Lorne Lanning & Sherry McKenna Discuss Oddworld

“It didn’t get that in the mid-Nineties, but once we were past 2000 – the Xbox generation – the publishers had come fully to understand the value of IP and brand, especially to their Wall Street shareholders, who began to think that was the basis for a lot of their potential growth. So, all things said, the games started getting more and more and more expensive, and there’s a certain point where it’s hard to justify the effort. As they get more expensive, the terms get worse for the people building the games. People say, ‘Wow, you’re on a 25 million dollar game,’ not that ours cost that much, but there’s a lot of that. But if you were the one who got that 25 million dollars to build that game, that’s a tremendous amount of pressure on you, to deliver and get it done, meet audience expectations, meet publisher expectations. But the problem with the industry, for the development community, is that the rewards have been fewer. If you just look at Infinity Ward, it’s a perfect example, in terms of who builds the product and who takes the mountainous lion’s share of the money.”

With all of these things in mind and the twenty-twenty nature of hindsight, Lanning contemplates making the Oddworld series in 2010. “We have a number of designs that we’d like to implement,” says Lanning. “It’s finding the right conditions, it’s progressive… We identified that boxed product was sort of collapsing… I would say collapsing on the developer, not necessarily on the big publishers yet. The thing that’s really different today is you can have a better idea of who your audience is if you’re going through online. When we sell our games on Steam, we can see what country is the most interested, what time of day they have the most activity, what happens in the world that causes sales to increase or decrease. You get to see who is playing your games, and the closer you can get to the people playing your games, then the better an idea you have for what kinds of games to make, and choices to make, that your audience is going to like more. So those things said, when we look at the types of products that we would want to launch with Oddworld today, they would be of a different sort of classical format, rather than the, ‘Here’s the 30-hour story you’re going to unfold through an action-adventure game.’ It would be something that’s more of a living ecosystem. And I don’t mean that in terms of a natural simulation, but I mean in terms of a marketplace that would allow people to have much more custom configuration over their gaming experience.”

“When we look at the types of games we’d like to build going forward, we want to be more settled into what we see as the new landscape, rather than the old one, which was just building huge products. On the new landscape, you build a smaller product, you get it out there, you try and learn more from the audience quickly, and then you help the audience have a feedback loop with you. It’s a more co-creative process with the audience. You see that happening in some territories; in Asia, you see it happening with a number of online-type games where the audience is really helping to shape the experience. And I think that’s more and more important as we go into the future. That’s what people want: they want more control over what they do. So that would be the difference. A new product with the Oddworld label would be born in a very different nature.”

Even in a Halo-centric industry, when every other developer and publisher was going right, Oddworld went left with Stranger’s Wrath, a critically-praised shooter with a heart and a sense of humor. Currently, Lanning is trying to get ahead of the curve yet again with a social networking platform he and McKenna have been building for the past few years, but he leaves us with a final message from the Oddworld Inhabitants, and one we don’t even have to save 99 Mudokons to unravel.

“I think it’s about dreams,” says Lanning. “It’s about pursuing dreams. I think life is full of compromises, and you’re always evolving. So, whether it looks like you’re on top of the world or not, it’s really about adapting to what’s going on; trying to be innovative, trying to stay on top of being creative, and following your dreams. We are absolutely still in pursuit of our dreams. I can’t imagine living any other way.”

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