Interviews// David Jaffe: Calling All Cars

SPOnG: Playing it single-player, the AI is quite harsh – you have to work hard to get through it. Was that a conscious thing?

David Jaffe: Well, no. We focus-tested the crap out of it, because we didn’t want to make the game too hard. We saw a lot of early testers complaining about the overwhelming power the AI has with the magnet. Because we had to go back into the game and fix critical bugs anyway, we went back in. We didn’t change the multiplayer, which everyone seems to be a fan of anyway, but in single-player, we toned down the AI ability to suck the criminal out of your car with the magnet. And we may also have toned down the difficulty a little bit in the default mode. That’s the hard part, too: when you focus-test it, you don’t know who your audience are. We brought people in as focus-testers who were obviously interested in videogames, and we watched them play in default mode, even before we fixed the magnet.

These guys would be able to get through the game in, like, 25 minutes. PlayStation 3 is still a relatively expensive purchase; the assumption is that people who have one can hang on to the title of a gamer. So it was a real challenge: who were we tuning the single-player for?


SPOnG: Was Wacky Races an influence?

David Jaffe: No. Robert Crumb was an influence – the cartoon artist who did a lot of comics back in the 60s and 70s (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – ancient Ed.). Originally, it was not going to be so much of a G-rated family game – it was going to be more of an X-rated, kind of cartoony Ralph Bakshei kind of thing, and for a number of reasons we ended up moving away from that. One was a gameplay reason, one was an issue with guys on the team, where guys didn’t know whether we wanted to take it that far. Wacky Races is more benign than where this actually started out, which was much more X-rated.


SPOnG: What was behind the name-change from Criminal Crackdown?

David Jaffe: Legal came back and said that we couldn’t use Crackdown. They never said this, but the assumption was because Microsoft has this game Crackdown. Legal’s great because they watch out for us, and nobody wants to end up in court or to get sued. For me, that was a little bit of a stretch – Criminal Crackdown/Crackdown, people ought to be able to tell the difference.


SPOnG: Are we going to see more PSN download games from you in the future, then?

David Jaffe: That’s all you’re going to see of me in the future. You never know what’s going to happen, but this is the space I want to be in, to work with this great team I have out of Utah, and I want us to really make our mark in this space.

To me, it’s all a journey – that’s what I learned from God of War, that I only want to do games that I feel can 100 per cent reach the intention of the designers behind them. I think this game comes a lot closer to realising the intent – it may not be as critically successful – but the intent is to provide people with fun, to make people laugh and trash-talk with their buddies. I think that intent has been achieved much better than the intent behind God of War, which was to get people to feel emotional about the story and the character. I feel that we can achieve our intents much better on the PlayStation Network with these sorts of games, and this is all I’ve got lined up for at least the next couple of years. Assuming Sony will continue to support me and put up with me.

SPOnG: So, you’ve got several ideas for download games?

David Jaffe: We’re in the design phase right now – here it is (holds notebook to camera to chorus of “Hey, put that away” from Sony people) – with number two and three right now.


SPOnG: Thanks David.