We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.
The only one that seems to be able to hold the business is Disney. They do it is because they have a fabulous philosophy about marketing- but even they wavered.
Shelf-life for a regular video game usually is about three to five years, and that's it.
The heart of Dragon's Lair has always been its compelling story. With Dragon's Lair 3D, we think the team has really created an interactive animated movie.
With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.
When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry.
If you look at the game and everything, it's not quite like looking at an animated film, because that's total character. This, this is really movement, but it's got funny little things if you look for the humor. They're actually getting to the character.
We'd love to do Space Ace 3D. It has a lot of potential. But, it is really up to the publishers.
But I've been surprised over the years. I mean, someone told me the other day that maybe 360 million people have played this game in the world. That's a lot of people.
The studios will go wherever they smell money. It's like sharks to the blood.
I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.
It's whatever sells; it's the business of it.
I think we have to bottom out. When the studios jump out of the ring, perhaps the artist can get back in.
Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them - the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome.
You've got to be able to make animation for much less... Less is not the studio's way.
The marketing department is really an important part of getting an animated film to work. If the people running it are used to selling live action films and the hard rock music and the sex and all those things... Anything outside that, they just don't know what to do with it.
How can you have a director that doesn't go to work with the crew every day and talk to them?
In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line.
I prefer that animation reach into places where live action doesn't go, and it seems like all of animation nowadays is trying to go where live action is.
It just seems like the whole, overall animation world is trying to go where maybe animation doesn't belong.
