Yug: First question, the studio here has a huge history in Australia games development, it would be great if I could hear the background of the studio and how it’s come to be where it is today.

Kurt Busch: The Studio was originally Beam, and it’s been Melbourne House for quite a while. It is, quite possibly, the oldest studio in Australia.

Yug: I was actually looking into it, and the Hobbit was one of the first and biggest titles to come out of Australia

Kurt: Yup, it’s not only one of the oldest studios in Australia, it’s one of the oldest operating studios in the world. The studio has been around since 1980, and there are people who have been around here for 16 years. It’s a very, very long period of time in this industry. At one time, it’s been a developer, it’s been a publisher, it’s been aligned with other publishers, most recently – prior to being acquired by Krome – it was part of Atari, and before that Infogrames. Krome took it over a bit over a year ago.

It’s got a very long and distinguished history, a lot of titles – the Hobbit as you mentioned, going way back, and then more recently Test Drive Unlimited to GP 500. There was Men in Black games, Space Race on Dreamcast, LeMans.

Yug: I can’t remember off the top of my head, but have there been any original I.P.’s developed by the studio?

Mark Coombes: You’d have to go way back to Horrace.

Yug: Way of the Exploding Fist?

Mark: That was Melbourne House. I’m not sure of the origin of the I.P. for that though, but it’s so long ago now.




Yug: Of course, you were saying there are alot of people that have been here for a very very long time, is there anyone who’s been here from the beginning?

Mark: We have people who have been here for 15+ years, but no one from the very beginning any more.

Yug: You hear alot about other developers who have a high turnover.

Kurt: Yeah, I think historically there has been a high turnover in a lot of studios, and I think one of the differences with this studio, and with Krome in general, is a tendency to not ramp up and ramp down.

Yug: So just progressively keep on keeping on.

Kurt: Yeah, there have been, and I don’t want to name any other studios obviously, but all kinds of instances where you see they have to get a major title out, and they’ll ramp a team up to a couple of hundred people, and once that’s done you have the redundancies that are part of not being able to maintain that kind of team size during the transition period. We have enough individual projects going across the three studios, which means we haven’t had to do that.

Mark: Star Wars is the first game where every studio has been working on the same title, and with that there’s a lot of sharing of work and communication has to be kept up. It’s been running very, very smoothly actually. When Krome took us over at the start of last year, it took a little time before we took a full project here. Initially we helped out on the existing projects like Hellboy, Spyro, Pinata.

Yug: So is the Force Unleashed on the Wii the first full title developed by Krome Melbourne?

Kurt: Since it became part of Krome?

Yug: Yeah.

Kurt: Yes. Force Unleashed is a good example because it’s here, it’s in Adelaide, and it’s up in Brisbane. We have management meetings and production meetings every Monday between the three studios, and we look at each case and say ‘do you need extra resources, animators, programmers’ and things like that. If someone is rolling off a project, we’ll get them to do support work on a project done at another studio until they get reassigned to a new team.

Yug: So you can share resources between all the studios.

Kurt: Exactly, and one of the other good things is that Brisbane has built itself up dramatically, very impressively, from nothing 8 years ago to being the largest developer in Australia, and that has principally been a ‘character action’ studio.I think that’s the way they would describe it.

Yug: Character action?

Kurt: In terms of the games, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, Spyro, Hellboy, Jimmy Neutron, very much character action games, whereas adding the groups in Melbourne and Adelaide, both of these studios have very strong backgrounds in vehicle and driving games.

Yug: Because Adelaide has alot of ex Ratbag staff

Kurt: Yeah, the core of that is the guys who were in Ratbag who did all vehicle games. Powerslide was their first game. So that adds a whole new dimension to Krome, that expertise in both realistic and fantasy-based driving games.

Yug: Cool. Getting back to the Force Unleashed, the Star Wars licence is pretty intimidating I would think. What was your reaction on finding out you would be working on the next Star Wars game ... and not ONLY that, but I think ever since anyone ever heard anything about the Wii controls the first thing everyone thought was ‘awesome, that could be a lightsaber’.

Concept art from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Mark: Well, I’m a huge Star Wars nut so it’s very exciting at the beginning, and ever since I’ve worked in games I’ve thought it would be great to work on a Star Wars game, and then it finally happens. It’s very, very exciting. I do feel a certain amount of responsibility, especially with the Wii. You read forums and people talking about the Wii and there is a high expectation about the first game with a lightsaber. We have considered this a lot but we’re in the reality of the situation and we know the hardware and what it can do, and the difference between some of those perceptions and expectations, and what CAN be delivered and what will be good for the game and fun, will be quite different.

But I think as time goes on, people are getting used to the Wii console and remote and what it can do, so I think people are realising that you can’t have a game like this that’s totally 1 to 1 saber control and you can swipe any way you want.

Yug: I think that was the first impression that everyone had, but the limitations of the hardware don’t allow that?

Mark: Well that’s one part of it, but it’s also the limitations of what a fun game is. If it was possible to give that experience, it wouldn’t actually be much fun.

Kurt: There was a game that was made several years ago, not a Star Wars game, but an original I.P. that used inverse kinetics for sword fighting, and it made a very cool tech demonstration. But it wasn’t fun. It’s one of these things that you realise ‘wow, that’s really cool, but it’s not fun after awhile.

Mark: We put a lot of effort into making sure that what you do with the Wii remote was as close and as immediate as we could with the characters, so you do get that feeling of instant recognition.

Yug: straight away, you moved and that motion appears on screen sort of thing.

Mark: As close as we can within the constraints of the game

Kurt: To answer your question too, obviously when you work on a Star Wars game you get the feeling that you’ve joined a very elite set of developers, and when you look at the very high quality of the development companies that have consistently worked on the star wars game, it’s a humbling and very cool feeling.

Yug: For sure. Now, with the Force Unleashed, it’s also developed on the 360 and the PS3. How do they compare to the versions you are working on. Do you use the assets from Lucas Arts for those games, or is it just a copied scaled down version that you guys have made.

Mark: Well, the lead development has been done in Brisbane on the PS2, and that is the first port of call with all workings between Lucas Arts and Krome. So what we’re doing here is taking the PS2 development, putting it on the Wii, and making all the Wii-specific stuff here.

Yug: So do you guys have much contact with Lucas Arts directly?

Mark: Well there are differences between the developments of the PS2 and Wii, so Lucas Arts is very interested in how this Wii game is going, so we talk with Lucas Arts directly about the Wii-specific issues.

Yug: Ok, purely from a geek point of view here, have you gotten to speak to George Lucas?

Kurt: I’ve never met him.

Mark: Nah.

Kurt: I once had a lunch with him once though *laughs*

Yug: Was he like two tables over sort of thing?

Kurt: Exactly.

Yug: You could have answered it like that then, and said ‘oh yes, I know him, we had lunch together’ *laughs*

Kurt: It was the American Japanese society of the San Francisco Bay area, and they were honouring some guy for Sony and I was invited to it. And there was George Lucas, by himself, walking across the parking lot. I’m going ‘wow, only in Silicon Valley could George Lucas walk across the street without people coming up to him and going oooo I’ve got this great idea.

Mark: know guys on the PS2 team have gone to the ranch, especially in the early stages of the game.

Yug: Well I suppose things like sounds, and all the effects and things like that are from an existing catalogue of Star Wars.

Kurt: Or created by them.

Mark: We get a lot of assets from Lucas Arts. There is a sharing of assets between the ps3 and 360 to us, but most of that is sound and reference material. Everything else has been built exclusively by Krome.

Yug: Cool. You were saying the Wii version and the PSP version are similar in terms of the single player?

Mark: Yeah, all three of them are the same single player.

Yug: But the Wii is the only one that has the battle arena

Mark: Yup, the only one with battle arena with two players on the same screen. PSP battle games use ad-hoc connection.

Yug: I just think that mode is really really cool, I’m surprised it’s not on any of the other versions.

Mark: With the PSP, you can’t play 2 people on the same system, and the PS2 is concentrated on making the single player game so that’s where all that effort is going.

Yug: Ok, just getting onto a bit of a different topic, one thing I noticed is that you have AIE directly two floors down. Is it literally a case of, when they graduate, they just move two floors up?

* laughs *

Mark: Yeah, we’re the third year.

Yug: The graduating class! Does that happen?

Kurt: Well it’s certainly convenient, but how many people who go through that program come up here, who knows? Melbourne is a great area for recruitment in general. There are a lot of game companies in Melbourne, a lot of studios. There’s an active game culture.

Yug: Is there much social communication or events between the developers here in Melbourne?

Kurt: Well there’s the GADC and the occasional events, and there’s a lot of casual relationships between people who’ve worked together at different studios. There’s a very congenial atmosphere between most of the management of the companies. And we all do different stuff, it’s rarely a case of being down to us and them to do this job for a publisher, because we all have different publisher relationships. We’re all doing different types of projects. You have a couple of studios owned by major publishers, and you have independent ones, and they work every type – from mobile to PS3.

The Krome Studios Melbourne offices - behind the scenes

Yug: Great, well I’ll just finish off with one last question that you probably can’t say anything about, but what are the future plans for Krome Melbourne.

Kurt: Well right now we’re still in growth mode. We have two teams running right now – Mark’s team and another unannounced next generation project for a major publisher. We also have a number of people right now that are working R&D for some things that we’ll be doing, and we are particularly looking at working together more with the Krome Adelaide studio. Of course we can’t announce anything yet, but you will see growth in both these studios.

Yug: Someone was telling me there used to be 40 people here, and now there are about 70 ...

Mark: I think last year when Krome took us over, they took on 45 people.

Yug: It’s just interesting because some of the other studios, they’re comparatively new, and they’ve just started to build up in the last couple of years from 10, 20, 30 ... you guys have been around for ages, has it been up and down?

Mark: Well over my time, there used to be 160 here.

Kurt: When it was owned by Atari. Of course, it’s the nature of the industry right now, you have to grow. And we’re doing things like looking for other projects that require smaller teams, but the bread and butter of this industry requires substantial resources. And we do very much have the attitude too that if somebody really good comes in looking for a job, we’re going to hire them.

Yug: Find them something to do.

Kurt: That’s right, because it’s worth it.

Yug: Fantastic, thank you very much for your time!