He got game, and so does Sidhe: An interview with Jos Ruffell

The recent AnimfxNZ 08 conference in Wellington, New Zealand is the place to rub shoulders with a mix of international speakers and participants from the animation, games, visual effects and film technology in-crowd.

One of those attending was New Zealand's own Jos Ruffell – but who is he and why should you care?

To look at him, you wouldn't guess that Jos is at the forefront of New Zealand's next great contribution to the creative industries. He's unassuming and a little bit tousled, laid-back and soft-spoken.

Under the misleading demeanour, though, lies a sharp mind and a forward thinker. Jos is the Business Development Executive at Sidhe Interactive (pronounced 'she'), New Zealand's largest retail game development house.

And for those of you who still think of gaming as a niche market, consider this: Grand Theft Auto 4 had the highest-grossing first 24 hours of any entertainment release ever, around US$310 million. Compared to that, Spiderman 3's $60 million opening day seems positively paltry. When Gears of War 2 launched earlier this month, fans spent 15 million hours – around 7,500 working years – playing the game in its first weekend.

If that weren't enough to make the games industry interesting, it's also a rare bright spot in a marketplace of gloom. While CitiGroup announced layoffs of 50,000 employees worldwide this week, gaming continues to grow. October sales in the U.S. market were up 18% from last year, and the Interactive Software Association of New Zealand (ISANZ) is reporting a 17% year-on-year increase from June 2007 to May 2008.

In the hyper-competitive global games industry, Sidhe is holding its own against such powerhouses as Electronic Arts (FIFA, The Sims) and id Software (Doom, Quake). Their catalogue includes Aladdin, Rugby League, Surfer, Jackass, Speed Racer and Football Fever, and they make games for Sony's PSP and PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii and DS, as well as PCs and iPhones.

We sat down with Jos to find out where he comes from, where he's going, and when he thinks the New Zealand games industry will have its Lord of the Rings moment.

What’s your background, and how did you end up here?

During university I got a job working in a games store. I was studying commerce, but dropped out of uni because I got frustrated being taught to make myself more employable when I wanted to be learning about entrepreneurial skills, how to start a business and grow a company. I didn’t want to be an employee – I wanted to be my own boss, so I saw it as a waste of time basically being told how smart I was for making myself more employable by being in this room.

Some close friends who I was working at the games store with had decided to form a games studio. They started it in the spare bedroom of my flat because we were flatting together. I said, “Hey, I need to get involved; I can help run the business side”. I didn’t know anything about games except I liked playing them and I was business-focused. But I did like media and television and I saw some common ground there and that was how I foolishly got into the games industry.

There’s a lot of public consciousness about the growth of the New Zealand film industry. Can you speak to the development of the New Zealand games industry in a way that people might not be familiar with?

Sure. I think a good way to look at it is we are as an industry 30 years young. We are at a point where there is no local market really for New Zealand-produced content. I mean the film industry itself, even with support from the Film Commission, struggles to make New Zealand films targeted at a New Zealand audience possible – they need to work for a [domestic] audience and a worldwide audience. So for the games industry that problem is exacerbated enormously.

It’s very hard to get going as a studio here because you have a huge distance between where you are in New Zealand and the overseas market. And so you have very few connections, very few pieces of knowledge that would help you get started, unlike if you were to start setting up in an established market like America were you might have actually come up through the industry, worked on a few games and then left to start your own studio. An analogy I’d use is that the New Zealand games industry is sitting at a Heavenly Creatures, maybe verging on Frighteners state right now—we haven’t had our Lord of the Rings moment yet. But it’s not to say that we won’t.

What do you think has been the closest New Zealand gaming moment to Lord of the Rings?

I’m a little biased but I would say Speed Racer could have been a strong candidate for a Frighteners-style game and maybe it is. Speed Racer represented working with top-tier Hollywood talent the Wachowski brothers, top-tier Hollywood producer Joel Silver of Silver Pictures—an industry legend—and also top film studio Warner Brothers. Their Warner Interactive games division is not a top-tier games publishing company, they’re not in the top five, but they are making rapid inroads into the games industry. So it wasn’t the Lord of the Rings shot but it maybe was Frighteners.

People were saying [Peter Jackson] came out of nowhere when Rings happened but there was a very gradual building and each film was getting a little larger and a little more complex, and it culminated in Rings.

The games industry is in a similar place in New Zealand—we're growing and improving and every game we put out is getting better and better. I believe we’ll get to the point where we have our debut on the world stage and people will say “where the hell did the New Zealand games industry come from?”

Right. An ‘overnight success’ within the next decade.

Yeah.

Do have a time frame that you’re striving for?

I think it’s reasonable to expect we could achieve that within five years.

I’ve seen the movie Jackass and watched a couple episodes of the show, and it’s pretty crazy—what is the game about?

The purpose of the game is to have fun with your buddies doing ridiculous over-the-top stunts. When you look at what traditionally goes into a game—strong story, plot, and character development just like a film—Jackass has none of that. So it makes an interesting challenge.

We looked at situations of what the Jackass guys might have wanted to do if the serious risk of losing a limb or death was not an issue, and put that into the game. So, taking things to the next level. Simple games like when kids trace out their fingers with a pen and get faster and faster, we had a mini-game with a very sharp kitchen knife. So, you know, ‘dot dot dot dot squelch—scream’. That sort of thing. Or rolling down a San Francisco street in a tin can dodging traffic.

We also wanted to riff on common popular games and put them in Jackass, so we had ‘Fridge Racer’, like Ridge Racer, where you are riding down a ski slope on top of a refrigerator. Urban Wakeboarding: getting towed behind a pickup truck riding on top of a garbage can lid, like wakeboarding but hillbilly style.

Jackass obviously got pretty broad distribution in the United States as did Speed Racer, how do those two compare to each other as far as your evolution towards that Lord of the Rings moment?

I think Jackass was an important step for the studio that we could execute on a known, large, very well recognised IP and do it well. In that regard we really achieved that goal. The quality of the game was high for the platforms and we had some really cool features that hadn’t been seen. For instance, on the PSP, the portable Sony machine, we had a lot of user-created tools so people could actually save their replays from the stunts, edit them in the game and upload the replays to the Jackass server for other people to download and rate and make their own Jackass TV shows out of the game footage. That was a very cool feature which was greatly enjoyed by the fans.

Speed Racer was the next step in that it was a ‘triple-A’ big-budget Hollywood film project. At the end of the day they make the Jackass films for $5 million on handicams. Speed Racer was a film with a budget in the hundreds of millions, so it’s a slightly different ball game.

What are some of the projects you’ve got coming up?

We’re focusing on creating an original IP content for the download platforms. One of the cool changes of the next generation of consoles is that you can publish games directly to the machine which are downloaded digitally so they basically have an iTunes for games on them, and that’s really attractive to us because we can make our own games, develop them internally and publish them without having to get a publisher involved—we are the publisher. We can put little quirky unique game ideas out there and just see how they go and be quite creative with them.

What was the worst moment in Sidhe’s existence to date?

Oooh, probably the day the soda fridge ran out of Coke (laughs). It’s actually a fortnightly occurrence, right on the cusp of the next delivery.

That’s your worst experience as a company? No dark despair of the soul in the middle of the night? I heard you guys were going for three years before you got your first development contract.

Probably the hardest points are waiting for getting the contract when you really want to land the deal. The negotiating process can be quite time consuming and you just want to get in to the game. I guess those are the nervous times, for me at least on the business side. You really want everything to come together but you also need to negotiate the contract. Those are the moments where, for me at least, you might not have sleepless nights but you get a little tense.

What’s your vision for yourself in the next five or ten years? Do you see yourself with Sidhe? Do you see yourself in this industry?

Yeah, I see myself in the industry. Absolutely. I’d like to see Sidhe continue to grow and prosper and to get firmly established on the world stage, and also the New Zealand industry in general and other companies. I’d like to help them in the same way that Sidhe actually helped and continues to help the studio I came from. I’m still involved with them and so I’d like to pass that on. It’s a very collaborative and cooperative industry in New Zealand and I’d just like to see everyone prosper.

If you had one final thing to say to the people of New Zealand about the gaming industry or about Sidhe what would you want it to be?

It’s an exiting industry and there are lots of opportunities for New Zealanders. It’s a very artistic and creative industry with strong technical challenges, and it’s a fun industry. I encourage people who don’t play games to take a look at them because there are a number of new ways you can play games these days and the industry is really opening up and expanding. It’s coming into a really golden era.