Interviews// God of War: Ghost of Sparta

SPOnG: Of course, you guys have done well out of being a high-profile PSP developer, haven’t you? Have you always been considered a first-party studio with Sony?

RW: Ready at Dawn’s been around for seven years. We've been working with Sony first-party for seven years for three games. The cool thing last year was that we were named as one of the 13th best overall game developers in the United States, and 30th overall in the world.

After looking at the list we realised that we were fourth as independent developer. There have been very few big indie developers that have been on that list for a long, long time. So, it was kind of a problem for us last year, you know, to be there. And we've done what we wanted in those seven years. We've tried to build the right team.

In 2006 we released Daxter. It's gone on to sell - I guess - something like four million units overall. So, again, you can be successful on PSP, that's the point. You can totally be successful. Daxter’s kind of our first baby. It’s still very close to our hearts.

We released God of War: Chains of Olympus in 2008, that ended being the highest rated game on the platform. It still is. Hopefully we'll beat that - we'll see what happens with Ghost of Sparta. We truly think that we’ve made a better game, we'll see what people think about it. But again we want to go on with that track record and sell worldwide.


SPOnG: It says "100% of the power" there [indicates press blurb]. I know when a lot of developers talk about "Oh we've used 70% or we've used 100% of this console's power"... I'm not doubting that line there, but is it really 100%?

RW: Funnily enough this line came not so much from us but talking back with the hardware guys, looking back at what could be done; all the things we tried to push; things we tried to break. We broke the PSP as far as, like, pushing too much stuff on it.

And breaking it really just means you do things and realise, 'Oh that's not going to work, the frame-rate's dropping to 10 and this is impossible, there are no ways around it.' So, after talking to them, we were actually told by those guys that "Yeah, you can safely say that this game pretty much leverages the whole PSP."

The big thing for us is that we think we've pushed the power of the PSP to its limits at this moment.


SPOnG: So, David Jaffe... did he have any involvement in the game? As a consultant?

RW: No, no.


SPOnG: Because the first two games were kind of like his babies it could be argued.

RW: In some ways, yeah.


SPOnG: Particularly the first one.

RW: Yeah, absolutely.


SPOnG: So, did it feel weird messing about with that at all?

RW: Not at all. Funnily enough we've had five games and five different directors at this point. It's kind of cool because I think we've all learnt what God of War was in our own way, and we've all added what we wanted to the game. So, honestly... David has his own thing going on with Eat Sleep Play right now and he's doing really well.

The only time I really talked to him was during this game’s development, but we never talked about the project itself. I managed to get his opinion at the end when everything was done - we had this director's get-together that was filmed in the United States, where all of us are in a room and the audience asks us questions.

At that point we picked his brain and went, "Hey, what do you think?" and, to tell you the truth I don't think he said he would have done it any differently.

It's cool that we have multiple creatives play with the IP and create new things rather than always having the same person do it. And I think that's one of the reasons why every God of War has been a good God of War, it's because every different one has brought a different perspective.