GameDaily BIZ: Let's start by talking about your comic book series Iron and the Maiden. How has that been doing sales wise?

Jason Rubin: It's certainly no Crash Bandicoot. The comic book industry is a very different industry than the video game industry. It's not the kind of industry you [enter] to make lot of money and to create a hit franchise, because there aren't a lot of comic book readers even if you're wildly successful. And you really can't be wildly successful unless you're a Batman, an X-Men, a Spider-Man, one of the classic characters that have been around forever, and they still do very well. And unless you're the top artists on a top book, your sales basically cover the cost of making the book. So my goal of getting into comics wasn't to be wildly successful or to get a million readers. It doesn't happen for anybody, even for the big books. It was more to explore intellectual property. It had been in my head for years; I wanted to get it out. And it's a very economical and efficient way to flesh out a world without creating a team of a half dozen people and getting an engine and getting going like you have to do in games.

And that's why I think so many movies are grabbing material from comic books, even comics that weren't wildly successful, because it's been fleshed out. They're not looking for popular comics to grab the audience; they're looking for people that have gone beyond scripts, creating the look and feel of a world that's a lot more fleshed out and thought out than a script would be. And there's just a huge, huge amount of treasure in the comic book world that's being discovered. So things like I Am Legend was a graphic novel based on a book. And it was the resurgence of the graphic novel that kind of made them think about making the movie. There are tons of examples. Frank Miller's 300 is another one. The graphic novel sold many, many times better after the movie.

BIZ: You've said before that when you create worlds and characters, you automatically do it in ways that are suitable for games, so have you given more thought to bringing Iron and the Maiden to movies and video games?

JR: Oh sure. Movies, video game world... absolutely. I've done a little work in that direction but there's nothing I can announce yet. But that was always the game plan... Having said that, I made the best comic book I could make with the best comic artists I could find and really tried to make an incredible comic book. It wasn't a stepping stone so much as it was really my focus, and now that it's passed, I'm looking at what I can do with the property now.

BIZ: Can you talk about any companies you're working with?

JR: Not really.

BIZ: Is there anything else besides Flektor that you're working on?

JR: Nothing to talk about right now. After leaving the gaming industry where you have to focus on a single title at a time – for me anyway – and not able to pop your head up to see what's going on in the world, it's been nice to be able to look at the world at large and work on things outside the game industry, like comics for example, or working on the Internet. And as a creator of IPs and entertainment, [my business partner] Andy [Gavin] and I have gained a lot by stepping back from the games industry for a little while and experimenting in other parts of the world. Andy has experience now in Internet and selling things on the Internet and creating things for mass populations that aren't gamers that most gamers don't have. We learned an incredible amount about consumption and the way people choose things outside of games and what people like and don't like outside games. I think there's a lot we can bring from that...

BIZ: And perhaps apply that to the Wii...

JR: The Wii, Guitar Hero and Rock Band... these are all examples of potentially coincidental intersections of non-gamer needs with games. I think if you focus a little harder... the game industry will find they have a huge potential outside of the core gamer and the audience that has kept us going. That's not to say we shouldn't focus on the audience that kept us going, but why not expand? I always believed the games industry has unlimited potential to reach every corner, from a 90-year-old woman to a nearly newborn as soon as they can play with controllers – two or three years old. You know, I've seen four-year-olds play Jak and Daxter - not well, but they've played it. ... So, stepping back has given Andy and I a great opportunity to expand our horizons.

BIZ: Right, and at the same time you've attended conferences and remained very much in sync with the games industry. So are you itching to finally make another game?

JR: Andy and I started making games in 1985. It's hard leaving the industry that you love and grew up with. At the end of the day, 50 years from now, if I never make another game I'll be remembered as a game creator that did other things, but I'm still the game guy. ... There's no better industry to work in. The other thing that we've been doing that we never had time to when we were at Naughty Dog is playing games. Andy has like how many level 70 WoW characters now?

Andy Gavin: Three.

JR: That's a huge time commitment. And I'd say I get through 60% of most games. I've been a mass consumer of games, not as a person looking to see how many polygons they're pushing or what their A.I. is like or how the physics engine works, but honestly enjoying games for what they are. And it's very interesting to me that the games I'm playing as a gamer are very different than the games I played as a creator. I used to play my competition – people I thought I could learn from – and that probably meant I was making decisions as a game maker that weren't necessarily best for what the gamer wanted, but rather as game maker for what I wanted to prove. But as a player, I find I'm playing games that I would have never respected on the technical game making plane, but are more fun and more enjoyable as a gamer than the cutting edge technical works I was looking at back then. That has been a huge lesson to me along with Flektor, that it's more about the fun – that's really what we're about – and you have to pay attention to that.

BIZ: It's interesting that you say that, because David Jaffe at one point that he has a tough time playing games because as a developer he knows all the techniques so it's tough to separate yourself from that mindset while playing. Are you able to play games for what they are?

JR: Now I am. And it's been the last year after a couple years off and kind of losing touch with the latest technologies that I'm not worried about those technologies; I'm worried instead about the game itself. I have a director friend and he said it takes him 2 or 3 viewings of a movie to stop thinking about the things off camera. Why is the camera man shooting from that angle? The make up is wrong, etc. – things like that, which nobody who isn't a movie maker thinks about. They're watching the movie as a story... It's the same as a game maker. I'm not interested anymore when somebody's arm goes throw the wall, "oh they should have fixed that," because in the end it doesn't really matter in the gameplay. Before I couldn't play a game if somebody's arm goes through a wall continually. I'd say "This is a technical failure, how could they release this?" The amount of time as a game maker we would have spent fixing that arm, and not balancing the game or adding cool stuff, would be a mistake. That's a lesson you can only learn by stepping back from the industry.