I don't want to say “be more creative”, but when you know you can be quite agile, you feel more free to experiment. With a relatively big team, we roughly get a new game a month. With FunOrb, while still making a great game, we're looking at 9-12 months. With Mechscape, we're looking at 3, 4 years, maybe more. We wanted to create a service for time-pressured gamers, people like us, who can go back to playing those great games, as well as us being able to innovate and create new games. But getting out the old Amiga is a hassle. We've been doing this for nine years, and all of a sudden, despite family and everything else, we still want to play good games. FunOrb was the same kind of thinking, and perhaps showing our age a bit. We're always looking to make games we want to play – which is the success story with Runescape. When interviewing a developer, it's not just “can you do the job?” - because there's a skew of developers who can – but “Show us your hobbies, your interests. Mark Gerhard: Jagex is staffed by gamers. RPS: Runescape's been going ages, but your latest venture – FunOrb - has been going for a year and a half. An MMO which looks at Master of Orion rather than Ultima as its inspiration? Picking up where Sensible Software left of? Real Men Programmers Do It In 64Mb? PC as pure populism, and taking that seriously? And not playing the hype game at all? It's time Jagex got on your radar. I come away with the impression of a proud, ambitious and iconoclastic company with a lot of big ideas. A chance meeting with their recent brilliant arcade football game Kickabout League made me reconsider, so I grasped the chance to hook up at Develop with their CEO Mark Gehard, the Head of their new not-revealed MMO Mechscape Henrique Olifiers and PR Manager Adam Tuckwell. While I was more than aware of their enormous success with the free MMO Runescape, I never quite filed it as something directly relevant to my interests in PC Games.
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