Jak and Daxter interview from C&VG.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/front_index.php

10 Dec 01 It hits shops this weekend and if the excellent reviews and US trend are anything to go by, it\'s set to be a PS2 hit. Jak and Daxter are the new faces of Crash Bandicoot inventor, Naughty Dog. In fact, they\'re the new company logo. During their current whirlwind global publicity toru, chief creators and top dogs, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, talked to us about their new babies, giving away Crash, selling Naughty Dog, and, just to really spice things up, how Miyamoto\'s cornering himself, why Link can never speak, what they think of Mario Sunshine, Sony\'s secret vomit-testing and how Microsoft tried to buy them up.

How do you think games have evolved since those days?

Jason: Back then it was just a game. Setting up levels that made good gameplay. Everything else kind of went secondary. Now there\'s a story. We\'re trying to create worlds, try to create something a lot more broad.

Andy: There\'s more of a concept of production and art design. Stuff we\'ve learned from films, living in LA and around people in LA.

Jason: But if you look back at Miyamoto\'s games, the guys who have come from the old days and haven\'t changed. Mario\'s design was straight out of game design school. He made flat objects flat, blocks that are creatures because you need a block-shaped creature. There\'s no production design, it\'s just "what we need is what we put in the game".

Andy: Of course, with four to 16 colours and low resolution, there weren\'t a lot of options at that time...

Jason: Yeah ,but even Mario 64 uses a simple set-up in terms of design. Now you see games like Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid, they\'ve done movie-style pre-production, so everything fits the world, and is very thought out, very well rendered. They pre-draw everything before they do it in the game. Mario 64, Spiro, games like that are much more just do it, build it, change it, make it play well, don\'t really worry how it looks overall. Just make it look as good as it can within reason.

So what kind of game do you prefer? The new or the old?

Jason: As long as the gameplay remains good, I prefer the newer ones.

Andy: There\'s probably about the same percentage of good games now as there always were, cos there\'s always a certain magic you have to hit to make it really good.

Do you think people expect more from games now?

Jason: It\'s a broader market, not just core gamers who, if you made them play with two controllers, one in each hand, would figure it out. If it\'s not relatively easy to learn, they can\'t play. But you still have to challenge the core gamer. If you don\'t, they\'re not going to play, and they\'re the ones driving the market, because they\'re the opinion makers.

What inspired Jak and Daxter?

Andy: When we finished Crash 3, we split up the team. Most people started on Crash Team Racing, and a couple of other programmers and I began initial technical design on what was to become Jak and Daxter. It began with the mandate of a 128bit platform action game, we wanted a single cohesive all-3D world, where it\'s all modelled at once and you don\'t load between sections. The gameplay would be more linear, there\'d be more story and things would make sense in the world, rather than just sort of being arbitrary. We wanted to take platform action games to the next level with these basic goals in mind.

Jason: We wanted to do load-free since Crash 1, but PSone couldn\'t handle it. We wanted to do free-roaming since about Crash 3. But PSone couldn\'t handle it and keep the density of art we wanted for Crash in a 3D world, which is sort of what Jak and Daxter became. These things became possible when we got PS2 specs.

Ever consider doing this game with Crash Bandicoot?

Jason: Yes, and the reason we didn\'t is that Crash was designed for PlayStation. He has a big face because it was low-resolution and we wanted to see emotion. He has big white teeth and big white eyes, so you can see they\'re super-white. He\'s orange because it shows up well. He doesn\'t have a lot of hair, he doesn\'t have a lot of metal, because those things are hard to do on that system. His gloves have black on them, because with very low polygon models the shading wasn\'t that accurate. We wanted you to be able to track the hand. There were all these things we did for the PSone. Why go to PS2 with our hands tied by those things?

Andy: A high-res Crash still just looked like Crash.

Jason: Another thing was, we wanted all this interaction with the non-player characters. Crash doesn\'t talk. If Crash started saying, "how you doing? I\'m Crash Bandicoot!" Well, that\'s not the Crash I know. Remember the Sonic TV show? It just blows your mind. Mario and Zelda don\'t talk cos of that. We\'re not used to it. And we couldn\'t give Crash a sidekick, cos where does this sidekick come from? And who would follow Crash? He\'s a goof! A sidekick is usually the more unhinged one. What\'s more unhinged than Crash? So we said forget it, we\'ll do something new.

Universal actually started talking about doing a Crash TV show. Put all these very high-paid people around a table and they go, "okay what is Crash gonna do?" You can\'t just rehash the Crash plot every week, so they were like, "okay... Crash and Cortex get brought into the real world and Cortex is his step-dad." This is literally what was said. In this whole plot the butler was going to be Koala Kong. Crash doesn\'t translate well, he doesn\'t talk and he\'s got other problems, but Jak and Daxter can translate into the other medium, cos they\'re full characters. If we go to PlayStation 3, you can bring Jak and Daxter along because we passed that point where you go from videogame character to just character in general, and they have the broad range of emotion.
And... I think Miyamoto san, brilliant as he is – and he is the best game designer for action games – he\'s tied to Mario and Zelda cos he\'s doing Nintendo games and that\'s their franchise. I think it may restrict him and he might find himself cornered in the future, because he can\'t give Mario a voice and he can\'t do a lot of the things with Mario that we did with Jak and Daxter, because if Mario did it you\'d say, "wait a minute, that isn\'t Mario!"

What do think of Mario Sunshine?

Jason: My understanding is, it\'s one of only five titles they\'re working on with Mario. The plan is to take the best one, release it and take all the others and chuck \'em. It\'s not even clear it\'s a real game. It looks like Mario 64+, but like we heard, there\'s some other things being worked on that look incredible but they just don\'t want to show them. They had to show a Mario.

Andy: We\'ll have to wait until he shows up at E3 and then make our judgement.
Jason: Knowing Miyamoto san it\'ll be incredible. I really like the look of the new Zelda. Other people don\'t.

What sets Jak and Daxter apart from other 3D platformers?

Jason: We call it a Platform Action game because it\'s both parts of Zelda\'s action and part of Mario\'s platforming.

Andy: In Germany they call it Jump and Run.

Jason: First, there\'s the story. There\'s also the load-free world, which no other action game I know of, has pulled off without camera cuts or things like that. We have a hundred different tasks in the game that are pretty much unique. If you fall in the water it\'s not death,you swim around. You can do things in many orders. You do a task where if you kick a pelican, he spits out a power cell and you race him to it. Go to a cannon first, and you can blow him up in his nest and you don\'t have to race him.

continued...

Are you happy with comparisons to Zelda 64?

Jason: Absolutely. Like movies, the games industry builds on past successes. If someone takes from Crash – and there have been a lot of games that have been like Crash with a Jalapeno as the main character or whatever...

Andy: We can\'t blame \'em, we\'ve borrowed bits from a hundred other games.

Jason: It\'s never been offensive when someone\'s said, "you guys have taken stuff from Mario." Damn right we did, it\'s a brilliant game!

Aren\'t you worried about being pigeonholed as just another 3D platformer, and not being given a chance?

Andy: It not like it\'s a niche pigeonhole.

Jason: Yeah it\'s a big pigeonhole. The single largest genre. For a long time Crash 1 and 2 were the best-selling games in Great Britain. So people pigeonhole it as that type of game, I think they\'ll be surprised.

Daxter is very similar to Timon from The Lion King. Intentional?

Jason: Interestingly, Daxter\'s voice is done by the guy who played Timon in the Lion King Broadway for the first year. The character inspiration was more Joe Madureira who did Battle Chasers, the comic book, and Miyazaki san who does Princess Mononoke. We also looked at Asterix and Obelix for the whole village set-up and the way the characters interact.

Andy: The goofy villagers.

Were you not worried about making hated characters?

Jason: I dunno, we have good writers. I still laugh when I\'m playing the game.

Andy: I\'ve seen those cut-scene movies so many times, some are still pretty good.

Jason: Daxter\'s a lot of fun in the movies, cos not only is he nasty to the characters and not only does he get put upon, but he acts like he\'s almost outside of the game. For example, this one woman goes, "there\'s these lightning moles and they\'re out of their holes and they\'re blind and if you don\'t save them and blah blah blah." And he goes, "yeah, lightning moles, like we care." It\'s exactly what the gamer\'s thinking.

The camera angles in Jak and Daxter have been praised as very good.

Andy: The camera is one of the toughest technical/AI challenges in making any kind of full 3D platform game. With a driving game, you just put the camera behind the car. But in a platformer you\'re running through all these wacky obstacles, you\'re going any which way and the camera has to keep you in view, not have you obstructed, not be annoying and show you the way

Jason: There\'s a lot more going on than you realise. In Japan, they sit very close to their TVs because their homes are small. Beyond that, we believe – and this is not just Andy and I, it\'s Sony from doing tests – that for some reason the Japanese are more susceptible to motion-sickness from televisions.
With the first Banjo Kazooie in Japan, they did a test with 45 people. 35 said they were nauseous and six threw up. When they took Spiro there they worked and worked on the camera and still had kids throwing up. Even in the United States, when they did focus tests on Spiro, a kid got up, went outside, threw up on the carpet, came back in and kept playing. They said, "you having fun?" And he was like, "yeah, I just felt sick." So there\'s a lot of research behind the scenes that Sony Japan has been doing. We\'ve tried to incorporate all their theories into this and it\'s been really successful. Now, we\'ll test 30 people and three or four will feel queasy. Nobody actually hoofs. It\'s a success!

Is it true the game came out a week early in the States?

Jason: That\'s right. It happened so close to the end of development that there\'s still buses driving around saying the 14th on them. But why make everyone wait? What\'s more we shipped the US, Japanese, UK and European versions on the same day.

Andy: And even the US version has the European languages in it.

So, what next for Jak and Daxter?

Jason: The game came out yesterday in the US. We\'re waiting to see not only how it sells, but how people feel about Jak and Daxter. If they don\'t like the characters, we\'ll do something else. But we promise, if we do Jak and Daxter 2, it\'ll be far more different than Crash 1 and 2, which were the same game.

Also, I don\'t know if you know this, but Naughty Dog sold itself to Sony. The nice thing about being part of Sony is we know the financing will be there. We know the publisher will be there. We don\'t have to worry about getting a contract signed or having a demo to show somebody or anything like that. Sony said, "take some time off. Don\'t design the game when you\'re frustrated, cos you just finished the last one, and that\'s a very hard period. Take a few months off. Forget about everything. Get your lust for it back." Which is already back for me, because it only takes three weeks of vacation and I\'m bored.

So as Sony developers, there\'s no point asking what you think of Xbox and Game Cube?

Jason: I can answer if you want. From what I\'ve seen, the Xbox launch is very weak, the titles. The Game Cube... I don\'t like any of the titles except for Rogue Squadron, and of course I\'m looking forward to whatever Miyamoto san does.

The thing that kicks me is, its been two years since the PS2 chipset was done. Between that and when the Game Cube and Xbox chipset finished a few months ago, you\'d expect there\'d be this incredible leap in technology. If it was a two year old PC versus a new PC, it\'d be night and day. And yet there isn\'t that amazing gap. Okay, the helmets are shinier in Madden on the Xbox.

Microsoft came to talk to us before we sold ourselves to Sony. There\'s going to be a book out soon that says that we were talking to them about selling Naughty Dog to them, but that\'s not quite true. But they told us the stats of the system. And we walked out of the room going, "either they\'re lying or they\'re over-estimating." But sure enough...

How do you feel about selling Crash Bandicoot to Universal? After all, he\'s your company logo...

Jason: Yeah, in fact, our business cards still have Crash on them, but we\'re going to get Jak and Daxter ones made up soon. My opinion is that if Wrath of Cortex (first non-Naughty Dog Crash) had been incredible, I would have said, "damn we should have stuck with Crash." But I think they got handcuffed by the restrictions we left Crash for. So I feel pretty good about it.

Andy: We\'re really excited about the whole Jak and Daxter universe and franchise. Feel a little sad for poor Crash, left to fend for himself...

Jason: But we\'d sold the rights to whatever game we made before we even started, so it wasn\'t like, "Okay, we\'ve got this Crash ho, how much do you want?" It was already sold. And we\'re sure they\'ll get worse and worse, that\'s my personal theory.

So, how much cash did you get for Crash?

Jason: For selling the character? Well we sold it before we even started Crash 1. It was part of the deal. We had a three-project deal with Universal that ended up being Crash\'s 1, 2 and 3, and they\'d own whatever character we made. We had a royalty, so we did quite well from the Crash series. But at the beginning we hadn\'t been paid for two years, so at one point, just before Crash 1, I had $6.37 in my bank account. Now I\'m driving a Ferrari.

Sorry about posting the whole thing, but ever since C&VG went down the crapper, it is heck trying to get articles from them. (Go ahead and try it to see what I mean).

It\'s a pretty good interview.  There isn\'t any trash talking about other developers like in previous interviews.

[nO-One]

It\'s a pretty darn good interview and it sheads alot of light on why they didn\'t continue making Crash games.

For some odd reason ever since I got Crash one I\'ve liked Naughty Dog, at that time I didn\'t give a flying fudge about game developers and stuff like that I just wanter the games, but for some odd reason I liked Naughty dog and the name stuck in my head.

I\'ve always like Naughty Dog too.  They are pretty good developers even though not all their ideas are original.

I heard from a different forum that in the February issue of PSM there is an interview with Naughty Dog.  They say that they are sharing the technology of Jak and Daxter with other PS2 developers, which means we can expect even more games to come out that are of this caliber.

Looks like a good interview.

Ill read it later today.

Same here nO-One..
Naughty Dog was the first developer I heard about on PSX!

I remember my friend used to talk about them

Good interview.. Rubin seems like a honest guy..
Good taste in cars too