GameDaily BIZ: How is development on Too Human progressing? You got a lot of flack and negative feedback at E3 for what was shown there...

Dennis Dyack: Yeah, I think clearly E3 was not our finest hour. So, Too Human is going extremely well. Actually I would say probably it's beyond everyone's expectations internally at Silicon Knights and with our partner Microsoft, so it's going extremely well and I think certainly all of the issues and the things that occurred at E3 are way in the past.

BIZ: Can you put a percentage on how far along in development you are?

DD: It's much, much further along than what people think. The perception right now, because we're being so quiet about it, and we're being unusually quiet about it, is being misinterpreted as we're not that far along but it's going very well.

BIZ: You told me that you actively read responses from gamers and others on blogs and message boards. Did the response to the E3 showing and some of the things that were said bother you? I mean, some of them even resorted to personal attacks on you, which is ridiculous.

DD: Welcome to the Internet.

BIZ: How do you not let that bother you, or did it bother you?

DD: Oh it does! That's a very interesting question. I wrote a blog entry on IGN called the Ice Bucket. If you read that, then you'll get a perception of how it felt to be there. But afterwards, the reaction and the backlash was so strong, I think it really catalyzed into changing the way we think about a lot things, and not from a perception of, "We're upset because the reaction was bad." We knew the reaction was not going to be great even before going to the show. It led to a lot of internalizing, a lot of self-analysis and I guess one of the things that I looked at a lot was seeing how other entertainers—because we're an entertainment industry—reacted to extremely bad press before things came out. So I just started to looking at a lot of things and just sort of digging in to see what other people are doing. I remember I think it was one of the directors of X-Men before the movie came out, and the first director's advice to the second director was, "Don't read the forums because you can't please everyone no matter what you do."

There were a couple of ones that really resonated with me; one was Titanic. If you remember before the movie came out, there was so much negative buzz about it, it was unbelievable. The staff that were working on the project were getting demoralized because they were reading it all the time, people saying, "The Titanic's in trouble, James Cameron's going to blow it, blah, blah, blah." But meanwhile, internally people are saying, "This is the best thing we've ever done," which is how we feel about Too Human; no one's seen it yet and they're judging it. The other one that resonated with me was the new James Bond. If you saw some of the rumors when Sony said who's going to be the new James Bond, people were starting to call him "James Boring" and, "That guy's a terrible actor, I saw Layer Cake and it wasn't that good, that guy's a wooden actor blah, blah, blah." I actually liked Layer Cake myself, but I remember seeing interviews with him and he was feeling really bad about it. So I looked at all that, and I think a lot of people at Silicon Knights looked at all that... It's such a skewed perspective on what E3 is all about and what it's supposed to be that we just have to completely ignore it. We feel strongly that Too Human's the best game we've ever created. We're doing things we've never done before. We didn't show any of that at E3 and it's not the forum to show it; and our games generally don't show well at events. It catalyzed us into thinking about different ways in how we would start to think about games in the future and when we would show next. I think that has really catalyzed into why we're being so quiet right now.

BIZ: Speaking of that, I think the game industry is a bit unique in that it shares a lot of information and a lot of assets on projects way before they're completed, while if you look at Hollywood, how often do you see whole clips of movies seven, eight months before its even ready to go?

DD: Well the answer is almost never.

BIZ: Right, so do you think the game industry should go into more of a "quiet mode" until things are just about done and then show it to the press?

DD: Absolutely, and I think we're going to be practicing what we're preaching from now on.

BIZ: We won't like that in the press, but...

DD: Actually, you know what, I think you will and let me explain why. So I think fundamentally yes and I think the answer is, the industry's so immature and there's been a couple reasons why things are happening the way they are, and this is one of the reasons that E3 died. So [there are] two reasons historically why you would show a game before it's done. The first one, which is now starting to go away, is technology would change so rapidly, if you didn't get your game out as soon as possible, within six months, id could come out with a new engine and make you look like crap and you'd be dated. So there's this technology curve that people were just completely intimidated by. That's now gone. At the end of the day, I think the leaps of the technology are becoming so small and incremental, it's all about content and story and things just looking good. So there's no rush to market anymore like there used to be.

The other thing is, quite frankly, an immaturity in the market where the publishers don't have a cash flow model where you put a game in the can (finish it) and then you start the marketing after it's gold and mastered. What happens right now is people set their marketing budgets, which quite often are larger than the development budgets or at least equal to, and they hope the game gold and masters in time, otherwise they'll pay for advertising in television and movie trailers and all these kinds of things that are very, very expensive and they have these windows of opportunity... Sometimes if you're going to go to a print magazine, you have to book it three or four months in advance. If a game slips six months and you miss that, it's catastrophic, so what happens is we show games early. Some publishers will be like, "You have to make this date no matter what. Cut whatever, because the marketing budget is already set." You guys in the press have to deal with this stuff for example asking, "Does Too Human support four player co-op?" and I would be able to say yes, affirmatively... if the game is done. And there's no question, you don't have to give a person any sort of modicum of good faith, or they're going to try to get it in and it's looking good right now, so all this idea of previews is a joke. And without question at E3 some of the best games at the show are going to turn out to be horrible games.