Rebellion celebrate 25 years as a video game developer

GameCentral talks to the founders of Rebellion about what it’s like to run Britain’s biggest independent video games developer.

Mention the concept of indie games to the average gamer and they’ll probably start talking about budget-priced downloadable titles, that look like they were made in the 8-bit era. But all indie really means is that the developer is not owned by some other, larger company. A state of independence which British studio Rebellion has been able to maintain for exactly 25 years to this very day.

Rebellion was founded by brothers Chris and Jason Kingsley on December 4, 1992. Based in Oxford, the studio’s early reputation was based on the groundbreaking Aliens Vs. Predator on Atari Jaguar – at the time, the most technically advanced first person shooter on consoles.



That success allowed them to buy comic book 2000 AD, and all its characters, and since then they’ve produced a range of tie-in games, such as Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs. Death and Rogue Trooper, and original titles such as Sniper Elite and Nazi Zombie Army. Their upcoming games include co-op shooter Strange Brigade and Evil Genius 2, with other new announcements waiting in the wings.


We recently travelled to Oxford to talk to the brothers, to try and discover the secret to their longevity and how they view the current state of the games industry from their defiantly independent perspective…

We gather in the office of Jason Kingsley, who is a keen jousting enthusiast. The walls and tables are littered with medieval weaponry, as well as the odd vintage gun.

JK: They’re all deactivated, you don’t have to worry about that.

GC: [laughs] I don’t have to worry that you’re going to shoot me?

JK: Well, we’ll see how the interview goes.

GC: So I did all my exhaustive research last night, on Wikipedia, and it says you’re the biggest independent studio in Europe. But you must be the longest-lasting as well, because I don’t think Codemasters counts anymore?

JK: Yeah, it depends how you define independent. Because some people claim independence even though they’re owned by a bigger entity. But we are genuinely privately owned. Chris and I own the company, it’s a family business and we have never been owned by anybody. So yes, I think we’re probably right up there.

There are studios with bigger headcounts than us, but again they tend to be owned by multinationals, and they wax and wane. People shut down studios all the time. Sometimes, rather sadly, you think, ‘Well, they’d just done a really great project and now you’re shutting them down!’

GC: So why did you decide to start making games? Where you already gamers or was it an interest in the technical side of things?

JK: I think it was a combination of both. It was a combination of technology and creativity, and wanting to explore worlds. I got quite involved at school in role-playing games – Tunnels & Trolls, Dungeons & Dragons, that kind of thing.

CK: And then you wrote those adventure game books for Ladybird, which was a big number one hit.



JK: Steeleye and the Lost Magic.

CK: And He-Man and the Memory Stone. [laughs] They were like million-selling books, and he wrote them when he was about 18.

JK: Theoretically… I’m not actually a New York Times bestseller, but you could imagine I might be with those. [laughs] But I think it was a combination, we had complementary skillsets. Chris was much better than me at coding…

CK: You had enough knowledge to understand the technical limitations, restrictions, and opportunities. But you were artistic and I was a programmer. That’s actually an almost perfect combination for making computer games. What we’ve always said, is that it would’ve been useful if our parents had had one other sibling who was a musician. [laughs]

GC: And your first published game was Eye Of The Storm?

JK: That was quite interesting, because we self-funded it and self-published it. It was really where we wanted to be… and then we realised that it didn’t work very well.

Jason Kingsley doesn’t have to worry about shareholders

CK: It was difficult in those days to become a publisher. Until, really, digital stores came along there were quite large barriers to entry for developers becoming publishers – certainly on consoles. There were all sorts of particular rules and particular things you had to do to become a publisher.

But Eye Of The Storm… you [to Jason] did the art on that one, didn’t you? It was all coded in assembly language and it was fully 3D. It was one of the first PC games with texture mapping in it.


JK: And the gameplay was actually quite innovative, like a lot of early games. The idea was that you were in the red spot of Jupiter. And you were flying around and protecting the wildlife. You would be paid because you would be broadcasting video signals and the more interesting animals you saw you got more money. There were hunters trying to kill animals and you could shoot them.

GC: So at that point you were still students?

JK: Just left university. I did a zoology degree, so I created an artificial ecosystem in that game. In my mind, not actually in the game as such, but it was represented in the game.

GC: If that wasn’t particularly successful at the time, what encouraged you not to give up?

JK: You need to make a bit of money to keep going, but money has never been a motivator. Money is fuel to do stuff, and the success is in bringing new things out and trying new things and making things appear from nowhere.

CK: It did lead directly, well slightly indirectly, onto working with Atari. After Eye Of The Storm we were doing a dragon flight game, and we did a demonstration – a prototype of a dragon that was 12 polygons or something like that – and we took that demo to Atari, to see Alistair Bowden; because they were bringing out the Falcon, which was kind of their latest Atari ST version.

So we went to see him and he said, ‘Wow, that’s really good! I’ll go and get Bob Gleadlow down’. So he got Bob Gleadown down, Bob Gleadow looked at it and said, ‘Wow, that’s really good, that could be something that we could use on our new console’. And Alistair Bowden said, ‘What new console?’ [laughs] So that was the first time anyone out of the MD of Atari had heard of the Atari Jaguar console.


So then we got introduced to the guys at Flare II, who were up in Cambridge. We went up to see them, we got some development hardware. It all worked out with a couple of contracts for Atari. One was for Checkered Flag, a racing game, and the other one was for Alien Vs. Predator. But nobody quite knew what the game was going to be at the time it was commissioned.

GC: Did they have the licence already, or did you suggest that?

CK: No, they had the licence from Fox.

JK: Didn’t they have it from Activision from Fox, or something like that? ‘Cause they’d done the Lynx sideways-scrolling beat ’em-up… [It’s unclear what is being referenced here, but it’s likely to be Capcom’s coin-op game Alien Vs. Predator – GC]

CK: That was it! And they wanted another game like that. But instead of a scrolling beat ’em-up we said, ‘Why don’t we do an into-the-screen 2½D game?’ Which is where Aliens Vs. Predator – which is arguably one of our more famous titles – came from. And the idea that you could play the baddies in the game, which these days is a fairly common trope in games, was unique then.

JK: And I think we were one of the world’s first fully textured-mapped first person shooters – certainly on consoles. We did it all at the same time as Doom was doing it.

GC: Indie gaming means something very different nowadays, then it did back then. But that independence is obviously very important to you. Have you found things easier or harder in recent years?

JK: Our business has never been better. We go as direct as we can. We want to build up our relationship with our players, and we like getting feedback from them. We don’t even mind when people rant at us about games, because we learn something from that passion and that feedback. And so what we’ve tried to do, in our history, is make games that people want to play. And early in our history there’ve been a lot of people in the way that have left us completely separated out from our players…

CK: Actually physically stopped us from talking to them. In the past some publishers have said, ‘Don’t say anything about it, you’ve got a confidentiality clause. You can’t talk about it, don’t do any publicity’.

JK: Whereas now we have forums, we talk directly to people; people say, ‘I really love playing Sniper Elite 4′, what else you got coming up?’ So we can directly speak to them, which is wonderful. But we can also provide better value consumer support and none of the money has to go to a publisher, instead it goes back into feeding and keeping roofs over the heads of all the people and their families here.

GC: This year may be seen as a milestone for a number of reasons, but in terms of indies I think Ninja Theory and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was one of the most significant. I didn’t even particularly like the game, but I’m still glad it did well.

JK: It looks like it did well. It’s trying very hard, it’s dealing with a very difficult, complex subject, which works for some people and doesn’t work for others.

GC: Regardless of the game itself I loved that it had such high production values but was still mid-budget for them and for the consumer. Do you think that’s something other studios, such as yourselves, will look to emulate? Or is the future only going to be bigger and bigger corporations?

JK: No, no. We’re very keen on building our mid-budget triple-A titles. I mean, Sniper Elite stands head and shoulders with Call Of Duty, with Assassin’s Creed, and all of those. We don’t sell quite as well as they do, perhaps because we don’t have the marketing muscle or the distribution muscle, but we’re not far off.

And if you look at our marketing budget and development and compare our return on investment with them you’d want to be sitting in our shoes! We do very, very well. We sell games everywhere in the world, and that’s exciting. We’re 85% export, maybe 90% export driven. So from balance of payments for the UK that’s really good.

CK: I think the only country in the world where we don’t sell games is North Korea.

JK: [laughs] You think a few years ago, there were the big guys and there were some intermediate publishers like THQ and some of those other ones. And the intermediate guys kind of went away. So there’s actually a void which, luckily with digital coming along, allowed people like us to expand into it.

CK: It’s a creative business. And there’s two words in that phrase: creative and business, and you’ve got to consider both those things equally.

GC: One of the other big milestones of this year has been the recent controversy over loot boxes and the future of single-player games. A crisis that seemed to flare up almost out of nowhere.

JK: I think it’s just the nature of the games industry that it’s always changing, fashions come and go. You look at the world of free-to-play, there were a lot of people throwing themselves into that and then a lot of people said, ‘Oh, actually we don’t really like this very much’. And then people jumped into VR, and now it’s loot boxes. The thing is the industry is incredibly dynamic, you think how far we’ve come over the last 25 years.

CK: I think you have to look at the economics of it as well. So if you develop a game for $100 million and you’re selling five million copies of it for $40 the numbers just don’t work. So what the big, big guys have got to do, they’ve gotta keep their investors happy – that’s their meta-game. We don’t have to do any of that, but what they’ve gotta do is try and work out, ‘Okay, so we can successfully sell five million copies at £40, but how can we get £80 out of some of those people instead of just £40?

And that used to be the concept of DLC, additional levels and additional bits and bobs, which we are very happy with and that works very well for us too. Mostly the single-player stuff is paid-for, because people want another single-player adventure and they pay a little bit more for it. But multiplayer we tend to give away free, and they’re often directed by what players are playing anyway – and we want to build on that.

We’ve looked at the idea of loot boxes and things like that, and we can’t really fit them into the kind of games we do. Nor do we actually want to necessarily extend the life of the game for three or four years. Because I’m quite happy to entertain somebody for a year and then move onto something else.

Rebellion believes in VR, but not pay-to-win

JK: On Steam people have said our season passes are some of the best value ones they’ve seen. And that’s brilliant, that tells me that we’ve done the right thing for players. We want to entertain them, we want them to feel that they’ve got their money’s worth. Because we want them to come back and play the next game.

CK: And that’s an important thing: the repeat business. So if somebody plays one of our games we want them to go, ‘Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed that. What’s next from them? What have they got in their back catalogue that I can buy?’

(At this point Chris Kingsley has to leave unexpectedly, but Jason Kingsley continues…)

GC: What worries me is that as digital sales become the bulk of publishers’ income they’re only making money from a small proportion of their audience – the whales. Which cannot be healthy in terms of the influences that has on game design.

JK: I think there are some changes going on in the industry at the top end, and I think all of us – as games players, games consumers, and professionals – we need to look at the direction it’s going in. And we need to give feedback. Because I want my games to be enjoyed, consumed, thought about, replayed… I am little concerned about how the sort of aftermarket loot box-y thing is being perceived by our core audience.

A lot of people like them, a lot of people pretend not to like them… but you will know, as a journalist, that what people say and what they do is often different. But I also think games are an important cultural component of our society and I think it’s really important that in the game space that we occupy, which is single-player narrative-based action with some multiplayer components, I don’t want to see those become purely multiplayer.

We want people to go on adventures in our games, to have fun…

GC: It’s encouraging to hear it’s not just a business decision for you.

JK: I play other people’s games as a consumer and sometimes I have to switch off my I-am-a-games-designer head and just enjoy them. I love Bethesda’s work, I love the Skyrim series…

GC: It is such a weird year for this to happen, given we’ve had all these great single-player games. And then suddenly publishers are talking about how the whole concept is no longer tenable.

JK: Single-player is not dead. I think what people are desperately trying to do is work out how to get more money out of people that are willing to give them more money. And I think it’s dominating the news a little bit, but I’m absolutely sure that these people aren’t going to throw away the single-player market.

GC: I’ve heard the current situation compared to the rush to make MMOs after the success of World Of Warcraft.

JK: Yes! Billions of dollars went into that market and billions of dollar… left. [laughs]

GC: And yet when you read about EA, or whoever, making $1 billion from loot boxes it’s really no surprise everyone’s trying to copy them. I would, if I was a business exec that didn’t really care about games.

JK: Until the wheels come off the wagon. It used to be the Edge 20 rule: 20% of games make money and 80% don’t. And you look at the free-to-play space and it’s probably .001. The curve is so steep, whereas the curve for traditional games, like we do, you can be in the middle and, depending on your budget, you can make a decent living out of it and do it again.

But yeah, I think we’re going through a slightly curious time. But we’re also going through quite a tech bubble. There’s a lot of churn, there’s a lot of big companies valued by the American system that haven’t actually ever made any money at all. Because they’re selling the sizzle.

GC: It’s bizarre to think that companies like Twitter and Amazon don’t make any money and yet they’re so dominant culturally, let alone in a business sense.

JK: The trouble is those businesses can come from nowhere and become huge billion-dollar industries, but they can also disappear. They can literally fall off a cliff. The dotcom boom, it’s not that long ago… Business is about seeing opportunities, but there’s a certain amount of business copying that goes on.

So people in senior positions in big organisations need to be seen to be doing what their peer groups are doing as well. And at the moment they’re all embracing mechanisms to try and squeeze more money out of players.

GC: But turning back to your own history, I didn’t realise how early on you bought 2000 AD? In my mind it was a relatively recent thing.

JK: In the year 2000, it’s very easy to remember.

GC: Yes, that should’ve stuck in my mind a bit more firmly.

JK: [laughs] It took us many years to get to that point, but it was very exciting. Flatteringly, we’ve got more readers than ever, we’re releasing content digitally now so we’re reaching a much broader audience worldwide. We’re doing more and more licensing of our graphic novels to foreign languages.

It’s not as big as the games industry, at all, but it’s really nice to have 2000 AD still culturally strong, still embarrassingly powerful with its parodies. Sometimes the real world comes dangerously close. We had ‘Bad Bob’ Booth, who was the last president of the United States who launched nuclear Armageddon for ratings. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh god! It’s predicted it again!’

GC: It’s like reading The Onion, it’s pointless now that we’ve gone beyond parody.

Rebellion not only make games and comics, but potentially also TV shows

JK: [laughs] A lot of the fans have said they think the comic’s going through a new golden age, which is really nice. So we appear to be doing the right kind of stuff. Sales are up, we’ve got a lot more licensing going on. There’s a few things like the Dredd TV series, which we’re working on internally. We’ve got Rebellion Productions, set-up now to do that. So we’re trying to do these things… again independently and more directly.

GC: I assume you were fans as kids?

JK: Absolutely, I read the first issue in February 1977! I don’t really have anything to do with it now on a day-to-day basis. Ultimately, I have control over editorial, but I let my team do what they want to do and they make the judgements and commission the artists and the writers. But it’s probably only 10% of our business.

GC: The thing is, everyone assumed you would use those properties for more games. But you never really did.

JK: That was the intent. The intent was there, and we did a couple early on. We did Rogue Trooper and we did Judge Dredd, and a mobile game – Judge Dredd Vs. Zombies. So we did three. And we’ve just done Rogue Trooper Redux, just taking an older game and bringing it up to spec again – which has been very successful for us.

GC: Was that you testing the water for more 2000 AD games?

JK: I just thought there was a demand for it. It was part of a portfolio experiment; this is going to not cost us too much, the game was much loved but didn’t sell as many copies as was expected at the time, so is there a latent market out there? And the answer is yes, there is. And it was an opportunity to work with some colleagues of ours, with Tick Tock, and to try outsourcing some work.

So the simple answer is we did plan to do more 2000 AD things, but we were very successful with the Sniper Elite series. [laughs] And the Zombie Army series, and then suddenly those successes needed to be built upon, and then we found ourselves a few years down the road not having done any 2000 AD stuff.

So we recently announced that we’re opening the licensing to other people, so if other people want to make games off 2000 AD characters then come to us and we’ll work out a sensible deal and work through everybody. And hopefully we’ll see more 2000 AD games. There’s quite a few chugging along now, which is quite nice.

GC: So you’ve already made some deals?

JK: Yes, we’ve had a lot of people come to us with ideas.

GC: Have you said that before in public?

JK: Ah, I don’t think so. But I’m quite excited about letting other people have a play, because I do feel guilty that we haven’t done as many games as I expected.

GC: As well you should!

JK: [laughs] We should have done, but we just didn’t have enough resources.

GC: I assume part of the problem is that a Judge Dredd game in particular would be very expensive to make, since the obvious format is a giant open world game.

JK: It would be expensive. You could do a sector, you could do the Cursed Earth… there’s lots of different things and a few people are grappling with that at the moment. We’ve got some interesting ideas being proposed to us, not necessarily about Mega-City One but about… other areas of 2000 AD.

But what’s potentially interesting is if the TV show, if Judge Dredd: Mega-City One gets off the ground, which it looks like it’s doing – we’ve got a lot of very serious interest – and if it does go into production next year, which it might do…

GC: Really?

JK: Fingers crossed. That’s not been announced either. But then should we make games out of that? We wanted to make a game based on the Karl Urban/Olivia Thirlby Dredd, but there wasn’t time. And we’re restricted by the number of staff we can have in this huge building. We’re already full! I want to hire new people but where are they going to sit?!

GC: Is Karl Urban going to be in the TV show?

JK: It hasn’t been confirmed yet. I talked to Karl and we’ve had a long conversation about it, but the problem is his commitment to a TV show and all that kind of thing. It’s complicated.

GC: What about Olivia Thirby? Because she was great too.

JK: …. What can I say? I am in communication with Olivia and I think it’d be a great idea. But it’s a business and these people are very busy. So trying to get them together for a TV show is difficult. It depends how the script goes as well.

GC: What sort of time frame are you talking about with the games, if you’re already speaking to other developers?

JK: Well, most games take one to two years to make. And we announced the initiative… six months ago-ish? We had a lot of people interested in and whittled it down.

GC: So have they started work?

JK: To be honest, I don’t know.

GC: But you have signed deals with them?

JK: We have, yeah.

GC: And they’re full-scale console titles?

JK: It’s probably inappropriate to tell you at the moment, but basically we were looking for a wide mix of scale. Because we felt: why tell people what we want them to do when we haven’t actually done it ourselves? So if they wanna make a collectable card game based on characters – fantastic, sounds good. If they wanna make a wide-roaming, explore-the-universe with Strontium Dog – great, go for it.

GC: You have created a lot of new IP since buying 2000 AD and that’s what I find particularly surprising. With a game like Strange Brigade, for example, why wasn’t that the ABC Warriors or something?

JK: It’s deliberately so, because we wanted to make sure we did original titles as well. So we don’t want to just be the guys that do those 2000 AD games.

GC: Well, I don’t think you’re in any danger of that happening.

JK: [laughs] Which is good! I have achieved my aim! [laughs] With Strange Brigade we wanted to create a slightly more family friendly game. The Zombie Army series is set during the war and is quite grotesque, we wanted to make a co-op shooter that was a bit lighter hearted. That semi-coexisted in the same universe-ish.

So we just thought it would be fun to play around with a bunch of different characters. I was very keen on the boys’ own adventure, going back to the very earliest tropes of action adventure – where games came from really. We did look into the 2000 AD catalogue, but there wasn’t really anything that would fit.

What 2000 AD game would you want them to make next?

GC: But you also haven’t tried to adapt any of your video games into comics?

JK: We might do comic books, but we don’t want to shoehorn that into 2000 AD.

GC: And then you’ve also got two book publishing labels, but they haven’t been turned into games either? You’re keeping everything very separate.

JK: One of the rationales behind publishing comic books, by acquiring 2000 AD, and Abaddon and Solaris, was to generate intellectual property. So, that was the rationale behind it. We have a couple of ideas bobbling along actually, based on some of the literary stuff that we commission. Abaddon is wholly owned, so we come up with the ideas and then we commission people to write in those worlds – we call them shared worlds.

Solaris is more traditional, where people will approach us with their complete or near complete manuscript and we will buy the publishing rights, so we don’t own those game rights. But that was the idea, that there’d be a level of synergy. Problem is, to make a decent game takes a long time and a lot of people and a lot of money. So we can’t make nearly as many games as we can publish comics or get books written.

Perhaps one of the other reasons why we’ve not necessarily pushed Judge Dredd all the time in games, is we want to do stuff other than Judge Dredd as well. 2000 AD isn’t just Judge Dredd. We want to be bigger and different as well. I mean, we recently acquired Roy of the Rovers and Roy of the Rovers is gonna be huge!

GC: Is that going to be a game?

JK: We haven’t said anything about that yet, so I can’t really say.

GC: So how exactly do you go about choosing what game you’re going to make next?

JK: We make games we want to play. We’re not trying to make films that pretend to be games. We’re not trying to make gouge-y mechanisms to gather money off people. We’re trying to make games we want to play, and I think a lot of people buy our games, play them, enjoy them, put them down and go and do something else. And I’m fine with that. That’s all we need.

GC: It seems you’re moving away from mobile games?

JK: Definitely, the free-to-play space we’ve put on ice for now. We were actually quite successful in it, but we weren’t really comfortable with it. That space has become a bit kind of systematic and analytical and not the kind of way we like to do games. And quite frankly I don’t want to do stuff that I can’t be very enthusiastic about.

GC: It’s so creepy when you talk to other developers and they have behaviour psychologists working for them.

JK: I know. And a lot of those psychological tricks come from gambling. But then they still only get 1% of players to pay them any money! There’s big business there, and a lot of people are very happy working in it. It’s not an area I’m comfortable making games in. I’m looking at gameplay and I’m looking at trying to entertain people and help them escape from their woes for a moment. I don’t want to really just distract them for five minutes while they’re waiting for a bus. I’m more interested in an immersive experience that a good game can bring.

And making a game is hard, you don’t want to waste your time on something you’re not passionate about. Finding the right skills of people, putting the teams together to make good games… making a game is ferociously complicated. It is one of the most complicated things you can do. NASA did some analysis and one of the most complicated processes that are done by humans is making computer games – because of all the moving parts. And that including moon shots and manned space missions.

You can make a computer game, you can have it there, and it’s just no fun. Try to write down what makes a game fun in words, it’s quite difficult.

GC: [laughs] I have tried once or twice.

JK: [laughs] Why is this game fun? It almost goes beyond language sometimes, and that makes gameplay quite difficult to pin down.

GC: You can see that because gameplay is the last thing big companies ever want to talk about. Instead it’s always how many licensed cars they’ve got or how many polygons they’re pushing. Number wars. But the worse thing is when the fans pick up on it.

Because you’re right, it is difficult to explain why a game is good. It’s hard enough for a journalist whose job it is, to quantify why they do or don’t like a game. And so instead people get caught up in this whole meaningless number war. Explaining why one game works and another doesn’t is difficult, but arguing whether six teraflops is more than four – that’s easy!

JK: Yeah, yeah. I’ve had conversations where people have said, ‘What do you think about the graphics of a game?’ Well, graphics can be important. Some games can be beautiful, but an awful lot of games don’t have to have amazing graphics to be good games. There are plenty of games out there that are really fun, that have lasted a long time, that have lousy graphics.

And the same with narrative. I’m often asked to talk about narrative in games, and narrative can be an important competent of games… but it doesn’t have to be. A good story can be part of a game, but there are plenty of games that don’t have a good story or the story is just you, the protagonist, having an adventure. I love role-playing games and it’s all about me creating a little story in my head as I go.

GC: That’s what I always say. I was discussing with Ron Gilbert, the difference between plot and story. Plot is the excuse for what you’re doing and it doesn’t matter. Princess Peach needs to be rescued, or whatever, who cares?

JK: [laughs]

GC: Only a tiny percentage of games have a story with something to say. If you haven’t got something to say it’s just meaningless filler.

JK: I completed Fallout 4 recently and I was talking to someone about it, and he said: ‘Did you do the thing at the end?’ And I realised I’d completely forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. You’re supposed to be searching for your son, which should drive your every waking moment, but who cares about that? You just want to go off and explore.

GC: The problem most games won’t accept is that there’s no storytelling medium that would ever try to sustain itself over 80+ hours. It’s an impossible task.

JK: Exactly! But that’s almost the appeal to games I think, in that you can lose yourself in them. They often don’t need a complex story as well. I mean, virtual reality I think is a really interesting medium because you’re even more inserted into it. But it takes so much effort. To do virtual reality for any length of time is quite exhausting.

GC: So considering your anniversary, what is the future for Rebellion?

JK: There’s a lot of pressure on us to do more 2000 AD games.

GC: Good.

JK: Which hasn’t reduced during this interview.

Both: [laughs]

GC: So you don’t see the nature of your business changing drastically in the near future?

JK: Not really. I like the idea of having a big-ish company. But I like the idea of everyone making a difference. I don’t want to have a thousand people and not know half of them. We want to do more games, but we don’t want to do too many games.

And also, both Chris and I play the games we release, and that’s hugely important to us. Because we want, along with our QA department, we want to be responsible and stop games that aren’t good going out the door. I also don’t want to have a faceless workforce where I can’t talk to them and they can’t talk to me.

And it’s working well for us, we’ve hit a sweet spot. Our games cost a decent chunk of money to make, but make an even more decent chunk of money in returns. We make a profit and we plough that profit back into staff, training people, making new games, and that for me… that’s it. That’s what we want to do.

I’ve got enough, I’ve got enough horses. I don’t need anymore. The trappings of business success, that a lot of people would think you would want to have, like a Ferrari and a yacht… doesn’t really interest me.

GC: With this topic I always think of a scene in the behind the scenes for The Phantom Menace, where George Lucas is penny-pinching over the effects budget and whether it’s going to be $120 million or $121 million and I always think: why do you care? You’re worth billions, what else have you got to spend money on except making movies? Which presumably you enjoy? And if you don’t enjoy it why are you doing it?

JK: It is weird. I think having too much actually becomes a burden.

GC: He just gave all his money away in the end, which is great… but it also makes it all seem kind of pointless.

JK: Is it just points? Is it like experience points? I got given an OBE and someone said, ‘Oh, brilliant! You’ve levelled up!’

All: [laughs]

JK: These sort of things actually are gamifications, they motivate people. I think in life that’s important, but for me it’s about experiences and doing things, not having things.

GC: That seems a very healthy attitude to have, thanks very much for your time.

JK: Not at all, it’s been a lot fun.

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