Q-Games co-founder Dylan Cuthbert

If there were a definitive encyclopedia of pop culture, Q-Games co-founder Dylan Cuthbert will be located somewhere between Kevin Bacon and Zelig for the way that he keeps popping up in videogame history. Starfox for the Super Nintendo? He worked on that, in Japan, under Shigeru Miyamoto's supervision. Blasto for the PS1? He worked on that for Playstation's American division. Ape Escape? Phil Harrison's beloved rubber duck demos? The Playstation 3's wavey background? Cuthbert, Cuthbert, Cuthbert. He hasn't neglected his Nintendo ties, though, having worked on both the Bit Generations game Digidrive and Starfox Command for the Kyoto giant, with an as-yet-untitled game currently in development as well.

In early 2007, Cuthbert initiated what he calls the PixelJunk Project in order to realize his dream of making 2-D games once again, reaching an agreement with Sony to produce three such games for the PS3. The first game, code-named PixelJunk 1-1, was a top-down slot racing game released under the name PixelJunk Racers in September, to mixed reviews. His newest title, code-named PixelJunk 1-2, is an isometric real-time strategy game that is being titled PixelJunk Monsters. As we said in our preview, it's a clever reworking of the tower defense sub-genre of RTS games for console players, and as such should appeal to both newcomers and anyone who's enjoyed such browser-based titles as Desktop Tower Defense or Vector TD. In Part I of our two-part Q&A with Cuthbert, which we conducted via email, he explains what the name PixelJunk means; why he wants to turn Japanese gamers on to the pleasure of RTS games; and why PSN games haven't yet caught fire in his adopted Japan. Read on.

What does the name PixelJunk mean?

PixelJunk is the nickname I use on the fumufumu-Q blog ("fumufumu" translates roughly from Japanese to the "sound" your brain makes when you are thinking about something). It is a primarily Japanese blog which collects together a mix of tech, culture and art-related articles; a lot of our staff applied for jobs here after reading our those articles. So when I wanted to create a name for this series it seemed like a fun choice--people who like PixelJunk games are destined to be called PixelJunkies. :-)

Where did the idea for PixelJunk Monsters come from?

The idea for PixelJunk Monsters came from a desire to introduce RTS games to Japan somehow. For some reason, RTSs simply do not sell over here, even though if you drag Japanese people screaming and kicking and actually get them to play games such as Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Company of Heroes, etc., they absolutely love them and won't stop playing them for years.

Here at Q we've been kicking ideas around for an RTS for years and even presented some of them to Nintendo and other publishers, but we just can't get a Japanese publisher to take the plunge with that genre, so in the end we had to go ahead and fund it ourselves.

What do you like about real-time strategy games so much that has made you so determined to bring them to Japan?

The Sycamore, one of several enemy types in Q-Games' PixelJunk Monsters for PS3

This generation it seems that publishers and developers are determined to make real-time strategy games a success on consoles. The past two years have already seen such games as Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II and Command & Conquer 3, both from Electronic Arts' Los Angeles studio, while next year is expected to bring with it both Halo Wars, from Ensemble Studios and Microsoft, and Tom Clancy's EndWar, from Ubisoft. And as any one of these developers will tell you, the challenge of successfully bringing an RTS game to consoles is largely one of interface. There's something about using an analog stick to move a cursor around that's vaguely but noticeably unsatisfying; almost no matter how good a job the developer does with the controls, it always manages to feel both slow and perceptibly imprecise, as though it's slightly out of your control

Q-Games' PixelJunk Monsters (see here for screenshots), for which we were granted an exclusive hands-on preview, gets around this problem in a couple of ways. First, its design inspiration is drawn primarily not from games like Command & Conquer or Warcraft, but rather from the RTS-lite browser-based games like Flash Element TD and Desktop Tower Defense, which are themselves stripped-down, simplified versions of the tower defense modes in "proper" RTS titles. Second, like its forebears, PixelJunk Monsters fits on a single screen, so players can take in the entire battlefield at once without being disoriented by having to scroll around a larger field of combat. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, players make their way around the battlefield not with a cursor, but with a forest defender who serves as their on-screen avatar, its short legs pumping furiously as it scrambles from one part of the screen to the next. It's a subtly elegant choice that both solves the nagging control issues and projects the player into the game world, like the third-person games with which consoles have long been identified.

To read the rest of our exclusive hands-on preview, click on the link below.

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