Yesterday at the DICE Summit, G4′s Adam Sessler led a discussion with David Crane (of Pitfall fame) and David Jaffe (God of War, Twisted Metal) about casual vs. hardcore games. During the chat, Jaffe talked about the perceived “failure” of his PSN title Calling All Cars.
At one point, Sessler asked Jaffe if he would call Calling All Cars a casual or a hardcore game, to which Jaffe jokingly responded, “Well, I call it a mistake.”
“While the game was cartoony, our gameplay was more hardcore and modeled after some of the great Midway arcade games like NBA Jam,” said Jaffe. “So we had a casual theme, a hardcore play mechanic, on a machine people just spent $599 for. If we were to make it again we would have skinned it entirely differently.”
What he’s basically saying is that CAC didn’t realy know what it wanted to be, and didn’t speak to any specific audience. He also said that $10 was probably too much to ask for the title, but didn’t have any real statistics to go off of.
“All we had was Xbox Live Arcade as the innovator in the space, but there weren’t that many games like this at the time. $10 bucks? Why not? (…) I mean, we didn’t completely fail — we made a little money. But we didn’t make enough to do more just like this.
[Via 1UP.com]
