James Waller: Well the fighting games were really successful for us, so that's something that we will always pursue. We'll probably go back to that pretty soon. But Def Jam Rapstar is just a whole different arena.
It's what we build our careers on, it's what Def Jam was built on, it was built on rap and paving the way for people to be able to express themselves lyrically. No-one wanted to play rap in the United States when Def Jam was first doing it, and we literally had to go and beat down the doors of the music stations.
It's a similar thing today – no-one wants to put rap songs in their music games. They give you a sprinkle of songs here and there. This is us beating down the doors again, saying rap is worthy of having its own representation, not just talk about putting songs in a game just to satisfy us. This is just a step in another direction in us trying to pave the way for hip-hop.
James Waller: With partners like 4mm, you never know where you're gonna go (laughs). I'm excited just... you go into Jamie's office and you see the drawings on the wall and you're like 'Oh man, this is gonna be nuts!' You see it coming to life and you're like 'this is really cool,' so... we're creative partners. You never know where you're gonna go, so... we're never going to pinpoint ourselves to a particular space in the gaming business.
Jamie King: And that's why we really like working with them. At 4mm, we look at Def Jam and think that it's such an amazing brand. They can be anything they want to be in the video game space, and I think they did have a very interesting experience with making the fighting games and working with EA. It was almost like a taste of what can be done, but I think what is important now is that these games are coming, from the beginning, from Def Jam in very much a creative and inceptive way.
You touch on the fight games – that was a great franchise, and as James said that's there to go back to and to revisit. This is Def Jam stepping into the music genre, because someone had to do the hip-hop game. And it totally makes sense that they did it, and they have a lot of ideas for more games and we encourage that because we want to keep making games with them. We think there's a lot of potential and opportunity there in many different genres that we could get into.
SPOnG: What are the options for expansion if Rapstar performs well in the music space?
Jamie King: We're already talking about Rapstar 2. Although we're supporting Rapstar 1 heavily, especially because of all the community features. Once you build something like that, you have to keep feeding it. We can't anticipate some of the behaviours and outcomes that will come, so we've got the flexible for that. We are very excited to already be talking about Rapstar 2, so yeah there's a lot of life in this.
James Waller: One thing I learned about 4mm – and our company in particular, one thing that I was reminded of – is that nothing goes out of the door unless it's perfect. So there was a lot of things that we had in the game that would have been amazing to have in 1, but we couldn't perfect them in time, because we wanted to get this product on the market.
So we held it back, but Rapstar 2 will definitely get those things in. It's going to be a totally improved game, it's not just gonna be us putting more songs in the game.
Jamie King: And that's a challenge that's really important to us, because otherwise like you said it's not a 'true sequel.' And that's where there will be a real challenge in how do we innovate on the gameplay.
Of course there's a lot more songs to be added, both to this one through DLC and the community – but then we wouldn't want to put a game out that wasn't a true sequel. There is then that business timing, and there's a certain amount of time when there's a window to do a follow-up – and that's then the challenge. How do we really push the gameplay?
And there are definitely a number of things that we did hold back and we're already talking about bringing those out for Rapstar 2. We won't bring it out though unless there is that real next step in gameplay.
Jamie King: (Laughs) I feel bad for them because we don't want to dump on other people's games, and they tried hard. I think they were very ahead of their time... in a way... and I think looking at the way games were developed at that point – in our early pitch ideas, I wasn't aware of that game. And we had written our big plan, you know 'from the street to the world stage,' and almost everything that we had written appeared on the back of this box that landed on my desk one morning.
We looked at it, and it was like... OK, I don't want to start in a crappy bathroom. And that was where we were thinking 'how are we going to give players an avatar that's hip-hop?' At the same time, looking at how everyone videos themselves and posts it on Youtube, the idea of being a global brand, reality shows and the idea that 'anyone can be a star'... we realised that's where we had to go with it. Let's make it about you and the camera. The third piece to that was the community, and getting them to post everything.