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Re: Full interview with greg thomas??
The Return of the Comeback Kid: The Visual Concepts Interview
by Matthew Kato
POSTED: 4/23/2007 4:43 PM
hen Electronic Arts snatched up the NFL license and basically everything surrounding NFL football you could hear the collective 2K football fans crying in pain. The rivary between EA Sports and 2K Sports was dead. That is, until now. Exclusive to Game Informer Unlimited is the full transcription of our interview with Visual Concepts President Greg Thomas. We get the details on the complete history of All Pro Football and 2K’s goals with this game. We also touch on the rest of the 2K Sports line-up, Wii development, and their involvement with Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Note: This is a brief excerpt of the full interview that can be found in this month's Game Informer Unlimited for Game Informer Magazine subscribers only. Already a subscriber? Head over to Game Informer Unlimited now!
Game Informer: Obviously you lose the license and I was talking to Jeff [Jeff Thomas’s brother and VC’s Vice President of Sports Development] and the guys were immediately into thinking of all the different possibilities. I guess just talk about your thoughts at that time.
Greg Thomas: That was a rough time! We had to kind of reset. We had to really think about everything and what we were going to do. Everybody here thought about it. We talked. We had so many meetings. It all came back to one thing, which was, it’s all about the game of football. It’s all about the game that we made in 2K5. It’s about getting that back. We had so many e-mails from people who bought the game. We still have forums today. People play that game all the time. They’re always updating their rosters and just try to make it the most current game they can. They say it’s still the best football game. Those are the people we’re trying to please with this game. That’s what it’s all about. It’s putting aside the licenses and it’s making a real football game. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to do anything crazy, weird, some kind of little hook here or there. It is absolutely our football engine. The best we can make it. Again, it’s all about football.
GI: Would you guys go after the license in 2010 when their deal expires and you guys can get back in again. Would you guys do that?
Thomas: Absolutely. We would do it if it made sense to do it. This is not us putting our nose up to the NFL or something. This is about making a football game because we believe in the sport of football whether we have NFL with us or not. Would we prefer to have the NFL? Yeah, it’s a huge license, of course we would. But, everything is at a cost. If it’s so expensive to make a game that we can’t financially afford to make the game based on a license, then no, we’d rather not have it. And that’s kind of what we’re doing here. We’ll see how people like it. Again we think that, when we’re done, this thing is going to be the best playing football game. That’s what we’re shooting for.
GI: You have fans still playing 2K5 and you have a new direction you haven’t unveiled yet. Is there any danger that there might be an insurmountable mountain of hype that you guys might not be able to overcome because of the romanticism of the franchise?
Thomas: I was pleasantly surprised after we announced All Pro Football how many people were really excited about it. I was thinking, “It’s been a while now, maybe it’s really calmed down.” I was really surprised by how many people were excited about it. Since then how many people asked questions about it and wanted to know more about it and can’t wait for it and know it’s going to be the best football game out there when it ships. People really behind us. So I think there’s a lot more of that then I thought there would be.
But it’s still been a while since that really has happened. Still, a lot of things have changed. We have new platforms out there now. A lot of things have changed. It’s been bigger than I thought it would be.
GI: Because, it’ll be a situation where, for a lack of a better phrase, they’ve come back down to Earth because in a sense that they’ll actually have a product that they’ll have to criticize or look at or there will be things that they’ll test you on. Like instead of them romanticizing the good ole’ days they’ll actually have one of your products that they’ll have to run through the paces or find things that they don’t like.
Thomas: I think that we really look forward to that. As long as they’re understanding that it starts with not having an NFL license, because that’s what we’re building. We’re building a football game and as long as they start with the idea and they treat it fairly across the board, that that’s what this is. Then that’s exactly what we expect from everybody. We’re building a football game and we expect to be judged on quality of the A.I. and the animation and the visuals and the sound and all the things that we’ve been known for, that’s what we’re expecting. And we’re not sure how everyone is going to take it. I look at this as this is definitely a more hardcore game. When I think about who’s going to buy this game I think that “is this going to be people looking for their Madden fix? Are people looking for their NFL fix? Their football fix?” This to me is people looking for their football fix, obviously. They may also purchase Madden, they may also play some other football game. But, it’s about playing the best one, playing the one that hopefully they like so much as 2K5. This is not just 2K5 redux either -- this is a brand new game. It really is us trying to make the best football game we can make. There are always going to be things you can do more, and better or you can innovate and this and that. We’re not going in the direction of trying to do something totally crazy. We’re trying to make the best football game we can based on the game that we made before.
GI: Because I can imagine for casual fans, that will be the hardest thing to do. They see the thing on the shelf, “What’s All Pro Football?” I don’t know who the Tigers are or whatever the teams are going to be. Is that something you guys are going to attack just on the marketing end? How are you guys going to overcome that? How are you going to overcome feeling the need for a license?
Thomas: We cannot over come that. That is not something we can overcome. There are things that we are going to do - and we have not talked about that yet - that we think are very “football centric things.” But, generally speaking, this is not an NFL game. That’s where it starts. Right there. It’s going to be obvious to people and it’s the first jumping off point when playing our football game. It’s not an NFL game, it’s a football game. This is a very football centric game. But you’re not going to get an NFL license with this game. You can think about what that means negatively but instead of what we’ve done is we’ve thought about what that means positively. And not just in the way of, “Oh, now you can swear. Oh now you can do this.” We’ve thought about it and what it means in a positive sense for a football fan.
GI: Is this kind of retooling as a whole for the game also a way you can possibly introduced a non-yearly cycle to sports games?
Thomas: I don’t want to say we haven’t thought about that because we’ve thought about a lot of things. I don’t think that we’re trying to go into an annual or bi-annual kind of cycle. We’ve got a lot of different ideas, and this is one where we want to see how it goes. There’s a lot of ways to do it and this is one of the ways. We think this is the right way to go but we just won’t know until we see how the sales are.
But again, we think it all starts with the engine. Even if there was another hook or something else that we were going to do the next time it would still all be based around this football engine, that we here, just love. We here can not play enough of it. We here believe in it so much. I’ve gotten all of these e-mails and I’ve read all of the forum posts and all of these things that you cannot get in a football game today. That’s what everything is based on for us.
GI: Do you guys have any interest in developing for the Wii?
Thomas: We are in development for the Wii. But, not this game, per say, but we are developing other games for the Wii, and we really like the Wii. You’re asking if this game makes sense on the Wii?
GI: What about the NBA or MLB? These games are very complex games that have a lot of different facets to them. Would it be a situation where you just unveil a different line with a different focus for the Wii?
Thomas: I think it’s easy to fall into the, “Oooh, Wii is a kids machine or Wii is the motion game machine or something, and let’s keep it simple.” We just wouldn’t want to do it that way. We build simulation sports games. Would there be some new wrinkles? Of course there would. We wouldn’t just want to bolt on new control, but we would definitely want to take those people on the Wii and have them enjoy the same experience we’re giving to people not on the Wii. Just make sure that as we go, it really uses their machine in the best way we can. Whether if we’re using Miis or whatever it is just making sure that it holds true to our experience and it gives them what they’re looking for. And those to me can align. But they’re not always the simple, “hey, just make it simpler, take out the franchise mode, or this and that.” It’s not like that. I think we need to give a little bit more respect to that market.
Note: This is a brief excerpt of the full interview that can be found in this month's Game Informer Unlimited for Game Informer Magazine subscribers only. Already a subscriber? Head over to Game Informer Unlimited now to get the rest of this exclusive interview!
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04-23-2007, 03:17 PM
