Company Spotlight #3: Tag Games
This company spotlight is dedicated to another fresh player in the market called Tag Games. We spoke with Paul Farley, Managing Director (and probably a whole lot more) at the company. When Paul first introduced his company to me, he told a lot about the legacy of it. Naturally, we want to know more;
[Arjan] You told us you have worked on console and PC titles before, but also some titles for iPlay. Which titles should we know your company from?
[Paul] Although Tag Games is still very much in its infancy, the team we have started to assemble at Tag has many years of console/PC and mobile experience. I personally started my career in game development at DMA Design who are best remembered for Lemmings and the Grand Theft Auto series. In fact the first game I worked on in the industry as a games designer was GTA where I was responsible for building the map and missions for Liberty City. I then moved to Vis Entertainment where I was lead designer on State of Emergency before finally joining the mobile revolution with I-play (Digital Bridges) over five years ago.
At I-play I was involved in much of the internal and external game development including big brands such as the FIFA and Tiger Woods series and the Fast and the Furious franchise in addition to original IP titles. I am probably most proud of the last game I completed there called My Dog, an original pet game that seems to be doing very well indeed! The rest of the Tag team have a similar background. Jamie Bryan our creative director was art manager at DMA Design and was team leader for Space Station Silicon Valley a little known but critically acclaimed N64 game that was apparently Shigeru Miyamoto’s favourite game of the time! Jamie has had experience of not only managing large teams of artists but also brand management with Vis Entertainment so he comes with a great skill set and pedigree.
[Arjan] Working on titles for a company like iPlay is a position many people would love to be in as it’s often good money. Why go solo?
[Paul] I think ultimately it’s difficult to summarise the numerous factors that come into force when deciding to give up a well paid and secure position, take a bank loan, put your family’s security and well being on the line and start something new. Those factors must be very strong! I have always been attracted to the idea of setting up a small development studio and had been at I-play for over five years and really felt that personally I wanted to do something fresh. The mobile market has been dominated by so many big brands and licenses over the first few years of its existence and I began to see that the mobile games players and the operators that supply them were beginning to look for more original and innovative gaming experiences on mobile. With Tag we have the freedom to really create some new ideas and concepts specifically for mobile gaming and that excites me. I don’t think we have even scratched the surface of mobile gaming’s potential yet, whether that is in terms of game-play innovation or revenue!
[Arjan] How do you think you can compete in this market where the big publishers are fighting for every bit of marketshare left?
[Paul] Right now it’s very important for us to continue to build good relationships with all the large publishers and we really see them first and foremost as customers rather than competitors. Most of the big publishers are now actively seeking high quality, original content to drive their growth and quite simply the company structures and funding models that they have makes it very difficult for their internal teams to produce innovative content. This is where smaller companies like Tag can really develop a niche by taking risks and developing original game ideas.
At DMA Design the company was founded upon a simple desire to do things differently, to innovate, to place game-play first and to always try something new. It was not a company focussed on technology or high production values but it produced two of the biggest gaming franchises in the world. We believe we can achieve a similar result in mobile by embracing the same ethos.
[Arjan]You released your first original game Dead Water last month, can you tell us more about your roadmap for this or next year?
[Paul] Sure! Following on from Dead Water which was very much a ‘gamers’ game we have a title called Rock’n’Roll which is far more appealing to casual players. It’s a simple concept where you rotate a maze to drop the ‘rock’ character through it and it’s quite similar to Loco Roco on PSP. The game is looking really great and is impossible to put down once you start playing it! The software behind the game is pretty neat too, we have some sprite scaling and rotation routines that are working well even on low-end devices allowing us to achieve an excellent frame rate which is important for action games such as this. We have focused upon making it easy to play so there are just two keys used to rotate the maze and we plan motion sensing as well for a really interesting control method. Players will find the rock’n’roll theme is reflected in some really great original music tracks we have had commissioned especially for the game and again this just raised the overall quality of the game further. Rock’n’Roll is due to be released Q1 2006.
After Rock’n’Roll we have a really quite ambitious game in production that is scheduled for release Q2 2007. I can’t really say too much about it right now except that it is an extremely innovative approach to bringing a very popular game genre to mobile. We are going to be building the game around our understanding of how and why people play mobile games, so whilst it might look familiar I can promise you it will deliver a style of game-play that is unique to the mobile platform. We also have a couple of licensed games due in 2007 as well, one is an extremely popular casual PC game and the other is an old favourite of ours that is getting a new sequel on Xbox Live Arcade as well as mobile. You might also see a sequel to Dead Water if our hero manages to avoid being drowned!
[Arjan] Currently you seem mainly operating in the J2me area. Any plans to make changes here?
[Paul] We are focussing on J2ME and Europe as our target platform and territory right now simply because our resources can only allow us to do so much at one time. In the short term we aim to partner with distributors and publishers to port our games to BREW and other US devices, but further out we will certainly consider bringing BREW and development for other platforms in-house as the company grows. There are plenty of platforms that interest us such as Symbian, iPod, iTV, XBLA and Flash Lite to name a few. We will consider developing for these on an on going basis but first there has to be a viable revenue stream in place otherwise it’s just not worth our time.
[Arjan] Recently ad-funded games have been in the news a lot. Will Tag also make their games available on this basis like many others do?
[Paul] I think it is highly unlikely that we will take this route in the foreseeable future. Giving away your game for free undermines the inherent value that a high quality game should have and the inclusion of unrelated and quite clearly obtrusive advertising certainly taints the experience for the game player. At the end of the day the consumer will decide if they want to pay for mobile games or get them free and suffer the advertising, which ever route they choose we will obviously need to take it with them! Still this outcome is far from clear at present so we will watch developments with interest!
We are however very much at ease with the concept of in game advertising or product placement. In some cases this subtle form of advertising can actually add to the authenticity of the game experience for example by having real life sponsors display on advertising boards at the side of a football pitch or on signs in a city environment. This is something we are actively engaged with right now for a couple of our forthcoming games so it will be interesting to see how successful this approach will be.
[Arjan] Which of your own games do you like the most and why do you think it’s the best?
[Paul] I’m very happy with Dead Water in that it shows we can design, develop and deliver a high quality, innovative, mobile game on budget and on time, however it is Rock’n’Roll that really excites me at the moment. Although the game still has a month of development left on the reference devices it already has something really special about it that is hard to define. Sometimes when you are working on a game you just get an instinctive feeling that you have a massive hit on your hands. It’s a bit like Star Wars when Luke Skywalker feels a disturbance in force, the last time I felt it was at I-play with My Dog and that is certainly doing very well and previously I got that feeling with GTA when many people were writing it off. Time will tell however!
[Arjan] Which of the games from competing companies do you think is most interesting (and don’t select one of your old iPlay games here)?
[Paul] I’m really enjoying Glu’s Stranded at the moment. It is a really great concept that is well suited to mobile and implemented with a great deal of attention to detail and care. The look and feel is excellent and it plays very nicely. My only real issue with it is the constant loading of map data but that is forgivable when the rest of the game is so well crafted. Digital Chocolate’s Tower Bloxx is also excellent, a nice simple action puzzle game that is refreshingly different to anything else and for outright weirdness you have to check out Gamevil’s NOM.
Generally as a game player I’m rather bored of playing the latest sequel with slightly better graphics than last year so I’m always on the look out for something new. I’m also looking forward to getting my hands on a Nintendo Wii; its novel control system will ensure developers approach game development in a creative manner rather than just porting their existing games to it without thinking and at the end of the day the games just look like they are pure and simple fun – which is really what game playing is all about!
[Arjan] If we give you 20 words of space, how would you best describe your company?
[Paul] I’ll do it in ten! Interesting, different, original, creative, talented, growing, hardworking, determined, colourful and tall.
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