Denis Dyack is the Founder and President of video game developer Silicon Knights, which began a year after publishing Cyber Empires (also known as Steel Empire) in 1991. Silicon Knights has since moved from PC games to developing console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original Playstation. Silicon Knights also created, as a second party with Nintendo, Eternal Darkness, in addition to working with Konami America to create Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Currently, Mr. Dyack is developing a new game for Sega of America and about to release Too Human on the Xbox 360.

TGR recently spoke with Mr. Dyack in connection with his work on the Too Human trilogy for the Xbox360.

THE GAME REVIEWS: I just played the Too Human demo. What are your thoughts on what people have said about it so far?

DENIS: We just released the Too Human demo on Monday, which has been downloaded a lot. The impressions so far have been extremely positive, and we are really happy with that. I think we have a new website up, with all kinds of things in Live too. From that perspective, we are happy.

TGR: Can you comment on what the press has been saying about it?

DENIS: There has been a wide variety of opinions, simply because the game is so different. When you are first looking at the game’s videos, it appears to be an action game. So for a while, it got compared to games like Gears of War and Devil May Cry, which I do not think helped us at all. Once people played it, they realized it is an RPG. From that point, it started leaning more towards games like Diablo.

The unique thing about Too Human is that it is such a fusion of action and RPG. Once players start learning that you have to juggle to get your combo meter up, and economy with combo points, then they really enjoy it a lot.

All of the previews that I saw where people realized that really loved the game. I think others were a little too hasty to judge, because the game is so deep. But I think all of that is going to come around. In the end, it is in the hands of the gamers now, so I think the best press of all is word of mouth.

TGR: Right. How many downloads so far?

DENIS: I cannot say, but it has been in the hundreds of thousands.

TGR: The game has been in development for a really long time. How has it changed over the years?

DENIS: Essentially, we did some early work on the PS1, but when we became a second party to Nintendo, we stopped working on it completely. We started working on Eternal Darkness and finally came back around to working on the 360 recently, after we broke away from Nintendo. That has been the development cycle on it. We had to rewrite the engine and there have been issues there. Those are all public, but essentially, it has not been this crazy long super development cycle that people tend to claim in the industry. Instead it has been closer to a typical game development cycle – four years or so.

TGR: Instead you moved away from it to work on another game. Did you ever worry that you would never find the time to get back to it?

DENIS: No, we actually planned on bringing it to the GameCube. After we finished Eternal Darkness, which was originally planned for the N64, then we moved it to the GameCube, and everyone thought that would be a better decision. We finished Eternal Darkness and were getting ready to start on Too Human. Then we started working on Metal Gear, which caught us quite by surprise. After Metal Gear was completed, our intention was to work on Too Human, and we moved to the 360.