Playing Hard

What happens when we die? What will we leave behind?

Immortality comes when...

you give your people something

that they needed

that they didn't have,

and that they can keep

when you are gone.

That is how you...

How you survive your own death.

So you want to be a knight, eh?

You've lived your whole life inside these castle walls, yeah?

Run up here safe.

And now you come to me

and say that you want to pick up a weapon and defend your people?

Do you know what's out there?

Wastelands, poisoned lakes, starving barbarians.

We are going to ride out and retake those lands.

Yes. Those lands were ours,

and they will be ours again.

But if you are going to pick up a sword,

remember that it will be for the rest of your life.

We have endless enemies to fight.

We are far fewer than we used to be,

but these are our lands.

So, pick up your sword,

learn to use it, and ride out with us.

But don't expect to ride back.

You'll always be a warrior, if you start down that road.

But for those who live:

Gold, plunder, power, glory.

So, are you with me?

Well, then come aboard.

The reality of the video game - industry today is,

It's a savage industry where only three percent of all games

earn 97 percent of the total profits.

In all creative processes

they say, "Oh, it's normal to fail.

We have fail camps and we laugh about our failures."

But when you're living it...

...it's a bit less fun,

especially when you just burned through ten million dollars.

It was two years of my life we were working

on something magical

until we realized we weren't going in the right direction.

This is Yannis Mallat, the CEO

of the Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City studios.

Does he want us to get back on track?

Maybe he's telling himself,

this was expensive enough,

"You should go work on an existing brand."

I convinced him to give my team six months

to come up with a new proposal.

And after six months, they would decide

if they pulled the plug

or continue to invest.

I was looking for a Creative Director

that had a game in him.

This guy arrived at the second meeting

with a wooden sword he made when he was 14.

When I started this project,

I was half convinced that I was crazy.

I pitched this protect for ten years,

and every single person that I pitched it to had said no.

They'd said no.

"It's not interesting, it's not going to work, I don't get it,

it's not cool." I was starting to think I was crazy.

STÉPHANE: I've known the pain of

having something not work out,

and I've been fool enough to try again.

Stéphane, our producer.

Our pitch will be in a mix of English and French,

because, in order to get a good pitch from Jason,

we need English.

I could do my pitch in French, but...

make no sense at all. It would...

So, I've had a game in my head for about 12 years now.

I actually wanted to play this game

for much longer than that,

but the industry just kept not making it. Right?

I would go to the store every year, and it wasn't there.

And now I download, and I'm like,

"Where is it? It hasn't arrived."

So, that's this game. Okay? This game is that.

When our player

was, you know, eight years old or so, right?

He or she was in the backyard

and found a stick and...

And he could do it.

Couldn't put a ball through a hoop, right?

Couldn't write his own name in his handwriting - very well, right?

But... Cuk! Cuk! Cuk!

"All right, man!"

So, he did what any reasonable eight-year-old would do,

is he went and found his brother

and beat the shit out of him with it. Right?

Right?

Later, in high school,

picks up a baseball bat.

Something moves.

What is that? Like...

That's a little scary.

It's like... What is that thing? Hmm!

But, wow!

Hmm...

So, he puts it down and says,

"Fuck that, I am going to go play video games."

It's interesting to link our three cultures

with musical genres.

We're bringing the Super Bowl,

like, mood and adrenaline...

Heavy metal fits with the Vikings.

Rap is interesting for the knights.

It's like monster truck meets UFC.

It's loud, it's dangerous,

it's full of dust, it's full of blood.

Knight, Viking, or Samurai.

What kind of person are you?

What would you fight for?

Here we go!

Pam, 360, let's go.

360, Nick, Olivier.

First of all,

we wanted to solidify the nucleus of the game,

which is the fight mechanics.

It's our biggest risk,

and the heart and soul of this game,

and the business model of this game.

We convinced the company that we had an idea

about melee sword fighting

that was a completely new way to play these games,

was a real breakthrough in game play.

Instead of the traditional approach

where we expect you to memorize combinations,

the Art of Battle puts your attention

on your enemy's weapon

as the most important thing that matters.

And not just on the weapon itself,

but on that weapon's position in space.

Yannis was here to just see the production.

The good news is,

he really asked to see Hero.

He was looking at it and...

We sold the meeting. He went out happy.

That said, it doesn't bring anything new to the project.

It was more a recognition tour.

With innovation comes risk.

The more innovation, the greater the risk.

And the greater the risk,

the more likely it is to collapse.

Because there are too many forces pushing against

what the team wants to do,

whether it's the pressure to attract talent and resources,

or it's doubt

because your competition is doing something that works.

One thing I will do very often

is update you on what's happening on the marketing side.

I know we're not yet ready to go out and say, "Hey, we exist."

But in two weeks from now,

we're going to have people from Europe and San Francisco,

marketing people from Operational Marketing - will come here.

We're going to present them the game. They'll come and play.

We started with Jason's

pure vision, a blank slate,

we don't have a name, or a logo, or a cover for the box.

We don't have a trailer. Nothing exists.

Everything needs to be created.

When you introduce a new brand,

we want to make sure that we start with a message

that can be understood and resonate

into as many players as possible.

Blade Masters, Blade Assault,

Warriors of Honor, Eternal Honor,

Blade Warfare, Blade Assault.

I talked with Creative Services

in San Francisco. This is what they came up with.

Force of Arms, Wrath of

the Warriors, Storm of Steel,

Blade Rivals, Burden of Steel, Bloodsport...

We want to capture the universal feeling

of the heroic moment,

the universal feeling

of what it's like to be a warrior on a battlefield.

There! Yes!

The knight fantasy of being a protector, right,

has always really hit me hard.

My mom was a big Rodgers and Hammerstein fan.

Musicals, right?

And her favorite musical was Camelot.

And so I grew up watching Lancelot

singing about, you know, being a valorous knight,

and that whole thing was sort of where I got started,

you know, with this fantasy.

If you were really in trouble, we were like...

You would try to... You would try to follow it, right?

I think fantasy is a...

It's full of lessons

about what can be and who we are.

My dad was a collector of religions.

Uh, by the time I was 14,

I had been, I think, seven different things.