It wasn't too long ago that I wrote in a Sumea news item that Firemint were on a role. With critically acclaimed and well received titles such as Madden NFL 07 and The Fast and the Furious: Fugitive, they've proven themselves quite an exceptional developer of mobile games. They're based in Melbourne, currently working on to their next big title, The World Rally Championship, and they've also recently been announced as the developer taking on the task of turning the winning Project Joystick game idea into reality.
I thought it was a perfect time to fire up a few questions to Firemint CEO, Rob Murray, on everything about Firemint and mobile gaming....
Can you give us the background on yourself, as well as ndWare and Firemint?
Rob Murray: My background goes right back to making games on my VZ200 and then Commodore 64 (programming and "artwork"). I tried to start a games company between the ages of 17-19, but I was too immature and it failed, so I continued my engineering studies and some way through I applied for a job with Torus Games. I spent almost 4 years there and had the opportunity to work closely with Bill McIntosh and basically learn the ropes.
I left Torus in 1999 and started up ndWare with the intention of providing high tech programming services to the games industry, like 3D and physics work. There wasn't really enough of a market to run a company like that here, so when I got my chance at an independent game development gig in 2001, I jumped at it. That first gig was Nicktoons Racing on the Game Boy Advance, and it did very well in the reviews. I also got an early opportunity to work on mobile back in 2002 and it seemed to have a lot of potential, so I poured a lot of energy into growing a studio. As I was getting serious about the new games studio, I adopted a more marketable trading name ? Firemint. So they are the same thing really, ndWare is like a holding company and Firemint is the actual business. I haven't completely given up my tech interests though, ndWare also operates a very exciting business called Richmotion (www.richmotion.com), managed by Michael Shamgar, former Director of Nocturnal Entertainment.
So Firemint grew; and we grew the hard way, by doing the best job we could on each title and then hoping that people would notice. It's easier now, a lot of publishers have noticed what we are doing, and we are being called "worlds-best" in the mobile domain. We are now 28 people and probably growing to 42 by 2008. Firemint has had 18 titles published so far on mobile, Game Boy Advance, and soon Nintendo DS.
Can you tell us about the general limitations on a typical mobile phone game? What sort of processing power, memory, and space limitations do you have to work with? What other challengers do you face on the mobile platform, particularly with all the different handsets out there, and how do you deal with them?
Rob Murray: I'll start with some exciting tech specs of a high end mobile phone that you can buy today. You can have a 330MHz ARM 11 CPU with floating point support and a vector unit. In addition you have a separate GPU that might push up to 2 million polygons per second to a 240x320, or 320x240 screen. You have about 32Mb of heap space and gigabytes of storage. The operating system is Symbian which allows for native coding (compiled to the CPU rather than interpreted by a Virtual Machine). This sort of configuration is on the market right now, go and check out the Nokia N95 if you are interested. What's more, the phone can plug directly into your TV, it has GPS, a 5 megapixel camera and a standard headphone socket for music. It's pretty insane, really.
So that is the current high end state of the mobile phone market. On the low end, you can buy a pre-paid phone with a 60MHz ARM9 processor, no floating point support or graphics acceleration, running Java.
The easiest analogy to make would be to compare mobile phones to consoles. The most powerful phone next year will be similar in power to a Playstation and the low end phones are a Super Nintendo. The range of hardware you have to deal with if you want to cover the entire market stretches almost as far as 3 console generations. How we do this depends on the commercial value of the brand that we are producing, mostly we just try and focus on one or two generations ("reference builds") with one game, then the missing generation is either a compromise from one of the other two, or it is developed by a separate studio. We generally focus on the two reference builds for the high end devices, so we tend not to do as much 2D work as we used to.
Ultimately, we deal with it all by being as brilliant as possible, as often as possible. In mobile, brilliant individual ideas still make a difference.
What's the average number of people working on a Firemint game?
Rob Murray: I would say that the average is about 8 people per title.
Can you tell us the capabilities of Firemint's own Mint3D technology?
Rob Murray: Mint3D has grown to encompass a pretty large technology base now. It is a 3D engine along with associated tools that are designed to abstract away the differences between a large range of handsets. We can build the same game to run on Java and C++ with operating systems as diverse as Windows, Symbian, BREW and other custom OS's. We have tools and pipelines for just about everything that you need to do in a 3D game, like animation, world culling etc. We don't religiously stick with the engine as it is though, if we need changes or want to pull it apart for a particular project then that is what we will do. It is not there to limit or constrain, but to enable.
We have implemented some amazingly advanced effects into our next version of Mint3D, the sort of stuff you normally see on Next Gen Consoles. Our next round of 3D games are really going to take the visuals to the next level.
Madden NFL 07 was critically acclaimed and such a well received title on the mobile platform. What challenges did you face fitting such a big EA sports game like Madden onto mobiles, and what opportunities have opened for Firemint due to its success?
Rob Murray: Yes, that was a big one. We had to build a mo-cap driven skeletal animation system that could run on a 100MHz mobile phone and display 22 characters on screen at once. That was just the tech, the game itself was also huge and the AI very complex. The AI was built upon something that EA already had so we can't take credit for that, but we flew out a consultant to help us get the NFL stuff right. I think Madden has opened up a lot of doors for us, it is a massive brand with massive exposure. I think particularly the fact that we have continued to work with EA shows that we didn't burn them in the process. A lot of studios are out for a fast buck, that's not gonna happen. You need to focus on the quality - quality of the game, quality of service - and everything else will come. We're now very lucky to be in a position where we can be quite selective with the projects we take on.
Firemint has received many awards, including "2005 Best new startup" at the AGDC, "2005, 2006 Best mobile game" at the AGDC and Game Connect conference, as well as being nominated at the International Mobile Gaming Awards. What other achievements you are most proud of?
Rob Murray: Well we actually won the Excellence in 3D category of the International Mobile Gaming Awards, it just may not say so clearly on our website. We also came second in the GDC Mobile Innovation Hunt, but only the actual winners were reported there. Both of those were for Mega Monster, which I think is what I'm most proud of. You will all know why in time, it is an original IP and it will be picked up and taken to market in spectacular style - although as usual, I can't say much about it yet.
Also, our recent The Fast and the Furious: Fugitive review from IGN was fantastic and our best review yet. Most people outside of mobile don't realize how massive the F&F franchise is. It was built up on mobile only by I-Play, and has sold over 7 million units so far. The IGN reviewer said "Fugitive will be one of the games I leave on my personal phone to continue evangelizing the legitimacy of mobile games to non-believers" so that is a huge compliment to all our guys who worked really hard on it.
Can you tell us a bit more about your current title, The World Rally Championship? What sort of features can we expect to see from that?
Rob Murray: I'd really love to, but unfortunately I can't say too much yet. What I can say (because I can't help myself), is that I believe that this could be our most stunning title yet released. We are very excited about it.
What are the big markets around the world for mobile games and what sort of games are popular on the mobile platform?
Rob Murray: For us, our big markets are currently in the US and Europe. Overall, I believe that Japan is by far the biggest mobile gaming market, but it is also very competitive and it is very difficult for a western company to launch an IP there. It is hard to get reliable numbers on mobile phone games, but there are a good variety of games that do well. You can make some assumptions by looking at the larger publisher's portfolios, and seeing what they think works. At the moment there is a mix of casual and hardcore titles. You will have a lot more success in the mobile industry with games that reach a wider audience, it's a lot like the DS and Wii in that way. However, it is a very large platform and there honestly is room for all sorts of games, they just need to be designed in a way that works well on the mobile form factor.
Mobile gaming has long been described as a games market with the most potential, and we've been told to expect huge things as more local consumers embrace the 3G network. Has the market been booming, and if not, what is hindering the wider uptake of mobile games?
Rob Murray: I haven't seen any indication of the pace abating, there is a very healthy and fast growing market out there. However there are a few things that are holding it back from its full potential. The main problem is in the marketing and distribution channels. And the problem is: as a reader of this article, how do you know which mobile games are good? If you find a cool game, how do you get it? A savvy person could probably google their way out of this, but in general, the mobile games that you want are very hard to purchase. The channels to market must be improved and there are a lot of large companies working very hard to rectify this. When the channels improve and the market becomes more aware of what's out there, we are going to see the growth rate of mobile gaming rise even further.
Another problem is obviously in the form factor and control method. This is the same problem that the PC had however. Think back to early PCs when people felt that they had to plug in a joystick if they wanted to do anything fun. These days, how many people use joysticks or joypads on their PC? The mouse and keyboard are actually excellent control mechanisms for a wide range of games. They were not designed for games, they were designed to make interaction with your computer easier. Since the market for PC games was there at the time, the games industry innovated to utilize these controls. Another obvious scenario is the Nintendo DS touchscreen. If I am being honest with myself, I can remember thinking that it was just a gimmick when it was first announced. I don't think that at all now!
So in summary, there are some problems with the industry, but ultimately they will be overcome as long as the market wants it, and they do seem to want it, or we wouldn't see the massive sales that we are seeing already.
John Carmack recently expressed his disappointment with Nvidia's and ATI's 3D graphics chips for mobile devices, and particularly with the slow evolution of 3D graphic technologies on mobile phones in general. He's referred Java as to a "good attempt at making something run at a tenth of the speed it should." What are your thoughts on that?
Rob Murray: I am excited that John Carmack has chosen to focus on this market and I hope he can have a similar influence in mobile as he did on PC. In the early PC days, while other studios were trying to work around what they were given, Carmack released his game and made the hardware manufacturers catch up. For now, the reality is that at least 80% of the worldwide market still only supports Java, so if you want to make a game that lots of people enjoy, you have to deal with that platform.
Java can be frustrating for programmers because it is not as fast as native code and you lose a lot of control. I find it pretty hard to be disappointed with the 3D graphics chipsets themselves though, I think that they are much better than the early generation of accelerators on the PC. What is more frustrating is the lack of adoption of these technologies by handset manufacturers. I would like to see it all move faster. It was 3 years ago now that we worked with our first hardware accelerated mobile reference device, and it has taken that long to get to market - and it is still not quite there.
Would you recommend mobile phone development as a path for startup independent game developers? If so, what advice would you give them?
Rob Murray: Simple answer: If mobile is what you want to do, then yes, otherwise no. I think viewing it as a stepping stone is a mistake. Basically, start the business that you want to be in, you will spend too much time in it to be doing something you don't believe in. Carmack didn't get into mobile development because he needs the money or thinks it's easy. He got in because he wanted to. So if you can't find a good reason to want to work in this space, then you will be out-competed by people who can.
Having said that, there are genuine reasons that you would want to make mobile games and many developers just simply aren't aware of them, it's easier to see things when you are already in the industry. For example, you might want more creative freedom. You might want to work on the single largest mass market platform in the world. You might be big on online games - the future of mobile is online, it was pretty much born online. Or maybe you want to make a noticeable difference in your project, or you want to leverage your skills to more advantage.
What advancements in mobile phone technology are you looking forward to? If the opportunity arose, would you consider developing games on the iphone?
Rob Murray: All I can say is that we are looking at a number of interesting platforms. I like the dual touch screen on the iPhone, that's got great potential and is a great example of UI innovation. There are amazing things you can do with a touchscreen that supports multiple simultaneous touchpoints. New genres can emerge there that cannot work on any other platform.
I am also excited about 3D accelerators becoming standard, though as Carmack has said, that is going slower than I would like.
Looking at your latest titles, particularly with games like Mega Monster, it would seem that you're more than well capable of handling Nintendo DS development. You've worked on the Game Boy Advance before, but do you have any plans to work on the DS?
Rob Murray: We are actually currently working on a major DS title. However, for us it's really not so much about the platform, it is more about the game itself. The DS is a great console, but we're not specifically chasing DS work ? we're chasing interesting, challenging, exciting titles where we think we can show off a bit :)
It has recently been announced that Firemint will be developing the winning idea for the Project Joystick competition. How excited is the team taking on this task? How do you anticipate or prepare for what may quite possibly be an extra-ordinary game design idea?
Rob Murray: We are pretty excited, and a little bit nervous at the same time, it's a bit of an adrenaline rush. As for preparation, it is really hard to know where to begin, we just have no idea what sort of game we might need to make so all we can do is have the team ready. Even the exact make up of the team could change depending on the genre. Then again, it could be a genre buster, so who knows! It feels a lot like an episode of Iron Chef, waiting for the mystery ingredient.
There was some controversy regarding the issue of intellectual property rights for the competition. What is your response to those concerns?
Rob Murray: Well, the winner of the competition will have their idea made into a real game and taken to market. They will also get some pretty cool prizes from BigPond, and will get to work with us on the realization of their idea. BigPond is offering a rare opportunity if you want to get into the games industry. As well as the satisfaction of actually seeing your game to market, you can imagine how good it would look on your resume.
I think it is important to clarify that only the winner's IP will be used by BigPond. The other top 10 finalists IP will be returned to them following a promotional period, approximately 6 months. All other applicants will have their IP rights released to them immediately. BigPond aren't grazing for IP, they need those rights for a certain period in order to promote the outcome of the competition. The promotion is a good thing for the finalists, it could really boost their career.
What else is next for Firemint?
Rob Murray: We will likely grow some more this year and then consolidate to focus on the new opportunities that have opened up. In particular, I want to create an original IP winner and back it all the way. Of course, it's possible that we are already on the way to achieving that with Mega Monster, so it will be exciting to see how that develops!