Last week at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con our very own James Pikover had a chance to sit down with the insane mind behind one of the most anticipated games of 2009, Brutal Legend. During the interview (which will be posted over two consecutive parts) Tim Schafer reveals a ton of new information on the third-person action game including some exclusive details on the rumored multiplayer mode as well as how the studio dealt with censorship in such a brutal video game. Enough with the introduction, check out part one of our exclusive Tim Schafer interview on Brutal Legend below (look for part two on Friday):
PlanetXbox360: So the first question is, when you were working on Brutal Legend, was there anything that you learned from Psychonauts or previous games that helped you through the development process?
Tim Schafer: Yeah, tons of things. You know, we always starting with the highest risk stuff, and moving down to the lowest risk stuff. So with Brutal Legend, we worked with Multiplayer, and we've never worked with multiplayer. So we knew this game was going to have a component that was head to head, you and your army fighting against another army. So the first thing we did was make was make the multiplayer working, before we did the story or anything. In 2005, we had characters fighting and having epic battles, and then actually did the story later on when we felt more confident that we knew how to do that after we did the multiplayer. Then we did the streaming world. We never did a streaming world before. We wanted to have a big open streaming world where you could drive around in your hot rod and explore; look up and see the sky and see that every shot kind of looked like a cover for a heavy metal op, and going around having one album cover after another, having a streaming experience.
PX360: It actually took a pretty long time...I mean, Brutal Legend has been in development for almost four years. I know Psychonauts was also in development for a long time.
TS: It's a good game. I mean, it's a good game that has a 64-kilometer world to explore, and then it's got many, many characters. Like, I don't want to say a number because I'm probably wrong. There's like 80 characters, and they are all fully featured, they can all do all sorts of, you know...they can fight in combat, they can fly, they can drive, they have all sorts of different attacks they can do. And then there's the single player game, with this story and cinematics we've put together, and it's just a big, epic game. We wanted to do it right, and we wanted to do it really big.
PX360: What about multiplayer? Can you talk about that yet?
We're going to have a demo of that...I mean, not public, but we'll be showing it off. It's not a story-based experience. It's really just you and your army of heavy metal icons fighting against another army. We have three different factions, we have Ironhead, the classic rock, headbangers and metal beasts; The Dragon Dune, the undead looking, kind of gothic, sad black metal, like the diamond bar rats; then we've got the Demon Coil, an army of demons and they wear a kind of S&M wear and they have a hierarchy like a church, or a record company, and they can do things like give birth on the battlefield to devil warriors, and it's pretty grotesque but it's cool and it's fun. Just having those three totally different factions fighting against each other is really interesting.
PX360: You reported earlier that Brutal Legend was made as a console game. Now that you guys are working with EA, does that mean there's the possibility of a PC version in the future? Especially since most of the games you've done have been PC games.
TS: Devin thinks I'm going to say something...Nothing, we're not talking about you! I don't know right now, because there's no focus for that right now. It's not entirely out of the question. I'd like to do one.
Interview continues on the next page, click below to continue:
