Interviews// F1 2011: Senior Producer, Paul Jeal

Paul Jeal: The tagline ‘Be the Driver, Live the Life’ sounds like a cool PR angle, but it wasn’t at all. It was our internal thought processes about how we could evaluate game features. ‘Be the Driver’ came from the fact that it’s a racing game, and so there are all sorts of core elements that you have to get right - the AI, the handling, the pit stops, for example.

‘Live the Life’ was our way of thinking of ways to bring in more people. If you look at the sales figures there’s some 600,000 people who always buy F1 games without question. But how do you bring more people in? How do you bring in people who watch NASCAR or Touring Car races? Players of Gran Turismo? We wanted to bring these guys in, and also look further afield to the casual fans who just read about Hamilton in the paper. So ‘Live the Life’ was born from that.

But the fact that Formula 1 has so much going on now - night races, daytime races, young racers and all kinds of media attention - implementing all of that stuff was a really cool angle for us, and then obviously we just moved on for 2011 in order to get into the space of multiplayer. Too long has there been a situation where you’ve had to put everyone back in the box when your mates come round. We had to change that this year.


SPOnG: You’ve now built up quite a sizeable community for the F1 game series. How do you plan to keep those players involved?

Paul Jeal: They community is key, and we would love to come out and interact with them all the time. But there are certain restrictions on what we can say, or there may be situations where it’s not entirely clear why we worked on Feature X rather than Feature Y. I think some people just believe that if you didn’t have Live the Life, you could have Formation rounds. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve only got a certain amount of resources, a certain amount of skill sets and a certain amount of memory to play with.

Having said that, we always read the feedback. The feedback is always valued, and we know right from the beginning of 2010’s development that you have to get this core audience support. You have to sell them the idea, and have them believe in the direction you’re going with it. I think off the back of the market research we did for 2010, there wasn’t necessarily internal confidence at the studio.

But after events like E3 last year, all of a sudden you get these really positive reactions where people think we’re doing the right thing. You always think you’re doing the right thing, but it’s always nice to get that confirmed and also have really creative suggestions to improve the game as well.

Last March was the first time we had ever done a launch event, and the publisher invited community people to that. Our internal reaction was ‘Yikes! You’re going to invite community people to get their hands on the game six months before it’s out? Do you realise what state it’s going to be in? They’ll be Twittering pictures about it, it’s going to be crazy.’

But they just loved the fact that they got their hands on it. They loved to talk to us, and to get that interaction with us. I think that sort of thing is going to be a part of all of Codemasters projects, now that we’ve seen the benefits of getting the community involved that early on in development.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our supercharged interview with Paul Jeal!