Cleaver interview/Part 1

In May 2005, Cleaver agreed to be interviewed in a Ventrilo chat session hosted by Bluetta. Questions were posed by a variety of guests, who either contributed to winning Cleaver in the auction, or won a ticket in three events Bluetta hosted. Llama recorded the interview. Part one is transcribed below.

Furniture, retail, and the future

Stevedave:	Awesomeness. I need to know, how exactly, does one frizzle a leek.
Cleaver:	I couldn't possibly tell you that old boy. It's one of, er, the captain's secrets. I couldn't possibly explain. Sorry man.
Stevedave:	I feel cheated.
Bluetta:	Frizzle a leek?
Cleaver:	It's from the single player game. It's very, very secret. The other secret is that I'm a terrible, terrible cook.
Bluetta:	Alright, Stevedave's question of much awesomeness. I wasn't paying attention. Go ahead Jacquilynne.
Jacquilynne:	So, I know how much craft I send you guys all the time, how much stuff do you guys get, and do you really keep it all in the bathroom?
Cleaver:	(laughs) We don't get as much stuff as you might think, and only the stuff that makes it to the bathroom wall is generally player missives that come with checks, and cash and so on, and sometimes envelopes, so they're decorating the bathroom walls. The other larger stuff doesn't go in the bathroom. So we have like a little shelf where, for example, the global purse that was sent to us is on display and then various other things on people's desks and so on. No, we don't get enough crap, we want more crap. Send us more stuff.
Bluetta:	You're gonna regret that. (general chatter). Okay Kargach.
Kargach:	Hi Cleaver, I don't know if you mentioned it on the forums yet but I just wanted to ask you how E3 went.
Cleaver:	I hate E3, as I may have mentioned before. It was ok, it's very tiring. I had a lot of meetings this year, so lots of pacing around, going to meetings and some good may come of it, but nothing gigantic as yet. A lot of the meetings I had were about things like, we might do a Brazilian server, which is exciting for some of us, but not a huge thing. Of course I pace around and look at whatever else is on show, but mostly I find that rather a dour and depressing experience I'm afraid. I don't think much of the games industry, by and large.
Bluetta:	What is E3 exactly?
Cleaver:	It's a giant, giant trade show in Los Angeles. The annual hooha for the games business. People show their new products, so there's literally acres of stands, Nintendo and Microsoft and Sony showing off their stuff. Spending millions and millions of dollars, mostly for the benefit of the press and the retailers. So it's a little bit annoying for me as a developer because you go there and you point at the EA stand and say "Well, I could make 20 games for the price of that stand". It's that kind of thing, very loud as well. Part of the hooha, I suppose it's necessary, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Bluetta:	Madam, you are next.
Madam:	Hello Cleaver. I'd like to ask about furni.
Cleaver:	Hi Madam, what would you like to know about furni?
Madam:	Please, tell me about furni, just pontificate upon it.
Cleaver:	I like furni, hopefully you guys will like furni too. I like sofas especially. I think sofas are great. Having pirates sitting on them would be challenging. Anyway, furni is good, and houses to put furni in is also good. I don't know that I'm gonna say a lot more than that. Except that I am actually saying something about it, which is something, right?
Madam:	Nemo actually told me to ask that.
Cleaver:	I figured you had some kind of insider line. Otherwise the furni thing wouldn't come up, is this being recorded?
Randal:	I believe Llama is recording this, yes.
Cleaver:	Can we have a confirmation on that?
Randal and Bluetta confirm
Cleaver:	Okay, I'd better not say any more about furni then.
General protests
Bluetta:	Onward to Jacktheblack.
Jacktheblack:	I was curious, how many boxes has Ubisoft sold for you so far, and how much business has it brought?
Cleaver:	I don't have the sales figures, so I can't give you a precise answer for that. However, the results are not looking as encouraging as we had hoped. Fortunately, it looks like our online distribution is going to be picking up quite considerably. The retail thing is not quite showing the great swathes of pirates that we were hoping for. However, the Ubisoft guys assure me that it's early days yet, and we shouldn't be counting our chickens and you know, this that and the other are going to happen. It may be that it ends up selling like hot cakes at $10 so maybe they'll discount it to 10 bucks but right now it's not looking super exciting. We're seeing some people from it, but not the tens of thousands that we were hoping for.
Jacktheblack:	Yeah, it's kinda harder than I thought it would be to find a box somewhere round here if I didn't order it myself.
Cleaver:	I think that's the big problem. This was my suspicion all along with the retail thing. Unless you basically bribe the retailers, and spend a lot of money, and a lot of effort making sure it gets on shelves, endcaps etc., then it's not really gonna do a lot for you. I was hoping Ubisoft were gonna do that but it doesn't look like they've done a terribly good job. Again, it may be an ongoing campaign and they have to go back at it again or revise the offering somewhat. The other thing we've been considering which is sort of tempting, although it may reduce the point of the whole thing for us is to slap a "play for free on the doubloon server" sticker on the boxes. Which we may encourage Ubi to do, and they may or may not want to do, because Guild Wars is selling like hot cakes, and the big selling point there is the fact that it doesn't have online fees. So worth considering, but we'll see.
Bluetta:	I think Indeed had a question.
Indeed:	Cleaver, what makes blue dye?
Cleaver:	Blue dye? Um, elderberries ▶(?)?
Indeed:	Thank you. Sorry, I also had one more, and so does my brother but we can ignore him, I don't like him. Do you still have the stamp of approval pin that I made?
Cleaver:	Of course I do Indeed.
Indeed:	Excellent.
Bluetta:	You can let Fronsac ask his question.
Indeed:	Do I have to?
Bluetta:	No.
Cleaver:	Yes.
Fronsac:	Do you have any more of that whisky that you shared with me? That was really really good.
Cleaver:	I think I drank all that whisky. I'm pretty sure I drank all that whisky. I have other whisky though, I have a continuing supply of whisky, which is fortunate, because otherwise bad things would happen.
Fronsac:	I have a corollary question, is there anyway for me to obtain some of that whisky, or something near as good, because all the whisky round here sucks.
Cleaver:	I'm sure you can acquire good scotch whisky where you are. If I recall correctly it was Ardbeg that we were drinking. You can that in, even Trader Joe's sometimes. Certainly some stores will carry it. Go to a good liquor store man. Assuming you're over 21 that is.
Bluetta:	Away from the whisky, and on to the better half, Caspian.
Caspian:	I have a much stupider question. Have you ever seen the TV show House? If so, tell everyone how awesome it is.
Cleaver:	I'm afraid I've never seen the TV show house. Cleaver doesn't have a TV. Alas, or not alas as the case may be. So I can't tell everyone how awesome it is, but if you think it's awesome, it's totally awesome.
Bluetta:	Okay, Ridestowe?
Ridestowe:	Sorry, come back to me later.
Bluetta:	Yawl, do you have a question?
Yawl:	What would you guess to be the possible timeline for a product beyond Pirates?
Cleaver:	Well that's an interesting question. Beyond pirates, in space, with cowboys and lawyers. Well, we're actually working on a new game, or rather Jack is working on a new game, and Nemo and Bluebeard are making some art for it. I probably shouldn't announce what the new game is. It's not cowboy spaceship lawyer, close though. It will make you giggle when you see it. However, it's not an MMO as such, it's much more of what they call in Korea a "casual game", which is more like a console game where you play short 5 minute sessions and then there's some persistence, so you can save your character and build up stuff over periods of time. It's sort of really Jack's pet project, I'm not the designer as such or anything like that on it. We'll see how it goes, we're not sure whether we're gonna commercialize it, or what we're gonna do with it, we may just bin it after a bit. We're doing some technology experiments with it as well. It's now in 3D! Some fun stuff there, but it's essentially a bit of an amusement. If we do commercialize it, we'll probably spend another 3 or 4 months on it. We're hoping it won't take much longer than that because it's a nice small game. Then, or sometime before we finish with that, we're going to start a new MMO, but what that MMO is, is still entirely undecided. I have my own dastardly ideas and plots and schemes but we have a very collaborative process at the company and so I am under no illusions that my demented ideas will be the ones that finally see the light of day. It may be that the other lads come up with a better one, or they end up mutating mine into something more sensible. So we'll see, if we do that, or when we do that, then I'm hoping we can get it done much much more quickly than Puzzle Pirates, because I think we've learnt a lot. We've done a lot of development that we hope to re-use in the next game we do so there will be definite similarities with puzzle pirates at least in the underlying architecture of the game. We're hoping we might be able to get that second project up and kicking, and maybe having people playing it in as little as 6 months. Early 2006, if things go incredibly well, we'll have mini-game/casual game, and new MMO in early early testing. Don't hold me to that. Fortunately I don't have a publisher who's holding me to it, I guess you could pester me about it in 12 months and laugh at me but, that's the idea. You might find this amusing, we call the MMO without a plot or a name, or any particular plan yet, we call it SOY, or son of Yohoho, so there you go.