Marc Ecko started 2006 hoping his first video game would shake up the industry. He ends the year humbled by a few missteps, outspoken about the state of the industry and eager to finally make some of his older radical ambitions come true.

The fashion designer and first-time game developer spoke with MTV News last week to discuss his highs, lows and wild ideas. He spoke both as a game designer and gamer, voicing strong opinions all around.

Ecko's clothing line had been featured in games prior to 2006, but it was this year that he was finally able to put more of himself onto consoles. For more than six years, he nurtured a story about a young graffiti writer determined to shake the system, and after abandoning the notion to make it into a film, he convinced Atari to let him tap a developer to make it a video game (see "Marc Ecko's Spray-Paint Video Game Ends Rakim's Musical Dry Spell"). The result, "Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure," was released for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in February. And that's the first thing — the main thing — Ecko says went wrong.

"I was a little naive about timing," he said. The game was supposed to come out for the Christmas 2005 season, but Ecko pushed for a delay to polish the project. "Making a one-player game at the end of a cycle of PS2 and missing holiday definitely — I think I underestimated what all that meant in the equation from a business side," he said.

According to market-research firm NPD, the game has sold only 164,000 copies in the U.S. since its launch. That's less than a fifth of Vivendi's fall "Scarface" game and less than a 10th of Microsoft's "Gears of War."

But enough about business. What Ecko did this year is special. "I have a lot of friends that are not in the gaming industry who have been trying for years to get in," he said. "I managed to achieve something." He managed to get in.

And what happens when you get in? You learn how games are made, what pipe dreams work and how to take a critical punch.

Ecko didn't roll with every one of those punches. Reviews for the game were mixed: Electronic Gaming Monthly scored "Getting Up" a five out of 10, but Gamespot deemed it "great" and scored it just a tenth of a point less than the site gave "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess." Some of the harsher reviews ate at Ecko. He told New York newspaper Metro: "If you think that the fashion industry is filled with divas, no, the worst divas are the guys who got wedgies in high school."

Ecko says now that he was smarting from the immediacy of some of the reviews. "In the fashion business, every 30 days you have something new out there and then on to the next thing, so if you stumble a bit you can always kind of recover." Not so with games, for which a developer can toil on a project and then have to live with pointed Internet responses for a while. "I remember exercising a lot, making sure I went to the gym every day just to get it off my chest and manage whatever anxieties I was having."

Ecko thinks some of the slams came from his attempt to give the game a pop feel and said there are "real issues" in the gaming community with "the reluctance of wanting to mainstream it." That's what those Metro comments were about, he says.

Some might think Ecko a poser, an invader from another industry trying to bank on the next big form of entertainment. But he sure can flash gamer credentials. He was a 360 man in '06, getting his name engraved in the unit and craving some of its hits, like "Oblivion" and "Hitman." He calls the latter "very cinematic, a great study on short and sweet."

Ecko also weighed in on the handheld gaming war, with the fervor of the same sharp-tongued gamers who have been skewering his game. "The most disappointing phenomenon for me in gaming has been the PSP," he said. "I do own a DS. I find myself playing a lot of quick pick-up-and-play games, puzzle-oriented games, something I can volley off with someone else on the plane. For me, the DS has won that arm-wrestling match."

But back to his own material. The workouts at the gym and some post-mortems at his company helped Ecko recognize flaws in "Getting Up." It was linear and single-player in a year he thinks gamers were falling for more open and collective experiences. And it was too long in a time when many people's favorite pieces of entertainment last just a couple of minutes and can be watched on demand on the Web. "A good portion of the front of that game could have been edited out, probably a good solid two and a half levels." Strong moments should have come earlier. Fat should have been trimmed.

"[When] you go in making the game, you're very wide-eyed," he said. "You've got the fresh team of level designers and game designers. Everyone is eager to make their epic. As long as the game was, when I wrote my mission statement I wanted the game to be six hours long. I made that request two and a half years prior to release. All the people at Atari marketing are like, 'Are you f---ing crazy?' And then all the gamers at the studio said, 'You're crazy — people will throw the game away or return the disc.' " More than ever, Ecko thinks short games are the way to go.

One of the hallmarks of "Getting Up" was controversy, and in the months leading up to release, it drew protests from New York politicians alarmed at what they considered to be the game's pro-vandalism message. "It wasn't good," Ecko said. "The last 18 months have really been a backlash toward M ratings. You have an environment among publishers that before a game is even greenlit, they're staying as far away from M-rated titles as possible." He blames it on the "Grand Theft Auto" hidden sex-scene "Hot Coffee" scandal (see "A Year After 'Hot Coffee,' Game Developers Are Watching Their Steps"). That said, the M-rated "Gears of War" — which features salty-tongued space marines fighting aliens rather than graffiti artists fighting the Man — sold just fine these last two months.

Another signature of "Getting Up" proved to be its eclectic soundtrack, which won a VMA in August for Best Video Game Soundtrack. "I was traveling and I got an e-mail and it was, 'Dude, we just won.' It was very flattering that we were acknowledged for doing a very bit different soundscape."

Ecko still has a game division at his company, and the team there is working on ideas for a next-gen console — or consoles — with a new developer. His next project won't be a sequel to "Getting Up," a series that is tied to the fate of the now-struggling Atari. But otherwise he wouldn't say much; he did that too early with his last game. "A lot of stories got spoken a bit too early," he said. "I won't announce a title or content but I'll announce the developer or publisher real soon. It's exciting." But will it be short?