Recently we traveled to Paris to visit Quantic Dream, the studio behind Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Indigo Prophecy. We spoke to Quantic Dream founder and CEO David Cage about the upcoming Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer, a game designed solely for the PlayStation 3. Cage is the director and screenwriter for Heavy Rain, meaning he was the one in charge of writing some 2,000 pages of script for it, which he expects to be released in late 2009. Besides showing us "The Taxidermist," a demo that has been seen before in other venues such as E3, Cage and the rest of the Quantic team were very protective of any details regarding the story and characters that will be seen in Heavy Rain. Still Cage, who worked as a musician, composer and writer for years before founding QD in 1997, was a fascinating person to talk to, if guarded about any of Heavy Rain's many secrets.



GameSpy: Does the French government pump funds into game development to give it the same sort of weight French film has?
David Cage: The French government supported the idea that games were culture so they could really support the industry in a similar way that they support the movie industry because it's a cultural identity of the country. So the government helps with tax cuts and certain things to protect the industry. That's really clever and we really praise the French government for understanding the situation of this industry because we're really between technology and culture. We have some fantastic schools and we were just seeing art students leaving France because they couldn't find a job here and ended up working in the UK or the US. So they started working on giving us the means to keep these people here in France, working here. Also, there were very few cultural products that when you're French you can sell all around the world. When you're a moviemaker or a book writer, sometimes you can export what you do in your culture. With videogames, basically, we're trying to sell our games worldwide. So, it's a good thing for French companies.

GameSpy: How much of Quantic Dream's research and development funding comes from Sony and private investment versus the French government? Is it more Sony, or does more come from France?
David Cage: It's much more Sony, of course. Nothing insane, I don't know what the actual figures are. There's what they call an R&D cut, and that's probably 20% of what you actually invest.
GameSpy: What were the most painful lessons learned from Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit that you didn't want to replicate with Heavy Rain?
David Cage: I don't know that there was any painful lesson. There were some very positive lessons, and the first one was that there is a market with what we're trying to achieve. The reviews were very high, the figure sales we were really happy with. And that was really not obvious at the time that we were doing it, because we created the game and it was based on interactive storytelling and emotion.

Even today, if you talk about that stuff, it's a bitch to make to any publisher. Talk to them about how many guns you have, how many enemies you're going to kill, that's cool. But then you say, "Oh, well you know what, I'm going to trigger subtle emotions." Oh, okay. Is this going to be interesting? What is the point? So, we just demonstrated that it was possible to do that, first on a technical, conceptual point of view to tell the story from a player's actions. And last but not least, people already had interest in this. So these are good lessons.

Now there are always things you wouldn't do the same way, we hesitated on the [interface's] action system until the last minute. There were different options that we tried and I don't think we chose the right one. So this is something we'd definitely do differently. One of the lessons was that it's extremely difficult to do a cross-platform title when you have such a high level of expectation of graphics and visuals and technology. When you work on several platforms, you fight to have your game working on all, but it's not optimized for any of the three platforms. Where here, working only on PlayStation 3, we created PlayStation 3-exclusive engines so we take the best out of the hardware.