“This is supposed to be a review of Enemy Territory:Quake Wars but instead I’m sure you’d rather read a story about a walrus and some penguins.”

Interview with Steve and Janeen Fawkner

Yug and Oracle have the chance to sit down with Steve Fawkner (CEO and Lead Designer) and Janeen Fawkner (Producer) of Infinite Interactive, and ask them about their Puzzle Quest series of games, what else is on the horizon, and what the Melbourne developer community is like.

A visit to Infinite Interactive | Interview with Steve and Janeen Fawkner

Yug: Could you start off by telling everyone who you are and what you do here?

Steve: Yup, my name is Steve Fawkner and I’m the CEO and Lead Designer at Infinite Interactive.

Janeen: Janeen Fawkner and I’m the Producer here.

Steve: She’s really the boss, she’s in charge of everything!

Yug: Fair enough!

Janeen: I think I’m actually the Executive Producer now.

Steve: I just gave her a promotion, right then!

Yug: Congraulations!

Janeen: No pay rise though!

Janeen and Steve Fawkner

Yug: Well, to kick things off can you tell us a little bit about how the company started and how it got to where it is today.

Steve: Yup, we’ve been around since 1989 when we did a game called Warlords. I’d been working on games since about 1983, just releasing them into the public domain and taking donations from people who liked them. I think my first game sold 32 copies at $5 each! I’m really waiting for someone to come back one day and tell me “I’m one of those people who bought that game”.

I’ve never met one of those 32 people yet though ... I think they might have all been my mum.

* laugh *

So I did that for about 5 or 6 years part time, and in 1989 we did the game Warlords which I sold to SSG. The game was a bit of a hit, and I formed Infinite Interactive as a company front for the game. We stayed with SSG for about 12 years, and they went their own way after that, as they wanted to do hardcore military strategy stuff and we wanted to concentrate on warlords and fantasty kind of stuff, explore some new games and get on the consoles.

So we parted ways, we took the Melbourne office, and Infinite became known as Infinite – not just the Melbourne office of SSG.

Yug: So SSG moved on to the World War 2 series, and you moved on with the Warlords series with ... Puzzle Quest. That’s a bit of a departure of style from the previous Warlords games, how did that come about?

Steve: The first two games we did after Warlords 4 and Warlords Battlecry 3 – so we did turn based strategy and RTS – but the PC market was dying back then, so we thought one of the things we wanted to do was get into the console and handheld space, and handheld is a really good fit for a small group like us. So we did a PC game – Puzzle Quest – with the idea that it would go across to DS as a natural fit.

We then went through 18 months of pain trying to find someone who would buy it, and D3 picked it up and it kicked on from there.

Yug: It’s also gone on pretty much ... well, every other platform as far as I can tell? How was the process of getting that onto all the platforms?

Steve: We had to use alot of partnerships to get it across, as we were only small and still growing at that stage so we couldn’t do it all in house. So we got First Playable who did the DS port, with Vision Cycle who did the PSP port, we did the Xbox 360 and PC versions, and various other things.

Janeen: It’s on THQ mobile as well.

Yug: So I should probably ask what platforms it ISN’T on.

Steve: It isn’t yet on the PS3 network.

Yug: Are there plans to bring it to the PSN?

Steve: Well ... there’s nothing ‘announced’ yet!

Yug: How about the iPhone?

Steve: It would be perfect for our games, and we’d like to get some of our Puzzle games onto iPhone as it’s an awesome little platform.

Yug: They’re amazingly popular at the moment.

Steve: I’m really trying to hint that I want one ... aren’t I!

Yug: You’re not very subtle!

Janeen: I doesn’t work with Telstra!

The Quest of the Puzzles - Xbox 360 Live version

Oracle: You mentioned SSG before, do you still keep in touch with them?

Steve: Oh yeah, I’m good friends with them still – great bunch of guys – and without them teaching me how to run a company, polish a game and finish it off, we would never have had Infinite.

Janeen: And you got contacts while working for SSG. Steve used to go overseas with SSG to conferences and got contacts from publishers.

Steve: Met all the right guys that have been around the industry for years and years. SSG because they started up in 1982, had been around for ages. I think they might be the oldest Australian games company, if not one of the oldest.

Yug: Melbourne House ... Beam ...

Steve: They probably would have beat them by about a year.

Yug: Gotcha.

Steve: So they knew all the guys – the Sid Myers, the Wil Wrights and people like that, back when the industry was very very young and we could hang out with them.

Yug: Are you still hanging out with them?

Steve: Only in my dreams! I tell everyone I still hang out with them but I don’t really!

Yug: I have no doubt Wil Wright probably has puzzle quest in his DS.

Steve: A few of them dropped me a line after Puzzle Quest came out and said ‘hey, we love the game’.

Yug: You’ve won heaps of awards and accolades – I was at GCAP last year when I think you won ... well, almost every award there, which was pretty impressive.

Janeen: The ones I entered!

Yug: I personally think the most impressive reward is the Penny Arcade comics you have up on the wall!

Steve: They are geek gold those things, when we move they’re going straight into my new office, I love those things.

Yug: Cool! Moving on, can you tell us about your next game – Galactrix. The most obvious question is to ask is it just Puzzle Quest in Space?

Steve: Well, it’s a spiritual successor to Puzzle Quest, like a cousin. Still match 3 in there, but we wanted to change alot of stuff around so it’s not just exactly the same game with a Sci-Fi setting. So we changed the board, the way gems fall on the board, the objectives, the mini-games, the collectables, the way systems worked ... we actually had someone write a propper story for us this time too!

Yug: Well it’s not set in the Warlords universe is it?

Steve: First game we’ve done in many many years that isn’t in the Warlords universe. It was a chance to create a whole new piece of fiction, a whole new setting and a whole new bunch of characters.

Definately a Puzzle Quest game, but not just Puzzle Quest in space. We want to give that excitement that people first got when they first played Puzzle Quest.

Galactrix: More than just Puzzle Quest in space?

Yug: Well, I mean it is a brilliant formula with the puzzle and RPG elements.

Steve: I still play them! I sat up until 4am playing the puzzle quest expansion the other night! You’d think I’d have had enough of it by now!

Yug: That’s a good sign though, when the people who make the game actually want to play it, and I surprisingly don’t hear that very often. Usually they’re over it by the end of the development cycle.

Steve: You know what the best thing about this game is? My mum likes playing it. 25 years trying to make a game that mum liked to play and now she rings me up every couple of days asking if Galactrix is ready yet!

Yug: That’s the thing, these games are for the casual market but in the same respect most of the hardcore games also play it as well. Especially the RPG elements.

Steve: I think for alot of the RPG guys it was the first time they’ve played a casual game, and for the casual gamers it was the first time they’ve played an RPG. So that’s fantastic that we get to leave an inprint like that with some people.

Yug: It’s a gateway game, getting them in to more hardcore titles.

Janeen: It’s alot more accessable to casual gamers, our beta testers in the states – hardcore gamers – said ‘I don’t play puzzle games’ and I said ‘you have to play it’. So they gave it a go, and about 3 days later they email me saying ‘I haven’t slept or eaten for 3 days because I’ve been playing that game’.

Steve: Bejeweled is a crazy addictive formula, but hardcore games don’t pick that up, but they did pick up Puzzle Quest and got addicted to it.

Yug: How do you feel about that, your addictive game is ruining peoples lives!!

Oracle: They can’t escape it on all platforms either!

Steve: I prefer to think that it’s helping people around the world.

Yug: So, are there any other titles coming up that you can tell us about.

Steve: We’ve got Puzzle Quest: Galactrix coming up later this year.

Yug: Can you tell us what platforms that’s on?

Steve: It’s confirmed for DS, PC and Xbox 360 at the moment. We would love as many people to play this game as possible, so we will of course investigate the other platforms. We’re also working on NeoPets Puzzle Adventure with Capcom, which is due for release later this year on DS, Wii and PC.

Yug: NeoPets, is that Nicoledon?

Janeen: Yup

Yug: Well, I didn’t think you guys worked on Licenced titles?

Steve: This is the first big one we’ve done, certainly the first one I WANTED to work on. And we wouldn’t have worked on it if the guys here didn’t want to, but I found out we had a bunch of closet NeoPets players in the office, and they put up their hands and became the NeoPets team.

And it’s actually a good game, it’s alot of fun. It’s like a PuzzleQuest game with Reversi instead of Bejeweled, and it looks lovely and has a great story. The NeoPets world is a great one to work with.

I know it’s a game that will be marketed to the younger audience, but I really think gamers of any age can pick this thing up and play it.

Janeen: I know the NeoPets website, and generally anyone over the age of 18 gets board very quickly ...

Steve: Well, 20% of the players are over 18 years of age.

Janeen: Ok, but with this game it will cross the ages.

Steve: It’s like playing pokemon – gamers of any age enjoy it. It’s kind of like that actually, you can pick it up and play it, and there’s alot in there for everyone.

What we’ve done to Reversi in this game – and it’s game that’s a thousand years old, no-one had ever touched it before – was to get a modern game design team to come along and just mess with it.

Infinite Interactives first licensed title - NeoPets

Yug: And that’s what you guys have done.

Steve: Yeah, and you can do some cool stuff with Reversi.

Yug: Hold on ... Reversi?

Steve: It’s a game played on an 8x8 board, with black and white tokens, every time I put a token down it flips the other token between two of mine. Very simple little game, but all of a sudden you start changing the board size and shape, putting special tokens on the board you can capture and cast spells, having random effects ...

Yug: That sounds fairly complex. Is this game still playable by a younger audience?

Steve: Well, my mum always told me that little kids are just big people that haven’t gotten tall yet. In other words, they’re pretty smart even though they’re very little. And I think if you step them through the rules one by one, they get it. I mean, take Pokemon’s latest incarnations, it’s an incredibly complex game with Diamond and Pearl, so much to learn, and kids are like sponges – they suck it all up and learn all the rules.

Janeen: And they’re used to the NeoPets world so they understand. We have spells which are pet pets, and they know what they all are – all 400 of them.

Steve: Oh, there’s thousands of them there, it’s crazy. So I think kids take this delight in learning lots of stuff about something they enjoy, and if you step them into the rules it’s a game that’s really accessable and easy to play.

Yug: So when does that one come out?

Steve: Towards the end of this year on DS, Wii and PC. And we also have one more unannounced game that will be out towards the end of the year as well.

Yug: Let us know when that comes out.

Janeen: We’re also doing the Good Game project with the ABC – Office Wars.

Yug: How did you guys get involved with that?

Steve: I did a crowd sourcing experiment many many years ago, where back in the 80’s I was writing games with a few people playing the games back then, and we decided to design a game based on all their ideas. It all went horribly wrong however, because we discovered with 20-30 designers creating a game, it was like design by committee and it was terrible.

Over the years though, I’ve thought about how that crowd sourcing idea could work – having a bunch of people generating content. And you have a benevolent dictator at the top saying ‘these are your tasks, operate within these small boundaries, and if you go outside of them I won’t use them’. I think it could work, and the audience from Good Game has come up with some pretty fantastic ideas actually.

The game is Office Wars, it’s kind of an action-management-casual-RPG-office simulator.

Yug: Right, that narrows it down!

Steve: It doesn’t really have a genere, it’s an odd little mix. But it’s a fun idea, it’s something I’m surprised has never really been addressed before in a game, and we’ll work for a couple of months with the community to get something out. I would love to take this game then and get it signed and onto some platforms, and I feel it could be quite viral. You even have an office that you can customise to be like your own office.

Janeen: The ABC and the AOC have been really good and supportive; they came down and saw us.

Steve: Good to work with, and the Good Game community is alot of fun. I mean, there are some people that come up with crazy ideas, like ‘I’ve got this idea where you get a gun that can pickup and drop a mountain’, and then it’s announced we’re doing Office Wars they come back and go ‘I’ve got this idea for something in the office, if we get this stapler that’s actually a gun that can pick up a mountain ... ‘

* laugh *

Dude, get more than one idea! So we should have something available for download on the ABC website close to Christmas.

Yug: That’s very exciting.

Janeen: Then we’ll probably take it to GDC and see if we could sign it up to someone.

Yug: Cool! Now, just to change gears here a bit, can you tell us a bit about what it’s like to be a developer in Australia? I noticed on the Infinite Interactive website there’s alot of Film Victoria logos, how much support do you get from the government.

Steve: Well, Film Vic funded half the prototype of Galactrix, as well as the other project we’re working on at the moment – Deathbringer – that we just signed a big deal with a publisher.

Yug: Is that the one based in the Warlords universe as well?

Steve: It’s kind of nebulous at the moment, we’re not sure if it’s going to be or not. It might be. So yeah, Film Vic funded half the prototype for that as well. So Film Vic are great, it puts us in a better position to hold onto our own I.P. at the end of the process.

Yug: Do you have much contact with the other Melbourne developers?

Steve: Yeah, we catch up quite regularly actually – sometimes just for lunch or a chat. It’s a pretty friendly community. I wouldn’t say everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing, but we all have an inkling of what’s going on.

There’s some core studios that get along very well and have similar principals, like us, Firemint, Tantalus, Transmission, Torus, Iron Monkey and a few of the others. We’re all in the GDAA so we catch up at meetings there but also for lunch in general.

Yug: So, what kind of staff turnover do you have here?

Steve: We’ve had 3 people leave in 20 years.

Yug: Wow! Why is that?

Steve: Why did the three leave?!

Yug: Why did ONLY three leave? Alot of other developers have a very high turnover, what makes Infinite a different story?

Steve: We’re fun to work for! Everybody here is involved in all the design of all the projects, so everybody kind of owns the game when it comes out here. It’s not MY game it’s not the DESIGNERS game ... it really is everybody’s game, because everybody’s had input.

We do crazy shit! We had a game that went into alpha and beta, major design change came up – someone wanted it, and it was the correct thing to do to make a good game – and we made it. I think people working on these games know when the game is good or bad, and they respect the stupidity it takes to do stuff like that.

People SMILING at work? Crazy!

Yug: There’s nothing worse than creating a game, only to get halfway through and realise it isn’t very fun.

Steve: And then being forced to complete it, that sense of working in a sausage factory where you’re just churning out the next licensed title. So I think having original I.P. that we work on is one reason why people like to stay here, since you have so much more creative control.

Janeen: There’s alot of licences like, say, a Spiderman movie game, you have to follow the movie. You have no choice. You can’t make anything else.

Steve: One of the reasons the publishers like to work with us too, is because we like to take all their feedback on board as well. Basically we source our ideas from every single person we can in order to make the game better, and there’s absolutely no ego’s around here to be satisfied.

Yug: Do you get much feedback from the community and the people that play the games.

Steve: Yeah, quite often when we used to write forwards in our manuals, the first thing we would do is thank the community for all their input.

Janeen: We get alot of people who write really angry ‘my game crashed, you suck’ emails, and if you write back to them sensibly asking ‘where did it crash, what’s the bug report, how can I help you’ they tend to go ‘oh’.

Yug: Didn’t expect you to actually write back! Anonymous people on the internet being angry about something? Noooooooo.

Steve: We’ve got very thick skins because we’ve been doing this for a very long time.

Janeen: If I write a sentence and everyone hates it – well, we take it out. And I don’t get offended, you can’t leave it in there.

Steve: About every 2 weeks we do game testing mornings. We buy breakfast for everyone and they come in an hour early. We sit around and play games for about an hour, then we sit around for an hour and talk about what we could do better on the game, so people that aren’t actually on a team are contributing to the other teams.

Yug: One final question, which is something that the readers of our site ask us all the time – what advice would you have for someone who is wanting to get into the games industry?

Steve: Right ...

Yug: Deep breath in?

Steve: No, I’ll try to say something different this time, instead of the stock standard answer!

Yug: Something different is good!

Steve: Well, a friend of mine runs a printing company up north of Melbourne, and he reckons we have it easy down here because no-one leaves school wanting to be a printer, but everyone leaves school wanting to be a game developer. So you’re never going to be short of people who want to come and work for you! And that’s actually the biggest problem in getting into the games industry, is there’s no shortage of people out there. And alot of them are pretty bloody smart ... so to get in, YOU have to be pretty bloody smart or pretty bloody dedicated.

Anybody can, but you got to study hard, get good marks, goto a good uni or college that specialises in teaching a game course, or even a good games multimedia course. Then you have to come out of the end of that with a good portfolio, apply to every single games company, hassel them mercilessly, meet people from the companies to get your foot in the door, get the interview and get the job.

Yug: Simple as that!

Steve: That’s all it takes!

Janeen: And there’s a difference between people that like to play games and people that like to make games.

Yug: Well, people that want to play games end up becoming games journalists.

Steve: What we’re really looking for is we want to see someone who wants to make a game just as much as they want to play a game. Someone who when faced with the choice to either ‘sit here and work on this’ or ‘go downstairs and play Super Smash Bros’ ... equally likely to do either one, that’s the kind of person we look to employ.

Oracle: I have one last question. What’s your favourite platform to play Puzzle Quest on?

Steve: Depends what colour my mood ring is! If I’m on a plane, it’s actually DS, but if I’m on public transport it’s the PSP. If I’m just sitting around though, I play on Xbox 360.

Oracle: So you almost utilize all of them.

Steve: I do, I do.

Oracle: So THAT’s the reason you made it multi platform.

Janeen: We don’t play mobile games, so we haven’t made it for that yet.

Steve: But if I had an iPhone I would.

Yug: Nice! Steve and Janeen thank you very much for your time, and good luck with the new titles you have being released in the upcoming months!