While at GameX I got the chance to catch up with John O’ Neill and Joshua Cole, President and Technical Director of Spark Plug Games respectively. Located in Raleigh, North Carolina, Spark Plug is one of many new studios headed up by industry veterans seeking to develop independent and accessible titles with a focus on fun over glamor. Despite the studio’s independent status that doesn’t stop them from being involved with names such as Don Bluth. They are most recently noted for working with community development site 2BeeGames.com on bringing their latest title Storm onto consoles.
GDN: How did Spark Plug start?
O’Neill – A year or two ago a lot of industry veterans decided to take a chance and get back to the core and casual instead of the hardcore where it takes years and millions of dollars to make a game. Focus on the casual with a sustainable business model and have fun without killing themselves through a harsh development cycle.
GDN: Moonshot Games was just opened by ex-Bungie employees with a similar goal, as was WideLoad games also founded by an ex-Bungie team member. Do you think there is meaning behind this pattern?
O’Neill – Absolutely. You might get established with a large company, but a lot of developers get burnt out trying to find a lifestyle balance while still loving what they do.
GDN: What sort of games have you released thus far?
O’Neill - DQ Tycoon is one. Dairy Queen contacted the publisher and we got involved as the developer. Hidden Mysteries: Whitehouse for PC and Mac. We started iPhone products as well where we’re looking into a global market. All of our other projects are still under development.
GDN: What level of reception have you gotten from hardcore and casual gamers?
O’Neill - Coming to terms with what “casual” means, there really is a big separation between casual and hardcore console games. You can try and mix the two together, but we haven’t seen a lot of companies try and make a cross-over by choice. They start casual and stay there with no console sticking just to PC gaming, whereas we do casual, easily approachable, but take those games and put it to the console market for someone else or using our own IP.
We’ve spoken with a lot of casual developers and they only want to do PC and Mac development, whereas already having done console we have that experience to bring the games onto a new platform.
