the company is balancing its futuristic projects, like developing self-driving cars and Project Glass, with more pressing concerns. But Page also revealed some interesting details on how he views the competition and how he is focused on making Google an even bigger company.

When asked how he views the current competition, Page said:

Obviously we think about competition to some extent. But I feel my job is mostly getting people not to think about our competition. In general I think there’s a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need. And by definition, if our competitors knew that thing, they wouldn’t tell it to us or anybody else.

Even though Page thinks he’s describing a uniquely Google mentality, it also seems very similar to how Apple has approached developing devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Speaking of Apple, Page pointed out that he’s avoided rallying the troops at Google against its competitors, something Steve Jobs wasn’t afraid to do against Google’s Android operating system.

“… I think it would be nice if everybody would get along better and the users didn’t suffer as a result of other people’s activities,” Page said. “I try to model that. We try pretty hard to make our products be available as widely as we can. That’s our philosophy. I think sometimes we’re allowed to do that. Sometimes we’re not.”

When it comes to growing the company, Page said (naturally) that he wants Google to be “wildly successful”:

What does Google look like five years from now? What are we doing? Who’s doing it? How are we organized? What people do we have? And I think we have some answers to those questions. But I think, like I said, what I’m trying to do is to get a technology company that continues to scale its impact and aspirations in its everyday. We’re at a certain scale now, but I don’t see any particular reason why we shouldn’t be much bigger, more impactful than we are now. So that’s what I’m trying to figure out. And I think I have a lot of ideas about how to do that, and gradually, every day we increase our scale a little bit. It’s probably incremental in that way.

It seems only inevitable that Google will get bigger, but I hope Page pays as much attention to making sure Google gets things right before growing. Just as Android dominates smartphone market share, but took a while to become a well-designed user experience, Google could lose quite a bit by just focusing on being bigger.

Photo: Charlie Rose Show

Mars may once have looked like Earth. It has seasons, polar ice-caps and once supported shallow seas and flowing streams. So did it also once support life? The Mars Curiosity Rover’s chief software engineer Benjamin Cichy just gave a rollercoaster of a talk at LeWeb in Paris on the huge software effort and nail-biting suspense involved in getting the rover to Mars.

NASA has been sending spacecraft to Mars since the 1960s. The first 12 missions failed disastrously. Overall, one-third of all missions to Mars have failed. The Curiosity Rover is the biggest and most complex that NASA has even built, the size of a small car, and it was landed using a completely novel set of technologies.

It took five million lines of code to teach the Rover how to land. A heatshield made from an entirely new material protected the spacecraft during entry. The biggest parachute ever built was used to slow its descent towards the surface down to a mere 300 km per hour. At this breakneck speed the cord was cut and a jetpack attached to the top of the Rover fired up to slow it down to 2.5 km per hour and lower it down towards the surface. Finally the attachment to the jet pack had to be cut before it ran out of fuel and crashed down on top of the rover.

Even worse, there was no way to test if all of this would work together until the landing itself. NASA called it “The 7 minutes of terror.”

The Curiosity Rover’s two-year prime mission is to investigate whether conditions in Mars may have been favorable for microbial life. It is equipped with a 2 meter robot arm, cameras, spectrometer, telescope, chemistry and minerology equipment. It even has a laser which can be pointed as a rock to determine its composition. 

When the Rover has nothing new to report it sends back a packet to Earth. As software engineers do, Cichy inserted his own name and those of the other NASA developers into the 1000 characters available. He also added a quote from Carl Sagan: “We began as wanderers and we are wanderers still.”

We met with Benjamin Cichy for a chat after his presentation for some forward thinking perspective.

VentureBeat: What’s the next step, the closest in time, and the big picture?

Benjamin Cichy: We’re just getting the Rover to be able to explore Mars. It’s been on the surface of mars for four months now. We have a two-year mission, we’re just getting started. What we’re trying to do is to drive across the surface of this crater and get to the base of this mountain that we landed on. We’re going to go read the history book of that mountain —  each layer on that mountain is a chapter in the book of Mars.  We’re going to learn about Mars by reading it from the oldest layer at the bottom, to the most recent layers at the top. That’s what’s next for this mission.

VB: What do you hope to find out?

BC: Whether or not Mars ever could have been a place to have life. Was there a life once on Mars before? Everywhere that we look for life, we know we need to look for three things. An energy source, water an the organic molecules that can bring life — are there building blocks of life on Mars?

VB: Which would be the next planet that you would want to explore, that to you as a scientist think could hold the key to other potential forms of life? 

BC: There’s a lot of other exciting bodies in the solar system and they’re not all planets, they’re moons. Moons of Saturn and moons of Jupiter. One in particular, Europa, is very interesting — in terms of  maybe it’s an environment that could harbor life now; maybe there is a liquid ocean there on Europa. Maybe there’s something interesting to find out on these moons of other planets. What I’d really like to see is some missions to go off explore those other bodies in the solar system and really just look for how pervasive these environments are that could have once supported life.

VB: This is LeWeb and the theme is the “Internet of Things”. How does Mars Curiosity Rover relate to that? 

BC: This really is the first mission that we’ve had since the internet has literally exploded into a hyper connected web: social media, connected devices…. the Curiosity Rover in a way now is the further outpost of a connected device, and on the surface of another planet. What it does is that as Curiosity sends out these images, they are sent all over the world, broadcasted through social media and they get traction elsewhere in the world in a way that they never did before. Images are retweeted thousands of times and often times even before the scientists are able to take a look at them, the general public sees the images. That’s immediate access to the exploration process, participation in the exploration. This is really the first time.

VB: When do you think we’ll be able to have shuttle trips going back and forth between Mars or other planets and the blue planet — Earth? 

BJ: When I talk to people about space, it’s universal: the people want to take that journey of exploration. We won’t be able to do it now, we are taking the baby steps towards understanding what it takes to land on these other bodies, what it takes to get humans up there.

VB: What is the role of private-public partnership in your field? 

BC: When you look at what we need to do to gain low-cost access to space, if we want to go somewhere like Mars, colonize Mars, extend our human presence throughout the solar system, we’re going to need to get much lower cost access to space. One of the great things that we’ve seen through our collaboration with the private industry and the commercial space program is that lower cost access to the space station is achieved through such public-private partnerships. We really need to extend that model, in order to really  gain access to space — low cost access to space is what we will enable us to carry out the rest of our exploration.”

VB: What about communication with and identification of other forms of life? 

BC: Ultimately, we want to find a common language, about exploration, find a common ground. We want to tell them we’re intelligent beings as well.

Benjamin Cichy is on Twitter but says he tweets less than Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity), but you may still want to follow him:  @BenCichy

Interview by contributor Liva Judic; Photo: NASA

If you grew up playing Missile Command, Asteroids, Centipede, and Battlezone, take heart: The men who created those games are now building iPad and iPhone games.

Seamus Blackley, co-creator of the Xbox and president of Innovative Leisure, has assembled a “dream team” of old Atari game designers and set them to work building iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch games. He’s assigned these “geriatric” experts to work with young programmers to develop new arcade-like games for Apple devices. He is betting that gameplay, not distribution power or brands, will triumph in the mobile gaming business.

He and his partner chief executive Van Burnham have recruited a team of veterans from the “golden age “of Atari in the 1970s and 1980s to create games for the “new arcade” on iOS devices. They include Ed Rotberg, creator of the classic Atari game Battlezone; Owen Rubin, creator of Major Havoc and Space Duel; Rich Adam, creator of Gravitar and co-developer of Missile Command; Ed Logg, co-creator of Asteroids and Centipede; Dennis Koble, creator of Touch Me and Shooting Gallery; Tim Skelly, the only non-Atari veteran arcade game designer who worked for Cinematronics and created games such as Rip-Off; and Bruce Merrit, creator of Black Widow.

We caught up with Blackley in a fireside chat at our GamesBeat 2012 conference, where he made fun of my fish tie. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: So what’s the business idea behind Innovative Leisure?

Seamus Blackley: It’s to go and find those designers who initiated the whole thing in the first cycle of casual games in the industry, which was the explosion of the arcade business. We got together all of these people from Atari to make new games. Every classic arcade game you can think of, every style of gameplay that you can think of, were more or less all of them, at one point, at Atari.

GamesBeat: It seemed like a great idea for you, to take advantage of the sort of retro urge among a lot of older gamers…

Blackley: Well, there’s the retro urge, but I don’t think that’s the important factor. The important factor is that you have this whole audience of people who are lapsed gamers, who stopped playing games when they turned into movies. They want to have a game experience on whatever device is in front of them. In fact, when you look at what’s going on with Blackberry today, Blackberry failed to have games. And devices that fail to have games fail in the marketplace.

It’s a very interesting thing. People expect to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained in a way that’s very seamless with life. It’s very low friction. It’s a moment that’s identical to what happened when video games first showed up in arcades. It’s a moment that’s also identical to when home consoles started to take off. The people who wanted to play games, they wanted to play them in a way that integrated into their lives. I think that the main emphasis for this company, these are the guys who first came to that idea…. To a modern audience it’s very new. Games that fulfill that same need to play a game right now for a little bit before I go back to work, before I go on with whatever I’m going to do.

GamesBeat: There is also a down side of these cycles, where people fear that the games that they love are going to go out of style and the whole business is going to die off. There’s some fear that the $60 console game is going to die off and we’re going to be left with stuff that isn’t as good.

Blackley: A lot of the fears about the rise and fall of games from a business standpoint are kind of funny in the context of these cycles of waxing and waning in the industry. If you look at it as a pure business proposition, you say, well, social is hot here, games that are social are going to win. It’s not true. Games that are good are going to win. You can actually almost accurately track the growth and contraction in the games business according to whether or not the games we were producing were satisfying. What’s happened with the explosion of mobile and social games is we’ve discovered that an audience has a huge pent-up demand for a kind of game we’re not giving them. It doesn’t mean there’s not still demand for console games, it doesn’t mean that there’s not still demand for all good games. The explosion in growth fueled by the discovery of this new audience tends to sort of drumbeat out the rest of the business. People who look at it strictly in terms of growth in numbers on spreadsheets tend to predict the demise of sectors, much as they predicted the demise of the PC industry a couple of console cycles ago, much as they predict the demise of the Xbox thank to social games now… Yet we have a very strong PC business that’s grown, and it’s growing even faster now that we’ve tapped other pent-up demand in the form of things like Kickstarter. You see people willing to give millions of dollars for PC games. It doesn’t indicate that the audience is looking to be entertained in new ways. It indicates that the audience is looking to be entertained in the ways that they love, and it doesn’t necessarily follow the business cycle a lot of people are predicting.

GamesBeat: So you’re investing in game designers and game design. What is the reaction people have had to this plan, that you’re investing in talent?

Blackley: The reaction is great. It’s the same reason that Tim Schafer has been successful on Kickstarter, and other people. People love to play games that they love. And when you say that you’re going to get the band back together, people who invented a lot of fundamentals of gameplay and made these great games. People realize that their connection to the games on mobile devices is very much like the connection that they had to games in arcades. The idea of…

GamesBeat: Nobody ever really tried to get the Atari guys back together, right?

Blackley: Well, no. The human brain is magnificent and tragic at the same time. The tragedy is that when things sort of leave your view, you forget about them. I think one tends to assume that those things are old and those designers are gone and there are new designers now. It turns out, and Van and I were lucky enough to meet these guys at their annual golf tournament, that they are still epically smart and incredibly interested in game design, and they’re great friends.

They have this incredible rapport, which is a fancy way of saying that they give each other a titanic amount of crap, constantly. It comes from the feedback process when they were in the Atari lab. These guys came to Atari in an era when Atari has a huge amount of success with Pong, huge amount of success with Pong knockoffs, but Nolan and the other guys at Atari had no idea where to go next. It was a company based on copying a couple of games and engineering a solution that would allow them to be cheap enough that you could play it on a television. It took off. Where do you go now?

We need guys who can come up with ideas for new games. What the heck is that? Nobody knew what a game designer was. They made a couple of lucky hires and hired some guys who started to figure out what it was to come up with new ways to make games. Those guys that went on to invent things like driving games, shooting games. The concept of three lives. Crazy, fundamental things that you don’t think needed to be invented, but they had to be invented, and these guys did it by working together. Exploiting the sort of computer counterculture stuff that was going on in the ’70s to figure out what it meant to be making these games. They went on to have what still is the longest consecutive string of hits in the history of game design, and it was because they wanted to work together and were constantly thinking of new ideas and giving each other feedback about those ideas. So we met them and saw they still had that. It was obvious that somebody needed to give them a shot at getting back together.

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Even Scribblenauts creator Jeremiah Slaczka of (developer) 5th Cell is surprised at some of the things fans have come up with while playing his game. With the new object-creation feature and the possibilities it leads to, he calls Scribblenauts Unlimited for the Wii U “the definitive version of Scribblenauts.” It adds many of the features he’s always wanted.

With each iteration, the series has added increasingly more. “The first one [Scribblenauts], obviously, is just write anything, the second one is adjectives, and the third one is now object creation,” said Slaczka. “We’ve always wanted to do all those things at once, but in game development it’s just too much. You have to learn and stuff like that. So I wanted to do something where, literally, you could write anything, and share with friends, all this.” That’s part of the reason 5th Cell chose the name Unlimited for the latest Scribblenauts game, “because you have unlimited objects now.”

Object creation isn’t a new idea to the developer. “We’ve kind of had this in the pipe for a while,” said Slaczka. “For a couple of years I’ve been wanting to do something like this, and the Wii U is also really, really powerful—Oh, that’s cool,” Slaczka said, pointing at one displays on the show floor as he was momentarily distracted by a demo unit in which the game showed a rolling wave of water that submerged the lower half of the screen, “I haven’t even seen that. There’s so many objects—I think that’s like tsunami, or something.”

Getting back on track, Slaczka said, “With the Wii U we’ve been able to make the game way bigger, because with the object creation—putting all that stuff together—the DS just can’t handle all that stuff…even the Wii couldn’t handle it, but the horse-power of this can really handle it.” The increased resolution of the high-definition console also means that the developers can fit more information and objects onto the screen at once.

With Scribblenauts Unlimited, the Wii U gamepad mirrors what’s displayed on the screen. While previewing the game, I caught myself watching the GamePad and almost completely ignoring the television screen. Asked whether he felt it was a problem, he said it’s something he’s actually asked quite often.

“People say, ‘Well I should be looking at the screen,’ and I’m like ‘Well, why? Should you?’ Are you having fun either way?” he explained, saying that he doesn’t feel the player should be confined to either of the screens.

“What’s cool is your friends can all look at it, so while you’re writing, that’s why we don’t have the write-mode up. We just have a little bar.” The write mode Slaczka was referring to is an onscreen keyboard that pops up and covers the screen when the player wants to type a word. It shows on the Wii U GamePad’s touchscreen, but the television screen only shows a yellow bar with the letters popping up as they are typed, allowing onlookers to see the onscreen action.

Slaczka feels that he got just about everything they can in the game. “I just had a journalist, he was trying to stump it, so he wanted to make a unicorn that’s metallic and can shoot lasers.”

“I hadn’t thought about something like that before,” said Slaczka, going into detail about how they made it happen. “And it worked.”

Interestingly, Slaczka himself wasn’t at first sure it would come together correctly. “That even surprised me, because it was like ‘Uh, hopefully this works,’ I’d never tried something like this. I’m not trying to be PR and say we have everything in the game, but in the object creation, we have a lot.”

“See that?” he said pointing to the screen, “That’s a giant plant tank that shoots hippies—a hovering plant tank.” Sure enough, on the screen was a giant tank made of plants floating around the screen.

“That’s what Scribblenauts is all about. It’s just absolute wackiness, like, do whatever you want, and I want it to be like that, so I’m happy to see that people are doing all kinds of crazy stuff,” he said.

What’s more? With the online features of the Wii U, players will be able to share their creations, and that excites Slaczka, because he will be able to see what players create. “[That] is going to be so fun for me,” he said.

Scribblenauts Unlimited is set to release on the Wii U this holiday season.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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At one point, Takuya Matsumoto of MarvelousAQL truly believed that the game he worked on, The Last Story, would never see a U.S. release.

Being told that the game you spent the last few years of your life making may never see release in a major territory is hard for a developer to hear, but that’s what the team behind The Last Story for Wii was told when Nintendo announced that they would not be releasing it in the U.S.

Thanks to publisher XSeed, fans of console role-playing games (RPG) in the U.S. will get their chance to play The Last Story. The game, developed by Mistwalker and MarvelousAQL (formerly AQ Interactive), is set to land in North America this summer.

Nintendo published the game overseas, but for reasons the company won’t share, chose not to bring it to the US. What was the plan when Nintendo made it clear that they would not be releasing The Last Story in the States?

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much they could do. “As a developer we don’t have that much influence over what to do so that the U.S. can have the game. It was something we were hoping that someone would pick up, so that the U.S. audiences could play it,” said Matsumoto, speaking through translator Jimmy Soga of XSeed Games in an interview with GamesBeat at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

All a developer can do as this point is shop around in hopes that someone localizes the game for a territory. This was tough for Matsumoto, who truly feared at one point that The Last Story would not reach North America.

“Honestly? Yeah, I didn’t think it would see the light of day in the U.S.,” said Matsumoto, feeling that it may never go beyond Japan and European territories.

That’s when XSeed jumped in, according to Soga, who explained how the publisher managed to pick it up. “Our president…had some connection with Nintendo, so he was sending them love letters, love calls, to see if we could bring it over. He knew Sakaguchi-san from other projects, and asked him ‘wouldn’t it be great to work together again?’ We were fortunate enough that Nintendo liked our proposal, and we were able to publish it.”

Fans didn’t sit quietly through all this. They initiated Operation Rainfall, which was an extensive campaign of emails, phone calls,Tweets, and more urging Nintendo to localize The Last Story, along with two other Wii RPGs, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Pandora’s Tower. While very vocal, the group made it a point to keep things civil. In the end, Nintendo responded by thanking fans, but saying they had no current plans to introduce any of the three titles in the U.S.

When asked if he had ever seen such a fan response to a game, Matsumoto said, “This would be the first time. I did work on Sonic Adventure when I was working at Sega. There was a lot of hype for it, but Sonic is such a well-known IP in America. As for a brand-new IP, or a brand-new title? I’d never seen anything this big.”

The focus of our discussion then shifted to the game itself, and Matsumoto talked about an element that was left out. There was a feature in The Last Story that was supposed allow for the player to rewind while in combat just after casting a successful magic attack. When asked to elaborate on how it was intended to work, he explained that it was to give the player an overview of the battlefield, and understand was was going on around their characters, “but that really slowed down the tempo of the game, because you’re actually going back in time to do it again. Tempo was something that was really important in this game, so to enable players to better understand where everything is, we let the characters speak more freely within the battlefield.” The in-game banter between the characters is intended to give the player a better sense of what is going on through audio cues.

A mechanic that was also left out of the final game, but built very early, according to Matsumoto, involved an aerial view of the map during battle. “During the test phase, we had a mode that let you see the whole battlefield from a bird’s eye-view and see everything going on at once, sort of like a Diablo style, if you will. At the end, they couldn’t use it, because it made all the characters too small, and you can’t really relate to them,” he said.

As for why the Wii was chosen as opposed to a high-definition console Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, he says he had no say over platform. It was a project they were given by Hironobu Sakaguchi of Mistwalker, and the team consisted of many of the people who worked on the Xbox 360 creating Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon.

While the knowledge they had gained working on those titles came handy when developing on the Wii, Matsumoto said that the limitations of the hardware forced them to prioritize. They had to be more choosy of what they could place on the screen, and cut loose the parts that weren’t totally necessary.

The Wii’s control scheme was part of the reason the developer went with a duck-and-cover system. When we asked Matsumoto about any weaknesses he felt the Wii had, he pulled out two Wii controllers, and placed them on the table in front of him. One was a Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo; the other was a Classic Controller.

Wiggling the Classic Controller’s thumbsticks, he said, “I’m not sure if this is considered a weak point, but on the Wii Remote, there is no second analog stick for viewing (he was referring to a common control scheme in third-person games that allows players to use the right analog stick to control the camera).” He then picked up the Wii Remote and pointed at the D-pad.

“It is a third-person action game, so to be able to control the camera angle would have been a lot easier [with the second stick], I suppose,” he said. “Because you can’t freely move your camera, we were able to come up with a duck-and-cover system. Within the cover system, you will be able to freely look around yourself. Even though you won’t be able to move, it’s made the game more accessible.”

It was that control scheme, partly, that led to the design choice, but the main reason was that they wanted to give players a moment to take a breath and strategize by seeing the situation around them. Then there’s the fact that he loves Gears of War, and it was something he wanted to implement.

As to whether any future ideas came to mind upon seeing the Wii U hardware, Matsumoto shared some thoughts. “Because of this meeting, and the situation, I’ve just been thinking about The Last Story throughout this whole trip. One would be resolution, because it would be easier to implement more user interface (UI) stuff.” Pointing at areas of the screen, such as the heads-up display (HUD, where player information such as health is shown) Matsumoto explained that the decreased resolution gives them less screen space to work with. The HD capabilities of the Wii U would give them more space for placing such information.

“The other thing is, because you have a screen in the palm of your hand, it would be so much easier to control your allies within that while playing your game on the big screen,” he added. “Going back to that rewind thing that we left out because it slowed down the tempo of the game—but if we had a way to see where your allies are on a different monitor, that would totally cover the part that Sakaguchi-san wanted to do with knowing where all of your teammates are.”

The Last Story will launch on Nintendo’s Wii this summer.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Creating a game is extremely tough. Creating a game when you don’t know how to go about implementing your idea is even tougher. That’s the challenge that creative director at (developer) Acquire Richie Casper faced when trying to make Orgarhythm, a new title for the PlayStation Vita that combines real-time strategy (RTS) gameplay with the rhythm genre.

“When we had the idea of merging two genres, you know, rhythm and RTS, we were like, ‘Okay, how is this gonna work? What are we gonna do?’” said Casper.

“The first idea we came up with was: Since we’re making it for PS Vita, we need to come up with some kind of a touch mechanic,” said Casper. However, the original idea was nothing like the end result.

The player was going to have a home base tower that they would begin from, according to Casper. “You would do three taps. You’d tap the tower first. Then you would do another two taps to create a triangle. What that would then do, is basically, you would conquer land.”

He explained that the player was to take over land by tapping out these triangles to the beat. After creating their triangle with three taps, the player was given a window of time to touch the back panel of the Vita to create units, “and the unit creation would be based on the types of land you conquered. If you got land close to volcanos, you would create your fire people…same with river lands.” Once the player built their army, they would attack the enemy.

“The problem is that once we built the prototype, it didn’t work,” said Casper. “The gameplay mechanic wasn’t fun. We realized, ‘Okay, this doesn’t work as well as we’d thought,’ and we had to go back to the drawing board.”

The game wasn’t Casper’s idea of fun. “It ended up being way too complicated; it was just two games that we kind of smashed together.”

At the time, the game had a completely different visual style, and the team felt it had to be completely revamped. It ended up being more visually inspired by ancient Mayan cultures. The original design was going to have a medieval, fantasy-type look, but the team wasn’t satisfied with it. It then took them “a couple of months” to figure out how to make the game work.

His team had to take a step back and think about their project, and that’s when Tak Hirai at Neilo (pronounced Nay-lo) stepped in with his idea, which became the current game. Acquire’s president knew Hirai, and his team was available. “It just kind of fit,” said Casper. Hirai is best-known for his work as the lead programmer of Dreamcast classics Shenmue and Space Channel 5.

In Orgarhythm’s current state, players assume the role of the God of Light, and battle against the God of Shadow. Everything is controlled via the touch screen by tapping menu items to the rhythm of the background music, which encompasses a range of trance-style electronic beats. The God of Light walks along a pre-determined path while the player focuses on selecting units and attacks to defeat enemies.

“So it evolved from quite a different game,” according to Casper. “We drastically simplified the gameplay, but in a good way.”

“It’s cool being able to work [with Neilo]…have them basically make a game out of two words,” said Casper, referring to the merging of strategy and rhythm.

Casper is brutally honest about the game, he says he just wanted to make something different, and that combining rhythm with strategy seemed like the way to go.

“To be honest we have no idea how well it will do,” he said with a laugh, “hopefully this will resonate and find a good audience.”

So far, the changes seem to have worked. According to Hirai, Sony Computer Entertainment was interested enough in the title to feature it at their booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

Orgarhythm is set to arrive as a digital download for the PlayStation Vita this summer.

Update: We were contacted by XSeed’s external PR agency for clarity. Acquire is the Japanese publisher of Orgarhythm. However, Richie Casper was directly involved with the development of the title and worked as creative director. Neilo co-developed the game with Acquire.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Academia can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, and one that’s not entirely necessary in this age of do-it-yourselfers and 20-something billionaire entrepreneurs who mark “high school” as their highest level of education completed when signing up for that Amex Centurion Card. That doesn’t mean college doesn’t have plenty of worthwhile morsels for the inquisitive mind to absorb, but the financial barrier is just one of many restricting the majority of Americans to lower levels of learning.

Enter AStudyIn.com, an ongoing compilation of courses and talks in video form from the world’s best schools, available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection and a little motivation for self-enlightenment. The name itself is a nod to the idea that knowledge is boundless, allowing the user to fill in the blank with whatever they want, like Mad Libs. For instance, mine would be a “A Study In The History of Santa Claus and Vampires,” but less important things like business, chemistry, and neuroscience are also viable options.

VentureBeat sat down with Mary Wu, AStudyIn’s founder, to briefly discuss the origins of the concept, the difficulties of an educational startup, and how to incentivize getting your learn on. Mary was previously an investment analyst at a top banking firm, and is currently a digital media analyst at Apollo Group, a global leader in higher education.

VentureBeat: Education is a pretty brave field for a new startup to tackle. Please explain your method to this madness.

Mary Wu: The purpose of AStudyIn is to provide universal education to everyone. Right now it’s leveraging the internet so that anyone anywhere can access premier education. So we have content, talks and lectures from the top schools. We have lectures from Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so forth. And it’ll be great for individuals who aren’t able to go to these schools, to come on the website and watch the videos. That’s one segment. The other is for high school students, primarily seniors, who are selecting schools. They’re trying to figure out, “Hey, should I go to Stanford or Harvard? I wonder what their course content is like.” So these are our two groups.

Another motivation for AStudyIn is to incentivize people to learn. I personally feel that there are two groups of people. Individuals who are inherently motivated to learn and study, and another group who need that extra little push to be curious about something. I think an analogy would be going to the gym. For me, you know, I can tell myself, “I’ll go to the gym sometime, maybe tomorrow.” But I never really do, because I don’t have that incentive to. I’m lazy now, but I want to go to the gym in the future. It’s the same thing for studying. I do want to learn, just not right now. So what AStudyIn tries to do is to encourage people to study right now by providing an incentive system. Right now our incentive system is to reward individuals for watching our videos. However long you spend on our site watching the video content, then you get points for that, and you can translate those points into rewards.

VentureBeat: What is entailed in the process of putting an initiative like this together? How far have you come, and how far do you still have to go?

Wu: The idea originated in the beginning of January of this year. I started working on it one week later. At first it was just a test run, an experiment to see if I could actually do it. And it became this huge project. So I initially used… Well, I still use a content management system. And then I got a programmer friend to help me with some of the harder aspects. We started putting videos on there, and initially it was just lectures. Then we thought, well, that’s kind of narrow, what if people have other interests? So we expanded to talks and then to some short videos that we call “shorts.”

We have some strange, out-there videos that we thought were kind of wacky. That’s where the website is right now. We’re still trying to publicize. And in the future we hope to get more schools on there, more video content obviously, and to…actually go to, maybe, high schools and try to target the students there, the seniors. Right now we have some stuff, we tried to get some attention on high school forums, but I think we really need to try to expand in the high school area a lot more.

VentureBeat: Have you reached out to collaborate directly with any colleges, and what has the reaction been to that?

Wu: We haven’t yet, just because we’re still developing our website. I did consider the idea of partnering with colleges. I think a major barrier would be that… Many of the colleges now, especially the top colleges, have their own website, and they’re posting their own content. I think our website would kind of be competition towards them. So what we do is curate all the schools, right? You’re not just going to this one school, you can go to one place, check out all these schools. I think for the colleges… I mean, it’d be great if we could partner with them, but from their angle they might feel that it might not be such a good idea if students can see their competitors, which would be the other colleges. So that’s one challenge.

So far I’ve only watched The Brief History of Santa and The Science of Sex Appeal, then I started drawing monsters in my notebook before asking to go to the bathroom — so I can attest that AStudyIn does provide a realistic school experience that’s startlingly reminiscent of my own, though your results may vary. You can visit AStudyIn for more information, and GamesBeat will be delving into the gamification aspect of the site in a deeper interview later this month.

After hearing about employers who were asking potential hires for their Facebook passwords, two U.S. senators asked the feds to investigate. Now regulators in the U.K. are voicing their own concerns about the controversial issue.

We first heard about this odd trend last week. Some HR staffers have apparently been asking applicants to hand over Facebook login credentials, including user names, passwords, and security questions. Other recruiters might ask an applicant to add them as a friend on the social network to gain access to their profiles. In this still-tough job market, some potential employees have complied with the requests.

In response to the initial report about employers engaging in such actions, the Information Commissioner’s Office in the U.K. has issued a warning to employers to not ask for social media passwords from existing or potential employees.

“The UK Data Protection Act clearly says that organisations shouldn’t hold excessive information about individuals, and it’s questionable why they would need that information in the first place,” a spokesperson from the ICO told The Guardian.

On Friday, Facebook jumped into the fray and denounced the practices, saying employers shouldn’t be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords and that it looked forward to working with policy makers to safeguard users’ privacy.

Cut to Sunday, when U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked the Attorney General to investigate claims that employers were asking for Facebook passwords. The Senators specifically want to know if these actions would be in violation of the Stored Communications Act, which gives privacy protection to online communications, or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prevents unintentional access to information on a computer without approved authorization.

With Facebook itself and government officials in the U.S. and U.K. loudly voicing concerns, there’s a good chance this issue will be addressed. And for the sake of our privacy, let’s hope it is.

Employer behind blinds photo: Tomasz Trojanowski/Shutterstock

Casey Hudson‘s star is shining bright as the launch of his team’s epic sci-fi video game, Mass Effect 3, draws near. He is the executive producer of one of the biggest video games of the year in a series that has already sold millions of units. On March 6, Electronic Arts will publish the BioWare-produced game after a couple of years of development.

But not everything has been easy. It’s been an epic undertaking with 150 people working on the game. And fans have become distracted by the controversy over downloadable content dubbed “From Ashes.” That new content, which includes a powerful new character, could have been included in the game for free. But as DLC, fans will have to pay for it. It is a free for anyone who buys the more expensive limited edition of Mass Effect 3, but it will cost $10 for everyone else. Fans aren’t so happy about that.

But Hudson believes that controversy will blow over as fans get their hands on the game and find out what happens to their favorite characters. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Hudson.

Gamesbeat: So, do you feel good to be where you are now?

Casey Hudson: It does, yeah. I think we’ve done everything we wanted to do with the series, and that people are going to get what they want out of Mass Effect 3.

GB: What’s your own postmortem at this point? Your feelings on how it turned out.

CH: You know, I think we had a lot of ambitious goals for the whole series, and for Mass Effect 3 itself. I’m just really impressed with how the team came through, and I think for fans, they’re going to get all the things they’re looking for out of the experience. I think there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of anxiety. Fans want to make sure that they see things resolved, they want to get some closure, a great ending. I think they’re going to get that.

GB: What has been interesting to you about all the fan commentary so far?

CH: I think one of the things that’s really fun and surprising for us is the degree to which people responded to character-based storytelling. At this point, people need to know what’s going to happen with these characters, they need to know what’s going to happen in the end.

GB: Like every one of them.

CH: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

GB: It sounds like Kinect voice commands have worked out reasonably well. I played it at CES, it worked fine for me.

CH: Yeah, it actually is a useful function, being able to use your voice to do things that the character in the game uses his voice for. Speaking to other squad members, having conversations. Because we limited it to that, and it’s a very intuitive way to speak to people, using your voice, it’s actually a really intuitive part of the game. When you think about it, it’s actually pressing buttons in order to speak that’s the weird thing. Being able to use your voice to talk is a lot more natural.

GB: There was one review that kinda leaked out, and I was wondering if the basics of the information were accurate. Like… It’s about 20 hours of game to play, and maybe about 40 hours if you really explore everything?

CH: That sounds like it’s roughly accurate. We think it’s probably bigger than Mass Effect 2 in terms of size. Very, very replayable, so even if you did that extended playthrough, all of those things are going to be different if you had different playthroughs, different characters are alive, all that kind of stuff.

GB: And then maybe 90 minutes of cinematics?

CH: Yeah, I think it’s somewhere around there. It depends on how you count it. Much of the cinematics happen live during gameplay, in the game engine.

GB: That was worth stepping up, from your point of view? The cinematics help tell the story?

CH: Yeah. And like I say, so much of the cinematic parts are still during some sort of controllable gameplay, whether it’s a brief moment of cinematic action that leads back into gameplay afterwards… We’ve put a lot of the cinematic storytelling into moment-to-moment action. So Commander Shepard will step on a bridge, it explodesd and you go sliding down the side. We do a lot of redirects, where you see a hallway and you think you know where you’re going, but before you get there, other things change and the hallway breaks down, and you’re forced down a different path. A lot of these things are done cinematically, live in the game engine.

GB: Some of the fans are getting up in arms about the day one downloadable content (DLC). That’s the topic of the day, I guess?

CH: As a fan, some people fear the worst, and they put their own spin on what they think is happening. As a fan, if I believed those things I’d be worried too, because what some people are saying is that we’ve taken all of the lore of Mass Effect out of Mass Effect 3 and it’s only in the DLC, stuff like that. Of course that’s not true. In fact, Mass Effect 3 is all about answering all the biggest questions in the lore, learning about the mysteries and the Protheans and the Reapers, being able to decide for yourself how all of these things come to an end. The DLC, whether it’s day one or not, is always going to be sugar on top, the extra… You know, the extra little bits of content that tell side stories. So even though the character we’re releasing on day one is a Prothean, which is part of a race that’s important to the lore of Mass Effect, his story is still an interesting kind of side thing, and then you get this character that’s good if you want to have him for your first playthrough. But it’s always optional. We would never take stuff out of the core game and only have it in DLC.

GB: And then, for the purposes of those fans, can you explain some of the decisions that you’re making there, to do that?

CH: Sure. What a lot of people don’t know is that… We’ve got 150 people who worked on the Mass Effect game. When we get towards the end of the project, we get into the certification phase, and everything that we’ve ever wanted to do with the core game is actually finished. And now we just need to get it certified and put on the trucks and manufactured on discs and stuff. That takes three months or more. Three months or more for a team of 150 people, that equates to millions of dollars of development time. So we either would move on to the next game, which you might not see for several years, or we’re a multi-team studio, so they might move on to Dragon Age or The Old Republic. But we know that people really enjoyed the DLC for Mass Effect 2. So we wanted to start working on DLC.

GB: You finished it too early?

CH: We finished it too early. The team actually worked extra hard so that you would have the option of playing it in your first playthrough.

GB: Does it feel a little weird, though, to work on this for two or three years and then have the first thing that comes up be the DLC controversy?

CH: Well, I mean, it’s been a bumpy road throughout. We’ve had lots of interesting things happen through the course of development. And again, I think it just comes back to the fact that… There are lots of fans who are super excited, and understandably, they’re really worried about whether they’re going to get the full experience that they want and the ending that they want. And so we just need people to get to March 6 and be able to play it. Then they’ll realize that we’ve put our hearts and souls into making this game everything that the fans want it to be.

GB: After it ships the conversation can shift to more interesting things.

CH: It’ll probably shift to something else, but I think there will be a lot more appreciation for the fact that we love games, we love the Mass Effect universe ourselves, and we love our fans. We want to make sure that they get what they want out of it.

GB: So are you guys the creators or the stewards of the franchise?

CH: Um… You know, at this point, I think we’re co-creators with the fans. We use a lot of feedback.

GB: Is there something that comes to mind there, examples of that, where fans made a difference in how it turned out?

CH: When we started the Mass Effect series, we had no way to tell how compelling our characters would be in terms of the emotions… Especially with the aliens, we didn’t know if they would be able to portray compelling human emotion. So we didn’t build the love interests into some of the alien characters like Garrus… He has the exoskeleton face and stuff like that. But because a character like Garrus just has great voice acting and animation, and a personality that’s really well-written, a lot of people wanted romances with him and with some of the other alien characters. So we decided to try that with Mass Effect 2 and that was very successful. They’re some of the most popular romances, people love those characters. That was a surprise to us, but we kind of had to finish Mass Effect one and then listen to some feedback before we tried incorporating that.

GB: Were there any things you view as having…”fixed,” so to speak, when you moved from Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3? Improvements that really make a big difference?

CH: Yeah. The overall gameplay has really come full circle. Commander Shepard is now really fluid in how you move around, get over cover, you can grab enemies, it’s very physical and visceral. Jumping and falling, you just have so many things you can do. But in addition to the action side, we also took a lot of feedback about how Mass Effect 2. It was a very valid point, that there was progression, but not a lot of intelligent decision-making about how you were progressing. And so we’ve added a lot of depth and decision-making into every step of progression, whether it’s your powers, deciding which kind of flavor you want at every stage. Every piece of your armor has stats on it, so that you can decide how you look, obviously, but each piece is also helping you optimize your gameplay towards a certain style. The same thing with your weapon. Now you literally see your weapon on a bench, you’re plugging in and out different mods that really help you play the way you want to play. You might choose entirely different things on one playthrough versus another because you’re actually making intelligent choices about how you combine all of these things.

GB: So there’s more action and there’s more RPG, there’s more everything that…

CH: And more story.

GB: So then… Because the series was so successful, were you able to really ratchet the budget and the team and all that? Would that not have happened if it was a little bit less of a success?

CH: Well, I think one of the really difficult things in games is just getting them finished. Getting them through a greenlight process, getting them finished and shipped. To be able to do that three times in a row, as part of a plan to make three games, it is pretty amazing. And most importantly, it allowed us to finish that vision, to deliver it as a really great package of three games for players.

GB: Any last thoughts?

CH: We’re really excited ourselves to get to the launch date and let people play it. I’m really looking forward to hearing people’s stories, because when people compare notes. There are so many different paths. The watercooler talk is a lot of fun. So many different things happen from one playthrough to another.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s the story behind “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview,” an extended cut of an interview with Jobs by tech journalist Robert Cringely for the 1995 PBS special “Triumph of the Nerds.” Master tapes of the interview were lost in the 90s during shipment from London to the U.S., but months ago Triumph director Paul Sen discovered an unedited VHS copy in his garage.

And it’s a good thing that he did. While the 70-minute interview (only 10 minutes was used in the original special) offers little new information not already found in Jobs’ biography and elsewhere, it gives us a rare glimpse at the Apple founder’s business acumen straight from his own mouth. And, inevitably, it makes Jobs’ passing all the more bittersweet.

The film will screen at Landmark theaters on November 16, and will also be available via on-demand video.

In the early copy of the documentary I saw, Cringely introduces the film, but otherwise the “Lost Interview” consists entirely of his conversation with Jobs. And after seeing his slowly deteriorating health over the past few years, it’s a bit jarring to see the vibrant, longer-haired Jobs’ detailing the history of Apple and his thoughts on the future of computing.

Looking past things Jobs already discussed on “Triumph of the Nerds,” one of the first new topics that struck me was his relationship with money, and what that tells us about his dedication to Apple:

It wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money … I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things, enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short term payback and things like that … But, especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products that we were making, what we were going to enable people to do with these products … I didn’t think about it a great deal … I never sold any stock — I really believed the company would do very well over the long term.

For Jobs, who was worth over $100 million by age 25, his devotion to Apple and its products is something every budding entrepreneur should take note of.

The documentary continually offers up this sort of non-stop insight. For example, Jobs discusses how always asking “Why?” helped him learn to do business. While learning about the accounting practice of standard cost in the run-up to the Macintosh, wherein accountants would establish an estimated price for a product and adjust it later to fit real-world costs, Jobs asked why things were handled that way. “And the answer was, that’s just the way it’s done,” he said. Jobs ended up creating system in the Macintosh factory that made it easy to track actual costs.

When came to managing a solid team of people, Jobs likened it to polishing rough stones and transforming them into something beautiful: “It’s through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other, and they polish the ideas,” he said. “And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”

Not surprisingly, Jobs was also a big believer in the power of the web in 1995 (notably, a year before Apple announced it would purchase NeXT, his company at the time). When asked by Cringely about what excited him most about the next decade of technology, Jobs said:

Well, I think the Internet and the web — there are two exciting things happening in software and computing today. The web is incredibly exciting because it is the fulfillment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation, but metamorphosize into a device for communication. With the web that’s finally happening.

Secondly, its exciting because Microsoft doesn’t own it, therefore there’s a tremendous amount of innovation happening. I think the web is going to be profound in what it does to our society. As you know, about 15 percent of goods and services in the U.S. are sold via catalogs or television, all this is going to go on the web or more. Billions and billions, soon tens of billions of dollars of goods and services will be sold on the web.

Remember, Jobs statement came long before online retailers like Amazon proved the viability of shopping online. “A way to think about it is that it’s the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel,” he said. “Another way to think about it is the smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company in the world on the web.”

Fittingly, Jobs also accurately predicted just how much the Internet would reshape society: “I think the web as we look back ten years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology … the defining social moment for computing,” he said.

“And I think it’s going to be huge — it’s going to breed a whole new generation of life into personal computing, and I think it’s going to be huge.”