E for All 2008: Interview with Joseph Olin, President of The AIAS

JS: What about upcoming titles? Anything you’re really looking forward to?
JO: Pretty much everything, really.
JS & JW: *Chuckle*
JO: I think Dead Space is probably high on my list. I’m not as good at first-person shooters as I like to think I am but I like games that make me jump. Certainly Fallout 3 will be an undertaking. Resistance 2 will be great. I’m looking forward to the online co-operative play. I like playing in teams and I think it is a fun experience. WAR. The ability to talk and play is a nice play. I’m still playing The Blob from THQ because bouncing off the walls is a good thing.

Metropolis, by Stephane Martiniere, from MK vs. DC Universe

JS: How many students do you have?
JO: We’re a professional organization so we’re strictly game makers. People call up and ask us what our course syllabus is. We really don’t teach courses. We try to help people with some curriculum and we sit on the board of some universities in order to help them in terms of how to evaluate game making programs and things like that but no, we don’t teach anything at the Academy per se. Maybe we should. It is a competitive environment and there is no singular path to becoming a game maker similar to the way that there is no singular path to becoming a filmmaker. Not everyone who goes to USC or UCLA film schools is going to be the next Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg. But you learn about the craft of film making. But at that point you might end up becoming a grip because that is where the jobs are.

JW: So your bio mentioned that you had a hand in creating Lara Croft?
JO: Yea well, people always like to think that I created it and yes I’d like to take credit for it, my idea, one night over a couple pints of beer in Buringham England, we figured out we needed to do an adventure game with this buxom, large-polygon young woman, and that wasn’t how it happened. My role and responsibility was to try to determine the market for this title in the states and we all thought it would be, we thought it was a great game because of the overall nature of, not so much that it was a woman—because you couldn’t tell other than the cover art and such, after about ten minutes all you were worried about was am I going to survive the puzzles and such. It was the nature of our 3D engine technology and the art and the global design that made Tomb Raider a very fun game to play and very unique at its launch on the original Playstation. We knew it was going to be a hit, we just weren’t sure how big.
It was fun, and it was actually, I wouldn’t say a hard sell, because every game magazine out there wanted some sort of cover for Lara Croft because she was the most unique game character at the time versus any of the monsters or the Hulks or the Marvel characters and such, Street Fighter characters, it was a good opportunity and good timing.
The last iteration of Tomb Raider, just as a game player, I really liked a lot. Toby Gard and the Crystal Dynamics Team that did that game did a really good job on it.

Continued on page 5.

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