Mike Booth Interviews - 6/5/07

GamePro has just released an interview with Mike Booth, CEO of Turtle Rock Studios. Mike answers questions dealing with the co-operative gameplay in a broad sense.

"The design of Left 4 Dead explicitly presents many Iterated Prisoners Dilemmas. The simplest is "Do I stay with the team and protect them, or do I look out for myself at their expense". Others include "Do I share my only First Aid Kit with my injured friend, or save it for later in case I need it", or "Do I help my team take down that huge Tank, or hide in the corner until it's over", and so on. In every case, we strive to make "doing the right thing" the fun and exciting thing to do, which not only enhances everyone's experience, but feels very rewarding.

Although the game seems to be about blasting hordes of zombies, it's really about trust and cooperation under intense stress, which is surprisingly engrossing. "

Gameindustry.biz also released an interview with Mike, focusing more on the business aspect and his thoughts on the Steam distribution platform.

"What kind of challenges do developers face these days when developing an online team-play game? Is competition getting tougher as the market becomes crowded with titles?

Mike: One challenge is to be innovative with your game design -- to bring something new to the table. There are several excellent franchises out there that have several team-play game variants well covered. So if you're just going to do yet another deathmatch or capture the flag game, think again.

For some reason, a lot of single-player games think they can just throw together a basic online deathmatch using their game assets and call it done. That is just wasting dev time and game credibility to put a "play online" bullet point on their box."

The second part of the interview has been released and can be found here. Thanks to GamePro and Gameindustry.biz for these great interviews.