In the 25 years of career you have worked in very different situations. How would you call, in general video gaming and in the adventure genre in particular, the current situation: crisis, change or apogee?

I think the idea of, you know, I was demonstrating Broken Sword 4 recently, next to a game that cost 20 million dollars to develop and is only available on the next-gen consoles. I think that economically… the figures don’t back up and I think that is a serious concern.

I think that, creatively, actually, we came to an interesting time, and I think every time there’s a new generation of consoles they’re creating opportunities both graphically and in terms of gameplay, but I think that this makes of the indie scene, which is establishing. Is actually really good just to go back so I think that every time we have a new console generation, obviously it’s very exciting, the new extension of Wii, that’s the new control system… so I think that generally provided the industry doesn’t collapse because it’s spending so much money on a few titles, it’s actually a very healthy market. And as far as the adventure games are concerned, I pretty much accept that we have a static market but if we try to introduce, embrace different gameplay, if we try to steal areas from other games, then I think that we really run the risk of alienation of core market.

So I think for adventure games, we’re not going to sell a lot more than we are at the moment, it’s a very healthy market, so from my personal perspective, as to say, I love the idea of balancing adventures on one side, with actually without it going into mainstream games and try to bring something new, giving the experience. At the moment It’s a very good time, frankly, but then the industry goes running in cycles, I like to describe it like a season: two years ago, it was just the middle of Winter, it was awful, nobody did any games…. Then we came into Spring, I think it was very exciting, it was about a year ago, now we’re in Summer, things are great, but Autumn is around the corner, you can feel it, you can just feel the Autumn coming, and Autumn would be in a year time, and in a year off that would be Winter, we’ll go round and round and round, the thing is, anybody who doesn’t recognize that is a fool, because it happens every time, and it will continue to happen, provided we have these cycles.

- So what is the difference between now and back in the time of the first BS?

- Certain publishers… because the costs are so much high, publish is much more risk adverse. And to repeat myself for the third time, that’s why this indie scene is so exciting, because that is the only way you’re really going to get big risks through, because if a publisher backs a game and spends 2, 3, 4 million euros and it fails, that is an awful lot of money, because the other thing is that back then there were midterms, now there aren’t: games are either successful or failures, there’s almost nothing in between, and that increases the risks further. So in many ways it was more fun, ten years ago, because individuals, the publishers, would make smart decisions, and provided they were right, they weren’t going to get too wrong. Now you’ve got to go through green light committees, marketing, sales, international, etc, but that’s the way it is because in the end it’s so much expensive.As final question, we cannot but ask you, in order to have it clear for our readers, the million dollar question, asked hundreds of times.

Are there plans for a BS5 or will the series finally end with this one?

You know, it’s up to our fan base. I have no plans for BS5, we’ll see how well BS4 goes both commercially and how is received by the fans, because at the end of BS3 it’s quite clear that people wanted another game, and I love writing Broken Sword games, but at the same time my life is not just Broken Sword, I really enjoyed doing most of other things, and what’s fun is, that, we write a Broken Sword every three years, but hopefully it’ll feel fresh every time, cause BS3 was three years ago but it still feels fresh and is so in people’s mind, but three is quite a long gap, so as I said there are no plans for a new Broken Sword at the moment, we’ll see how it succeeds and maybe, well it’s now 2006 so maybe in 2009, another will come up and it would be great, and I’ll have the opportunity and the pleasure of coming and see you all again and hopefully show you something new and fresh and innovative.

- Thank you very much for your time.

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