In the time it’s taken many to simply suss out the hardware, Burbank’s Insomniac Games has made more triple-A titles for PS3 than any other developer. Say what you like about the solemn and scrappy Resistance series, but its ongoing work with Ratchet & Clank has been exemplary. The gambolling Future series – which comes to a close with this month’s Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time – shows just what you can do when you know your market, nail down your philosophy and, above all, have just as much fun as you intend for your audience. What is that philosophy and who are those players? We catch up with writer TJ Fixman and community relations manager James Stevenson to find out.

What’s the actual audience for a Ratchet & Clank game?
TJF We have really two audiences. We have the male 18-34 audience, which is probably our primary market. It would probably be our secondary market were it not for the PS3 user base - it kind of depends on whom we talk to. We kind of view them and males under 18 as the interchangeable primary-secondary market. Then we have the third market: all PS3 owners. What's helped us a lot is that we have a lot of kids who were 13 in 2002 and are 21 or 22 now, and are still big fans of the series. So there's a lot of crossover and fortunately we have a hardcore audience on PS3 that knows Ratchet & Clank and discusses it.

The series certainly appeals to children and parents alike, whereas movies like Shrek 3 infamously skew towards the latter. Is that something you watch out for?
TJF [laughs] Have you been reading our whiteboards? It's definitely challenging. The thing is, we look at Shrek 1: they did satire, they did referential humour, they did pop culture - but the right blend with the regular family-friendly humour, and that's why it was okay. But by the time they hit Shrek 3 that's all they had left. They fell back on it too much.



About those Mario-esque levels in A Crack In Time...
TJF Ah, this is James’ favourite question to answer.
JS Well, let's go back to the PS2 games where we had spherical levels. It's not like Mario Galaxy did spherical levels and now we're doing spherical levels - we did do that before - but Mario Galaxy's done some phenomenal things that we’ve in some ways tried to emulate. One thing they did phenomenally well - and actually this started in Mario Sunshine - is that you have the jetpack, but then you go through pipes into levels where you don’t, you have a really challenging platforming sequence. I think for a lot of hardcore gamers that was the best part of the game. And Mario Galaxy did the same; it was like birthday-cake levels.

The last few Mario levels, and the last few Luigi stars, were incredibly challenging. So challenging that they had to give you a 1up at the checkpoints because you'd never get through it on a normal amount of lives. I remember sitting there, almost laughing because it was so much fun to be challenged by a Mario Bros game again. And I think a lot of players who really enjoy gaming, really want to play a platformer and enjoy everything Ratchet & Clank has represented over the years are gonna just eat that up - because it's finally us saying, 'let's see what our designers can think up for you and actually give you something that will make you feel accomplished'.

PS3 exclusives suffer their fair share of fanboyism. When dealing with that kind of mentality, how do you sift out the constructive feedback?
TJF We read everything. Good, bad, ugly, all in caps, or in another language and Babelfished. We read it all. And I think what's interesting is that when we ship something, a lot of the time we already know a lot about the game. So someone will call something out and either we knew it and we were too close to see it - as soon as we step back, we see it – or maybe we were in denial. You need all these voices to come in and you look for the recurring themes. You look for the people that are reasonable and well thought-out; some people construct their arguments very well. Some people, of course, are idiots and don't understand game development at all, and they'll say things that don't make any sense - but they don't know any better.

We try and respond to every person that writes to us in email form or mail form. We don't get many snail-mails anymore, about once a month or something there's a snail-mail.



JS It's normally someone from a school class who has to write something to a company, or a mom sending a bunch of kids drawings, something like that. Some of those are the most touching ones. Or it’s eleven year old boys from Ireland who are playing Resistance 1, and we're kind of like, 'That would be cute to post on the website if they were actually 17-plus or whatever they're supposed to be.'

What’s more important, playing to the gallery or pushing things forward?
TJF It’s always both. The audience we have is a vocal group; they're the ones who sell other people games, the ones who generate word of mouth. So you have to keep them happy because that’s the foundation, and we're profitable off the backs of those people. We're always looking for the bigger audience though. We do so much usability testing now which is about growing things. It’s something Microsoft began doing in earnest and it’s kind of leading the pack on. That's a big challenge with our games because people complain about the fact that it's so easy, yet there might be a five or six year-old who just can't figure it out. And we don't want the person to get stuck at that puzzle if they absolutely can't do it.

You look at New Super Mario Bros Wii and people are calling it one of the hardest Mario games for some time - but it has features to make it much more accessible. And I think that's kind of the interesting balance the industry has to walk right now. We have a lot of players that haven't been playing games for 20 years or even just five or ten.