FG: And what's your reaction to this?

John: Of course our games are a bit different from what is already out there and selling because they are meant to be original! That is the whole fucking point! We want to be trend-setting not trend-following!

The problem is that the majority of the label-conscious, ten-minute attention span, soundbite generation would appear to be hellbent on trend-following too. It's like a fucking disease at the moment, so these people just play right into the marketing people's hands. It is not any individuals within marketing who are a problem, many of them are very nice people, it is just the whole ethos of it that stinks.

If I spend three years working on a game I want the game to sell for at least three years once it's released. I don't want loads of hype at the time of initial launch, in order for the publisher to make a modest profit on the initial development outlay, and then budget and bundle deals within six months to make way for new products in the marketing pipeline. What a fucking insult.

What has happened to the publishers' faith in their premier developers to deliver premier titles? I say: have faith in what you are doing yourself and fuck everyone else's opinion. In the computer games industry at the moment there are far too many people in jobs where they don't have a full grasp on what they are doing. As a consequence they are taking advice from people who have even less idea about what they are doing.

FG: When you look around the games industry today, what do you think of the levels of innovation and risk-taking?

John: Technical innovation is happening all the time at an incredible rate, although programmers are still not given the time to really master their machines as they did with the Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Mega Drive and so on. I would imagine that PlayStation programmers on their third PlayStation title are probably getting to grips with that machine now. That said, development teams are getting bigger all the time and truly creative programming is much harder when it has to be co-ordinated throughout a team. There are too many possible permutations of communication breakdown so it is often easier to play it safe. Also, people frequently assume that the other guy is doing something that he isn't. When there is no other guy greater control can be assumed in all areas, which allows for a greater scope for safe innovation and risk-taking on a technical front.