Although Super-Ego Games isn't brand-new—the company was founded in 2001—the developer has been laying low for some time, and now it's ready to reinvent itself for the next-generation GameDaily BIZ has learned. Details about its upcoming projects remain under wraps for now, but Super-Ego said that it plans to roll out a major IP title in fall of 2007 "to reinforce and support its mission."

And what exactly is that mission? Perhaps fittingly for a company named Super-Ego, the company is aiming to "redefine" the video game industry. Realizing that mission will entail focusing on "distinct and innovative titles" that feature "rich, character-driven storylines."

Super Ego's team, run by industry vets Bob Welch, Greg Easley and Bo Lasater, has already created a proprietary engine that will "mold carefully crafted storylines and character interactions for next-generation consoles and high-end PCs." The engine will also help with the creation of web and television content, company officials said.

Super-Ego's management has a wealth of experience to tap. CEO Bob Welch has been in the game industry for over 20 years, working with companies such as Atari, Infogrames, Hasbro Interactive and Parker Brothers. During his Atari days, he served as Executive Producer in the strategy game business, where he was responsible for franchises that generated $250 million in revenue for the company – such as Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, Act of War, Sid Meier's Pirates, Civilization, Risk, Atari Anthology and more.

President and co-founder Greg Easley has more than 12 years of video game industry experience. In 1996, he founded Bottle Rocket, a game developer that designed online products for clients including ESPN, HBO, Major League Baseball, Electronic Arts and MTV. Five years and over 100 game releases later, Easley sold Bottle Rocket to digital television company ACTV, where he stayed on for a year to oversee operations. Then in 2001, Easley met Bo Lasater (co-founder and Chairman) and formed Super-Ego Games.

Lasater has worked in both game development and high tech fields. At multi-media developer Morgan Interactive, Lasater worked as a designer and programmer and oversaw strategic initiatives in outsourcing and new art and animation techniques. After that, Lasater helped found online systems integrator Fort Point Partners where he worked with high profile companies such as Estee Lauder, ETRADE, Hewlett-Packard and J.Crew. In 1999, he helped found his second company, Totality, an application and infrastructure management system with clients such as Best Buy, American Airlines and Martha Stewart.

To dig deeper into Super-Ego and see what makes them tick, we tracked down Greg Easley for a little Q&A, which follows below.

GameDaily BIZ: What's the significance of the name Super-Ego? It certainly stands out...

Greg Easley: The short answer is that "Super-Ego Games" is a cool name that we could trademark. The long answer is that in college and grad school I was a Freud geek, so when someone here tossed out "Super-Ego" as company name, I was all over it. In Freudian terms, the super-ego is your good conscience. Incidentally, "super-ego" is the opposite of "id," which is responsible for your deepest animalistic drives. I'll let you read into this what you will.

This makes us sound more academic and moral than we really are, but you asked.
Unfortunately for us, most people take "super ego" to mean "huge ego." But that's not what we had in mind.

BIZ: You say you want to "revitalize" the video game industry? What's wrong with it and how do you want to revitalize it?

GE: I agree wholeheartedly with what EA's John Riccitiello said in his WSJ interview a few weeks back: "We're boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play." Personally speaking, there is a limit to how many times I can play through first-person shooters, even though the graphics are a bit better in each generation. How many games – including the hyped ones – are actually breaking new ground, and reaching new potential gamers? Are we recycling the same formulas over and over? I think the Wii has tapped into pent-up demand for non-derivative games. Super-Ego has an opportunity to do the same with our new title.

More specifically, Super-Ego sees a fertile middle ground between dime-a-dozen casual PC games and $20-million-dollar console titles. We want to offer a true next-gen experience that appeals to a wide range of gamers. We want to lower the barriers to entry, so we're making design decisions that emphasize fun over difficulty. We want to appeal to the same size audiences that the best TV shows reach.

To that end we are focused on creating content that we can develop not just as video games, but as TV shows and web properties, too. More details on our world domination plan will be announced soon.

BIZ: Your focus will be on "rich, character-driven" storylines. Sounds RPG-esque. Care to fill us in on your game development approach?

GE: The console title we're working on now is not an RPG. We can't say much about it at this point, but I can reveal the genre: comedy adventure. Haven't played many of those, have you?

We have focused our resources on making human interaction lifelike and believable. And the core of human interaction, of course, is speech interaction. It has taken us quite a while, but we have developed a real-time speech system that is good enough to allow us to do comedy. This is a high bar, but I think we're there now. Our new title will incorporate a full array of traditional game mechanics, but in the end character interaction is the glue that holds it all together.

Another way we describe our new title is as a "playable sitcom." In fact we have adapted a big part of our development process from the sitcom development process. We have a "room" of comedy writers who sit around a table and write the scripts and dialogue with our game designers. We do multiple read-throughs of scripts, then in-game walk-throughs using placeholder audio, tweaking everything as we go along. When we're satisfied that no more improvements can be made, we lock down the final audio, test that, and create the final animations.

Continue...