Part 2 - Online play, instant action, customization

FS: You mentioned the online modes; how will this new feature work?

SS: It will be a simple game lobby that will allow gaming to be done between you and three unknowns or, alternatively, all your friends. You can also team up with one of your friends and go online for some 2v2 team play.


FS: As we’ve talked about, there is still a huge following of Mashed fanatics out there. How did the idea for the initial concept come about, and what made you decide to revisit it with Wrecked?

SS: Well in the past, we worked a lot on the Micro Machines series [with Codemasters], which was aimed more towards the younger market. So really we wanted to make a more adult Micro Machines, and that’s why Mashed came to the foreground. To us, the industry seemed to go through a phase where it moved away from instant action-style arcade games, but with the introduction of the Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, as well as Android and the like, people seem to be coming back to it.




FS: It does sound like these services are perfect for distributing and marketing your kind of games.

SS: Exactly, but nowadays, selling the ideas to publishers is far harder. We’ve had people come in and enjoy the game so much yet still seem reluctant to grab at the opportunity. It’s a common theme nowadays to expect millions of options and to assume anything that doesn’t offer that to lack depth. I completely disagree with this, as the game play has so many facets to it; it’s a shame that sometimes is not appreciated.


FS: Well, as far as customizing your game goes, there’s certainly a lot of tweaks that can be made, such as taking a simple race and editing it into an all-out war zone. This naturally will modify the degree of difficulty quite a bit; is that something you’ve worked on?

SS: Older games were always, in our opinion, a lot more challenging and I think that largely stems from originating from coin-op arcade machines where they always were an uphill battle. With Wrecked, we wanted to give the people options to create the type of race they wanted, which can drastically change the strategies of a match, as well as allow less-experienced players an opportunity to ease themselves into the game.





FS: From playing it just now, Wrecked seems to have kept the same frantic game play that made Mashed so popular with fans. How did you approach imitating that?

SS: We actually found trying to replicate that level of unpredictability incredibly hard. Mashed was famous for its endless outcomes and scenarios people managed to save themselves from, so it was a tough task. With Mashed, we had so many problems with the physics that we totted up hundreds of hours during and after work just playing it, even forgetting that we were here to tweak it. From that we managed to get a good balance, and we think we achieved the same thing with Wrecked. We mean our wives are always phoning us when it gets to be 8 PM and we still aren’t home due to the frenzied testing.