"It will have aliens… shotguns… and rocket launchers…"
Interviewing Scott Foe is comparable to reading a riveting novel where the final chapter has been taken out. As the producer behind the Project White Rock, the N-Gage title clouded in mystery, all he would tell me about the title is the aforementioned aliens, shotguns and rocket launchers comments. Make of that what you will.
What is in no doubt is that Foe is an upcoming star in the gaming world – you don’t get named one of the next generation gamer makers to watch for nothing. Fans of the original N-Gage will no doubt be familiar with the massively multiplayer game Pocket Kingdom. Foe was the producer behind that, and he brought a huge amount of his knowledge and innate understanding of connected mobile multiplayer gaming into Pocket Kingdom. And while it was very much a ‘love it or hate it title,’ the Kingdom generated twice as much activity as any other title, with player racking up more than seven hours online each month.
“We were probably the biggest mobile online game at that time,” points out a proud Foe.
So with the likes of Xbox 360, Sony and Nintendo all going after the connected games, why is Foe still at Nokia? “A lot of my friends in the industry do like to tease me about that,” he drawls, “but Nokia are more than happy to let me try stuff.” The Finns aren’t hedging their bets in doing sequels, but continuing to push the boat out, to throw ideas at the wall, and see what sticks. There are no $50 million budgets on the line, so the risk compared to the reward is comparatively less.
As if it to prove that, Foe tells me that he pitched the idea for Project White Rock in under 30 seconds (“the classic Silicon Valley elevator pitch”) and while it may have raised a few eyebrows in upper management, he was handed the reins not just to develop and produce the title, but to run the marketing as well – and very few people in the games can successfully wear the same hat.
And while it’s incredibly hard to pin down Foe on the exact nature of the game, his track record in multiplayer connectivity is hinting at some sort of massive web/cloud of players in the same environment; some of them working together, some working against each other. I’m sure the popularity of clans and raiding in World of Warcraft will have been noted somewhere in his head, and I wouldn’t be surprised if such elements figured in the new title.
While White Rock was no longer on the table, Foe took me through his ideas of how to run a connected game. One (now obvious to me) point was that a perceived problem of high latency and a long time for packets to do the round trip (some three or four times that of a home based game) is actually a good thing, as it opens up the whole world to multi-player, as opposed to those just in America, or Europe. The extra time lets the packets traverse the world, and if you’ve designed to accept that, then the community grows to such an extent that the massively multiplayer game is truly massive.
He followed that up with a lot of technical talk about modes, synchronous and asynchronous action, which I just about followed, and then took all the different potential multiplayer game modes and integrated them into a simple demo on screen. One player was doing a Tetris style game, where the colours of the lines affected the second player firing away at the alien invaders, while a third player was running communication between the two – if this is what they’re happy to show in a PowerPoint, then heaven knows what Foe has dreamed up for the actual games.
“Mobile games should be easy to play… and easy to master,” are his thoughts on what makes a good mobile game. “The consensus of easy to play, impossible to master” is one that just doesn’t work on mobile devices.” I think about that for the moment – my flight to San Francisco saw me playing the hit PSP Game, Monster Hunter Portable, and the long periods of game-play, involved keystrokes, and infrequent save points do bear that out. It wouldn’t be suitable for a mobile phone.
Any rival studio out there would treat Foe as their rock star programmer – yet Nokia have provided him an environment he can challenge himself in, a platform where he can work on genuinely new titles, a place his creative can be unleashed. Scott Foe is exactly where he wants to be. And the indications are that the N-Gage platform is going to bring something genuinely new and exciting to the table. Which is exactly where Nokia want to be as well.