Interview: Vivendi Games Mobile CEO Paul Maglione

We're big fans of The Incredible Machine, as you'll know if you read our review last week. It'll be familiar to gamers of a certain vintage, as it was a popular PC game in the mid-'90s.

Vivendi Games Mobile is about to capitalise on that era with another game, Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail. Meanwhile, the company is also running an innovative promotion around its upcoming Crash Of The Titans game, putting one lucky O2 customer into the game as a boss character.

We chatted to Paul Maglione, CEO at Vivendi Games Mobile, to find out more on all the above, plus other trends he sees in the mobile games market.

Pocket Gamer: We've heard a lot about the 'Atari Generation' of mobile gamers, but you clearly see potential in tapping more recent PC games. Paul Maglione: Yeah, I think the arcade classics stuff has proven its worth in mobile and is still going strong, but now people are saying 'what else did we used to enjoy playing that's still got merit in terms of gameplay and originality?'

Clearly we're in a good spot in terms of the games Sierra had in its catalogue in the '80s and '90s, so we're looking at those carefully to see which ones merit being brought back as mobile games.

It's surprising how well something like The Incredible Machine has transferred to mobile – it didn't need many changes at all.

The greatest restriction back then was on processor speeds, which drove a certain economy of movement and graphics, which matches up quite well with the restrictions of mobile phones today.

What's more, they're short-session games even in their PC versions. You wouldn't spend three hours on The Incredible Machine on the PC, you'd spend 15-20 minutes. So it's a happy circumstance that the gameplay designed into games back then happens to work well on phones today.

Are you just relying on people feeling nostalgic for these games, or are you also trying to educate younger gamers about brands like The Incredible Machine and Leisure Suit Larry?

Oh, we're definitely doing both. For the younger players, even though you may make reference to the heritage, it's a brand new IP to them, so you have to sell it on the originality, uniqueness and fun factor.

You can't really say to someone who's 16 to 18, 'play this because you enjoyed playing it ten years ago' – because they probably weren't! So you have to sell it on its merits, and make it a new experience for them.

How does the new Leisure Suit Larry game fit into that?

Adventure games are underrepresented on the operator decks, yet it's a very fun and different genre. More importantly, you can play it in short bursts, but there's a continuum of experience there.

So you're waiting for the bus and play for five minutes, then come home for school or work and play for another 10 minutes, but you're still in the same story and brand character. It's more engaging than a pure match-three puzzle game, but you can still play it in short bursts.

Plus there's the humour of the game. We're really happy with the new Larry game: it really is true to the brand and the original PC franchise, so we're expecting it to do well.

Moving onto Crash Of The Titans and your competition with O2. What's the thinking behind that?

Well, the game will be one of our biggest launches of the year – it's going to be everywhere globally. So we thought it would be cool to give people the chance to be in the game as a boss-level character, and 'crash' themselves into the game. We think it captures the irreverence of the Crash Bandicoot games.

Does this sort of thing end lead to other ways for players to interact more with their mobile games?

Definitely. We're doing a thing with [mobile operator] Cingular in the US where you can go onto their website and create your own Incredible Machine puzzle, and submit it to the producers, to be included in future puzzle packs.

We're doing other cool stuff to involve people more, too. In the US we're releasing a game called People's Choice Hangman, where people can go onto the website, create their own word lists and then submit them for update packs. The best ones will be chosen and labelled with that person's name.

It moves mobile games a bit more into the personalisation zone, where the phone and what's on the phone is a reflection of your own personality. The most obvious way people do that is by wallpapers or ringtones, but the next step is to have a modified game with your own word list or puzzles in.

What other trends have you noticed recently?

The bar is constantly being raised higher in terms of what publishers have to do to keep operators happy, in terms of specific functionalities, the way we package our files, the links we build into our games, and the handset coverage. But in the last year, what's really expanded is the range we have to cover.

We do everything from 64KB games up to 1MB games at the very least, so in reality we're doing 10-12 master builds, which means effectively doing four or five games instead of just one.

On more complex games, you have a lot more graphics as you scale up, so there's more art, more assets and more coding. For action games, racing games and sports games, there's really no way around that – and that's without thinking about Symbian or N-Gage games!

For casual games, you can scale it up for higher handset specs without having to transform it in the same way. That's why brands like Larry, which is 2D, and The Incredible Machine benefit from those simple, cheerful bright graphics that don't require you to go down the road of trying to create a mini console game.

What about N-Gage and Symbian? Are they of interest to Vivendi Games Mobile?

It's an interesting area: will the Halo player on console ever accept Halo on a mobile phone? Or is it more about the person who's curious to get a taste of the Halo brand, even if they aren't remotely in the market for buying an Xbox 360? It's probably the latter.

So the biggest [console] brands will have some success as mobile games purely for the curiosity factor. But the people who are really looking to have a high-end 3D experience on mobile? It's still a niche market, I think.