Aventura y CÍA: Deck 13 is a young company and, at least in our country, quite unknown. In fact, it was because of the annoucement of the development of Ankh that your company’s name began to be known. We sure have lots of questions about your ideas, but probably the most important one is: what are your main objectives?

Deck 13 (Jan Klose): Our main objective is simple: Bring back the fun to computer games. We see so many people who are desperately looking for games that rival the classic humorous adventure and action adventure games. So we thought by ourselves: Hey, why does nobody want to help these people? And the answer was easy: we’ll do it!

And so did our publisher, Rebel Games. The guys and girls there are giving everything to make Ankh a major success – it will be one of the best adventures of the year!

AyC: We’ve heard many developers say that, although adventure games are well beloved by everyone, the “current market situation” requires other kinds of games to be developed. You have decided to take the “risk” of creating an adventure. Why did you choose this genre, now that everyone is decided to take it apart?

D13:We and Rebel Games think, the “current market situation” is greatly misunderstood. There is a big community of players who like to see light, humorous content. Not everybody wants to wield huge sci-fi guns or slay tons of goblins. What about all the fans of movies like “Finding Nemo” or “Shrek”? Where do they find equivalent games – that is games where they are part of a weird and funny story?

Besides, it’s been many a year since we’ve seen so many releases of great adventure games. Personally I think that the time for releasing an adventure game hasn’t been better for a long time!

AyC: The vast majority of the old gamers think that you have to be a die hard gamer in order to create a good adventure. Just like a movie director has usually seen many films before getting behind a camera, or a good writer has read lots of books before facing a blank page, we take it you have played a lot of good adventure games. What is your background as gamers and what are, in your opinion, the standard to follow?

D13: Of course we have played tons of adventure games over and over. But still: for fresh ideas you have to look beyond adventure games. You have to read books and watch movies, hear music and watch TV. Inspiration always comes from the outside if you don’t want to play the same old stuff over and over again.

Ankh promises to be a funny adventure filled with classic humour. What is the formula you plan to use in order to make it such a success? What are your inspiration sources when writing the script and dialogs for the game?D13
As mentioned above, imagination comes from everywhere. Great dialogues can be found in TV sitcoms as well as books (take Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, for example) or movies (did I mention Shrek?). Now add the special setting, the love for classic adventures and the creativity of developers and a publishing team, that is totally commited to the product – et voilà, there it is, Ankh à la surprise!

AyC: It was suprising to learn that Ankh was to be set in the old Egypt. It is complicated to write a story with so distant in time a setting, although that’s not a reason for it to come up badly (take Asterix as an example of good results). How will you face this complicated aspect? What kind of characters will we be able to interact with and what kind of locations will the player move over?

D13: I think that quite the opposite is the case: It’s very appealing to let a funny game play in Egypt. You have so many well known myths, places, and characters that you can all take and put in the blender and press the magic button. There are many things in Ankh that people will recognize, but just a few of the characters will behave as you would expect it. The pharaoh is a lazy dork who would kill anyone who speaks out loudly what I just wrote, and Osiris, the god of the underworld, is a bureaucrat, and Moses, although never actually appearing, is well known as a famous soccer player.

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