Exclusive Interview with Codemaster's Dance Factory Svengali

The forthcoming Dance Factory from Britsoft legends Codemasters is such a simple concept its genius. It’s a dance mat game that works with any music CD! Its one of those ideas that as soon as you hear it, you immediately think one of two things: ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of that?’ or ‘Why has nobody done this already?’. Well, we didn’t think of it, and nobody else has either until now.

Earlier today, SPOnG caught up with David Brickley, the Development Manager on the project up at Codemasters in Warwickshire, to quiz him about this innovative dancing game and try to get a bit of a clearer view as to Codemaster’s longer term development plans for the increasingly popular dancing and party game genre.

Codemasters and Broadsword Interactive have tuned the technology in Dance Factory to make it work well with the broadest possible range of music possible, which means you can pretty much try out your entire CD collection in the game. Although we're not sure if our copies of Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music' or Joy Division's essential miserablist classic 'Unknown Pleasures' would generate much dancing fun. But then we don't suppose that miserable old northern blokes are the key target market for Dance Factory.

Check out the interview where David also hints at some exciting future possibilities for dancing games and shares his thoughts with SPOnG on the worrying Christmas overload of poorer licenses and franchise products, instead of more innovative titles such as Dance Factory.

He is also keen to discuss future plans for dancing/music titles, although is somewhat cagey about the possibility of online style Pop Idol contests within online game worlds. As he says, “Why bother? The drummer will still be rubbish and the bass player will still find an excuse not to turn up on time!”.

We also hear about the unique Creature mode in Dance Factory, inspired by the idea that there’s a Creature living on each of your music CDs and the game software kind of jolts it out of sleep into dancing with you.

All in all it sounds like there’s some seriously sideways thinking going on up in a game studio somewhere in Warwickshire. Perhaps its something in the water up there, or perhaps its an excess of those funny magic mushrooms in the local cows milk. Whatever it is, its producing some genuinely innovative videogame ideas, which SPOnG is always happy to support. Watch this space for a first look at the game early in the new year.

Check out the interview: http://spong.com/x?eid=10109325