TGR: Do you see yourself moving down that path with the external type of devices?

RM: I always look at it. They had this question a few times during the week on the panel I was on about how do you approach the design? You need to know who you are, and what your innovation points are. You know who you are selling to, what they want, and what you are building. And all together, the business mold falls into that as well, so does the technology and whatever apparatus or however you are delivering it. It all has to be congruent, so you have to know who wants to buy it, and why and what do they want to play. Why and what are you building, and why and what are you really good at, something you are better at than anybody else in the world. Everything else you are doing should flow out of that. If these things enable us to do it, yes, it is great, but we are not going to do them just for the sake of doing them. We wouldn’t want to do them unless they will make our games better than anything else.

It is commercial art. It is a healthy process because it means people are pulling it, you are not pushing it. It is not just sitting there empty. It is actively being consumed. I think that it is really neat to think that your game is being played by millions of people. And that it may be affecting people the same way it did when I was a kid. I have really positive memories of that. It was really fun, and if I could help my teams to help reach people in that way with things that we are developing, I mean I am really excited about that idea.

TGR: Well, I know I played your games growing up. Are you trying to attract different audiences today than you did early on?

RM: When we showed the video of all our outtakes and videos of gameplay from all our past games, people asked, “Well, where are you going?” Watch this and then you will see, because there is a very clear path of where the characters are going in the story and exploration. And even though every game is quite different, if you look at our portfolio now, both of the announced and the unannounced stuff, it is actually all over the place in terms of different audiences we are targeting. Yet there is probably a group of people who play everything we ever make, and we don’t want to lose them. We are always trying to extend that and reach a new audience with every game, as can be seen with Sonic Chronicles on DS. It is a new audience for us. But it is still going to feel like a regular game, but it is also going to be kind of different.

TGR: So how far ahead internally do you plan when it comes to games?

RM: We look at it in different levels of detail. So we plan the next two to three years in quite a bit of detail, while the next five years are in more moderate detail, and the ten years is maybe in more of a theoretical type of planning, where would we see ourselves going. Really then, there is no end point on these. The great thing about our industry is there is no point where you are done. It can always get better, right? Because even when the technology has reached the level where it is just seamless, and everyone has access to the same tools and tech, there is still a division.

Have you made something that will touch people and create that emotional connection? That is what I am most excited about. We are reaching that point now, where visual fidelity is not really the barrier anymore. It is up to us now to make the mocap, the animation, the textures, and the facial expressions all across the uncanny valley to reach something that actually touches people.

With cinema, you could watch a horse walk in, or a train coming into the station and it was so cool because it was just like events. There is a non-emotional event which then progressed into silent film, BO, color, and then special effects. But now, it is all about what is the story and the narrative, and the characters and whether you care about them. It has probably taken 100 years of cinema to get to that level. Games are maybe 30 years old, depending on what exactly you count as a game. But what is the next 30 years of games going to be like? It feels to me like we are kind of somewhere in there right? So if that is the past, what could be achieved in the future is almost unimaginable. And you also want to go to science fiction or fantasy, to try and guess what possibilities there are.