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Interview with Tom Crago

AJ gets an interview with Tom Crago (CEO) and talks about the background and future projects of Tantalus Interactive

A Visit to Tantalus Interactive | Interview with Tom Crago (CEO) | Sypro: Dawn of the Dragon Preview

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We got another chance to sit down with Tom Crago, CEO of Tantalus Interactive after tyring out the new Spyro game and ask him a few questions about the company itself, the Australian gaming industry, and their future projects.

AJ: What drew you to work on Spyro and what do you believe has kept the Spyro name so popular for so long?

Tom: We had wanted to make a game with Sierra for quite a while. They were attracted to some technology we had on the DS, which we had been showing them over the course of a few years, through SpongeBob which was our first title on DS, then into Cars, released last year and then Pony Friends. They put the Spyro opportunity in front of us and we were immediately very enthusiastic, as it was a game that everyone here had played, a franchise that everyone here would enjoy and it seemed a very good fit for our technology. It was also an opportunity, genre wise, to move into a space that was a little different to where we had been on hand-held before. So for all those reasons, I guess we were able to tick all of the boxes that needed to be ticked and it was a deal that came together very quickly.

AJ: So for you guys, to have the opportunity to work on such a big name, as Spyro is in his tenth year now, it's a bit of a buzz for the guys and girls here?

Tom: That's another reason why Sierra might have looked to Tantalus with this franchise, as we have worked on some big licences in the past, SpongeBob and Cars to name two, and you have to be sensitive with licences that have a significant following already and we've demonstrated our ability to do that in the past and I hope that we are doing that again with Spyro.

AJ: Now you guys have developed for quite a while and for just about every machine since the SNES and the Saturn, more recently though you've moved away from consoles to hand held, was that a deliberate move?

Tom: I wouldn't say we've moved away from consoles, we've just become more serious about hand-helds. There's always been at least one console title in development at Tantalus since we were founded in 1994. So even in recent times where we've been doing a lot of work on hand-held, we've managed to release two titles on the PlayStation 2, we did Unreal II on Xbox, which was partly a conversion from PC, which had a lot of original content in it. It was the first Australian developed on online console title and it was a game that many people said it would be impossible to make. So I think in terms on technology on consoles, I think we really earned our stripes on Unreal II. We've got three titles on the Wii in development at present as well as PlayStation 3, so while the hand-held space has been good to us, we are still committed to the new generation of consoles.

Unreal II: The Awakening on the Xbox

AJ: So it's not so much a change of direction, just that it's filling the gaps?

Tom: I think that a lot of our hand-held titles have received a lot of recognition, which is great. That started for us on the GameBoy Advance with Top Gear Rally, which Nintendo published and won a lot of awards and did terrifically well for us. It's moved from there to the DS, we've done seven titles on the DS and some on the PSP, where we've had the successful MX vs ATV series. But all the while the console stuff has been happening along side that and with the Wii it's really going to come into the foreground.

AJ: You had a lot of success, particularly last year where you had three titles in the Top 100 selling games. Does that success breed more success, where you can then get a bigger team and get the licenses like Spyro?

Tom: I hope so. I believe we are already at the pointy end of hand-held development: the budgets, the team sizes. The development time we have is comparable with any studio in the world and we are working on some of the biggest properties and we have the opportunity to bring to market original properties with big budgets and big teams, which is terrific. We are doing that already on DS and PSP and we are trying to position ourselves to be able to do that on console space as well.

AJ: So in terms of a development team, how does that differ between a console game and a hand-held?

Tom: The Wii teams are certainly bigger than the DS teams. Although Spyro has the biggest team at the moment as we are trying to put the maximum amount to polish on that title and ensure that it really is a stand out.

AJ: And it's looking pretty good so far for an alpha.

Tom: Yeah, I think it is, we are pretty happy with the way it is progressing. But typically a Wii team would be double or triple the size of a DS team.

AJ: Now there has been comment in the media about the expense of developing PS3 or 360 games, what they are calling 'Next-Gen', is that something make it more difficult to move into?

Tom: We've been very strategic with our approach to the new generation of consoles. They came to the market at a time where the hand-held space was firing for us and we looked at people's forecasts and comments around the costs of 'Next-Gen' development and we realised with the install base that those consoles would have in the first few years, that those numbers just didn't add up, we held off our assault on PlayStation 3 and 360. We decided that we would wait until the install base was higher and the publishers started to make more sense. Then in between all that the Wii came along, which really was the perfect system for us given our experience on the Gamecube and the PlayStation2 and also the demographic that the Wii seemed to be attracting was a demographic that wee seemed to be having a lot of success with our earlier titles.

We decided then to make a commitment to Wii in addition to continue support to that DS and PSP and that really is our strategy at present, to run hard at those three platforms, but at the same time to approach, particularly the PlayStation 3 in a very strategic way an get ourselves into a position where we are developing very high quality, yet cost effective PlayStation 3 titles over the course of the next few years. We are also very serious about digital distribution through PSN, Live Arcade a WiiWare. We are spending some time and money on that a present and looking forward to moving into that space in the next year or two.

AJ: I noticed you did some work with Film Victoria with a proposed game at the time called Anaka. Now I know of your involvement in the GDAA and there was some discussion at the time on the difficulty Australian developers was having, which I guess drove you to get an investment from Film Victoria to do a short film and get something off the ground. Can you explain the difficulties that you were faced with at time and why that path was a way forward?

Tom: It's really hard to take an original idea and market that successfully as a video game. It's not just hard for Tantalus; it's hard for all developers. We had a concept for this game with the character Anaka and we wanted to bring this out as a DS title. We thought about some innovative ways we could do that and one thing that we thought could be fun was to make a short film based around the character Anaka and to use that to promote the game universe and as a selling tool as a DS title. We were able to access some money from film Victoria's Digital Media fund to assist with the cost involved in making that short film.

Find out more about Anaka at the website - http://www.meetanaka.com

The film was great; it was quite successful and shown in short film festivals around the world. It also screened on Nickelodeon in North America, nation wide and as yet it hasn't translated to a game deal, for Anaka, but it is still on our slate of original titles that we shop to publishers. So there is the potential for Anaka to become a video game at some point and we're still hopeful that as some of these things can take years and years to come to fruition.

AJ: Which leads me to the next question: Something like 80% of the top selling games out at the moment are either sequels or spin-offs from TV and movies, so how hard is it, realistically, to get your own new IP out in front of a publisher?

Tom: Oh yeah, it's really hard and it's all about investment, being able to fund a title yourself to the point where you've got a very compelling package to put in front of a publisher. It's also about what the market wants and it seems at the moment there is an appetite for sequels and licensed titles, but that can change and we are hopeful that it will change.

We have had some success brining original titles to market, we had a GameBoy Advance Title called Trickstar which we funded, which was released a couple of years ago, we had a title called Black Market Bowling, another that we funded and released. You would file those in categories of 'minor successes', but we learned a lot about the processes while developing those titles. At the moment we have an original IP at present, which we are funding to prototype stage, over the next nine months and we are hoping to have more success with that.

AJ: Is that a Wii Title?

Tom: Yeah we're developing, at present, for Wii and PS3.

AJ: And so you think that in terms of getting stuff in front of publishers, that being in Australia makes it more difficult for the overseas publishers?

Tom: Not really. We've been doing this for a long time and the publishers we deal with, in some instances; we've been dealing with for ten years. We've had a working relationship with these people for that long they know what we do, they trust us. It's more about wether the concept for them is compelling and wether they're able to make the business case for taking the title on.

The man himself - Tom Crago

AJ: Australia has been at the forefront of development for a long time with people like Melbourne House and Beam � Where did you start originally?

Tom: I started at Ratbag

AJ: Actually that is one of the companies I was going to ask about. A lot of companies, over the last five years have either closed their doors, or merged, or been bought out and then closed. What's your take on that?

Tom: Well you have to bear in mind that the Australian Industry has doubled in size over the course of the last four or five years. We're definitely growing and expanding at an incredibly rapid rate and this is happening at the same time that other areas of the entertainment industry are contracting. It's certainly the case that game development in Australia is booming, it's also then case that the industry we are in is certainly a volatile industry. It's also an industry that hasn't fully matured yet, in terms of it's business practices, in terms of it's systems and processes, so there are always going to casualties and companies that go from boom to bust, and others that are booming and then are acquired by bigger fish in the pond.

AJ: So Tantalus's stability, what would you attribute that to?

Tom: I would say we are one of the most stable game developers in Australia. There are a lot of reasons for that. In recent history we have been very profitable...

AJ: In the Top 100.

Tom: ...well I believe the Top 100 was for actual game sales, so that doesn't relate to our actual bottom line here. We have been pretty diverse, so we have been able to spread our risk across a number of platforms and publishers, which helps and recently we've has help from a private equity company, which gives us another level of stability.

AJ: So do you find the Government is being a little more helpful with assistance or are they hard to deal with?

Tom: We don't receive any assistance from the Federal Government, but we've been lobbying them, as an industry, for a couple of years now and we're hopeful that we'll get some 'love' from them in the course of thew next year or so.

AJ: So last year, you had three titles that did particularly well, how is this year shaping up for you guys?

Tom: At the moment our focus is on Spyro and we have really high hopes for that title. We have a number of other titles that haven't been announced yet and we can't talk about, they're to be released next year. So this year for us the focus is certainly on Spyro, we also released earlier this year a couple more titles, from our MX franchise: MX vs ATV Untamed, for the DS and PSP, so they will be the Tantalus cannon for 2008. 2009 will be a bigger year again.

AJ: On behalf of Australian Gamer, we would like to thank Tom, David, Andie and Matt for there time and hospitality.

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