YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS
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THEALEX: What games most inspired your current role of creating interactive and immersive experiences for the public?
All of them. I constantly draw on my games experience in my work in all kinds of ways. It’s like if you’re a writer drawing on everything you’ve read as you were growing up. Back in the Eighties or Nineties, the storytelling and the gameplay was completely stripped back, so you can see it for what it is. Nowadays it’s much more sophisticated, and you can’t see the bones of it like you could back then. But what’s really funny is that things come around again: there’s very little true innovation in terms of storytelling and interaction, so anything you see, you can sort of work out where it’s come from.
RETROBOB: What was the story behind you becoming a character in Micro Machines 2?
Codemasters rang me up and asked me whether I wanted to be in it, and of course I said yes. But I was a bit cautious, because what if they made me the really slow character? There’s that whole thing of women drivers, etc, etc. So I said, ‘Yeah, I will be in the game, but I want to be the fastest Ai-controlled character.’ But they went, ‘Oh, you can’t be the fastest, because Spider’s always the fastest, but you can be the second fastest,’ so I went with that. The grand irony of it is I haven’t even got a driving licence in real life! Actually, I had a phone call a couple of years ago when they did the refresh of Micro Machines and they needed my permission to use my likeness.
ROSSI46: With the games industry being bigger than the movie and music industries combined, why do you think there are not loads more TV shows dedicated to gaming?
I would say that games got ahead of TV and proliferated across all the interactive, youthful media channels like Twitch, Discord and Youtube. It’s like with telephones: some countries go straight to mobile and skip landlines. Videogames have leapfrogged traditional television and infiltrated the interactive world.