In the developers' corner, Jon Hare of Sensible Software offered the strong opinion that this was indeed the case, while from the corporate behemoth's perspective, Greg Ingham suggests, in this very issue, that there's no inherent correlation between the size and wealth of a company and its willingness to take risks and innovate. Continuing the quest for enlightenment, we now seek the views of a man with experience on both sides of that particular divide, and also of the ground in between. Gary Penn came to the interactive entertainment industry around a decade ago as a fresh-faced (and big-haired) magazine journalist on Zzap! 64, a famously punchy mag that also provided several other names with their big break. After a few years moving around in the mag business (including periods at both EMAP and Future, when the latter was still a smallish, creator-owned operation), he was lured away by the gargantuan BMG group to work as a producer for their ill-fated games arm, then moved off to the comparatively titchy but legendary developer DMA Design, only to then see the company swallowed up by the ever-growing Gremlin empire. It's fair to say that he's been around a bit, so you'd expect Penn to have seen a few changes in his day. So when I asked him how much the creative environment had changed during his decade in the business, his initial response came as something of a surprise.

"I'm not so sure things are actually so different. The industry has more baggage these days (in all areas). And more layers of fat - which tends to increase the distance between Publishing and Development attitudes; the field of vision has narrowed because the respective disciplines are more focused than before. The Developer-Publisher relationship still needs more effort from both sides... More than ever Developers need to be more realistic about what they develop and how they develop it - but then so do Publishers. If it's not Developers spunking millions up the wall blindly pursuing some vague idea for years on end it's Publishers wanking away the wedge in the blind belief that the vague idea is achievable within the intended time scale."

Surely though, this IS a fundamental difference? The whole point being made by those nostalgic for the old way of doing things is that all these "layers of fat" DIDN'T exist - developers developed the game exactly in line with their original visions, without anyone coming in half-way through and going "Oh no, the German market won't like that, you'll have to change those tanks into big bits of cheese" or something. And games were, far more often than now, only released when their authors were happy with them - now, there are shareholders to consider, fourth-quarter profit targets to reach... generally, a whole raft of factors getting in the way of creative freedom that just weren't there before big companies started muscling in.

"This is the nature of all business, though. Publishers don't want to wait for product; Publishers want to publish. Developers want time to make product; they want to develop. There's not enough compromise on either side. What it boils down to is neither party giving a shit about each other; both parties fail to appreciate each other's role in the relationship and are too quick to take the credit or point the finger. Pimp Publishers still have fuck-all interest in or appreciation of how their highly-strung Development bitches do what they do just so long as they do it as efficiently and predictably as possible. It would help if the industry discarded that bollocks 'interactive entertainment' tag and was more realistic about the nature of its product: digital toys and games. It's harder than ever to create new digital toys and games let alone develop those ideas to a marketable, saleable conclusion. Any Publisher or Developer needs to know where it's going with the idea which makes the reuse of existing toy sets and game rules all the more appealing. Developing original toy sets or game rules means resources devoted to building and refining prototypes and exploring multiple possibilities and resolving potential unknown problems. It makes far more commercial sense to build (or build on) and exploit established toy sets with established possibilities and rules which have been tried and tested and for which multiple prototypes exist."

What Penn seems to be suggesting here, though, is that there's no room for developers to let their minds run riot and come up with original thoughts any more (which were, after all, what got people interested in games in the first place). There's talk of the need for compromise between developers and publishers, but that "compromise" seems to suggest doing everything the way the publishers want it, ie churning out variations on the same old themes with little or no concern for exciting design. Surely that isn't how DMA, just for example, got where they are now?

"Well, development of original digital toys and games in today's climate still depends on good design: doing more with less. It's too easy to get too close to the work and take wrong turns and lose sight of the original goal and overcompensate with too many unnecessary features and end up doing far more than is necessary to get achieve a decent result - if, indeed, a result is still achievable. Look at what was released around 1978, 1988 and 1998... the proportion of new to recycled product isn't so different between decades. Publishers still prefer to 'play safe' competing against every other derivative fucker in the marketplace rather than take risks and do their own thing and flirt with potential disaster and fortune. The quality of available digital material continues to improve but... Most of the toys in t'old days were crude prototypes, simple wood carvings compared to today's detailed plastic models... but the function of the two extremes is the same: a plaything, a type of toy, a focal point for attention and imagination... Blah blah blah."

Penn, of course, along with everyone else at DMA, is in an interesting position to comment on the changing perspectives on publishers. Having worked through some of the industry's biggest names as an independent, I wondered if there'd been any noticeable changes since DMA was taken over by Gremlin (or since they started producing games for the notoriously-censorious Nintendo.

"DMA merging with Gremlin meant addressing some of our weaknesses (and with some success so far) but I wouldn't say it's had any detrimental influence on our integrity as yet. In all honesty: so far so fair. And despite what people think, Nintendo isn't strict about creative control as such... They are keen to put the benefit of their experience to task to ensure the best possible result from teams they want to work with... It's hard not to admire their fussiness but it's not always clear exactly what they mean and what they want or why they want it."

Nintendo, of course, are well-respected in the business for gameplay innovation, but it hasn't always paid off compared to more mainstream, less challenging approaches, for example, the success of the Mega Drive over the technically superiority and more innovative games of the SNES. Now, history seems to be repeating itself as the quantity of Playstation games overwhelms the quality of N64 titles. Does this suggest that things are more corporate and safe now than they ever were, or is the broadening of the market brought about largely by the Playstation, and the possibilities opened up by high-tech hardware, in fact heralding a new era of creative imagination (as seen in weird things like Parappa, Fluid, Bust-A-Move etc, and non-derivative, purist's titles like Mario 64, Pilotwings and Blast Corps?

"Of course things are more corporate and safe now than they ever were - it's a maturing business full of burned fingers from Atari through Nintendo and Sega and now Sony... they have all contributed to raising awareness of the medium. The technology's more accessible than ever before, there's a greater familiarity with the technology - more people were raised with the technology in the past two decades, the technology's more affordable than ever before... But the medium is as difficult to manipulate now as it's ever been. The audience is expanding and there are so many hungry punters consuming any old shite that comes their way and the Publishers are responding to the voracious appetite until punter discernment develops to a stage where POP! the bubble bursts and... it's the same old stupid story over and over again."

With this last comment, Penn aligns himself again with Jon Hare, who also predicted a soon-come "bust" stage at the end of the current, seemingly endless boom. I asked him if he also shared Hare's (and my own) concerns about the ever-shortening gap between development cycles and hardware lifespans (ie the seeming inevitability of the fact that, by simply extrapolating the current graphs, you very shortly arrive at a point - just a couple of years from now, in fact - where it takes longer to develop a game for a new hardware platform than the platform's expected shelf life). Is the current drive towards better technology, capable of more "realism" going to push us all into an economic abyss?

"We have to stop this obsession with the technology and focus on the development of the medium, to create toys and games which cannot physically exist for the majority of punters who favour convenience and fun over power and speed."