Interviews// Evolution Studios, Martin Kenwright

SPOnG: Is the game absolutely finished now?

MK: We’re just rounding off – I think Japan is all but there now, and it’s all ready for launch in a few weeks. We’re just rounding off all the online side, because the amount of testing and QA for online is quite profound. But the game is never really finished -- we’ll just keep rolling it forward, probably until I’m about 65 years of age.

SPOnG: But it will be a launch title for Europe?

MK: For sure – that was always the plan.

SPOnG: How was the experience of developing for the PlayStation 3, in general?

MK: I think there was a lot of emotion involved – everyone was honoured, thrilled and terrified, all at the same time. It’s really exciting for technologists to get a piece of new hardware and be the first at it. So in that sense, people loved it. But at the same time, there was the expectation of what we would achieve.

We kind of burnt our ships after the MotorStorm movie of ’05 – there was no going back. We have images now which show we exceeded that in many areas, and in the future, we know we’ll surpass that. There was a lot of pressure, and it took some remarkable efforts from the team. And Sony were great, with their support – for an independent studio, we were almost treated like a first-party studio.

SPOnG: How big was the team, and how much outsourcing did you need?

MK: The team was considerable, because we wanted to make sure we were there for launch, and it’s best to over-resource rather than under-resource. We thought big, and I counted through the credits list the other day, and I think there were about 500 people on it.



Of course, that was all indirect, but the core team was easily 100-odd people. And the amount of outsourcing was a lot. As we reached this level of sophistication, we’ve got to move more and more that way – getting the expertise in in the relevant areas.

SPOnG: Cheers, Martin.