Alex Louie
LM: The gameplay is the most imaginative. I mean you have no hands, but you can just about survive anything, crawl up all sorts of surfaces, and hang upside down. It opens up areas of the playing interface that doesn’t exist in any other game. How was this to work with?
Alex: We had to come up with some sort of challenge or impasse in the game. In real life, they can basically go wherever the heck they want. So we had to make these contrived barriers. We also had to make the world smaller. Originally when we were more ambitious, we were thinking like a six-story building; tons of other stuff.
LM: When you did this, were you even thinking about who would be playing your game? It isn’t an action game, it’s pure adventure–but the subject matter and environments are definitely out there. So who was your intended market?
Alex: Well, we were just thinking gross stuff and who loves that? Our market tends to be 19 to 25 year olds. I think that’s what we were thinking.
LM: Ok, so why re-publish and why now?
Alex: Somebody in France actually called Pulse up and was interested in re-publishing the game. They emailed Pulse, which is not releasing any more games at this point. And they thought, well who would know about this? So they decided that the only person who knew anything about the technical aspects of this and could pull it all together was me, at that point.
They said, “Are you interested in seeing if this thing could be done?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll take a look at it.” And then the French guys flaked out. So then I thought, well, since I have already put all this effort into it, it is a cult classic and so on. Maybe I can find another publisher. I mean, Myst is still being published by Ubi Soft.
Some people were kind of interested, others not interested. Then I got into a conversation with Got Game and we just clicked. We talked for about a half hour and I kind of knew then that if I could pull it together these were the guys I wanted to do it.
Got Game also asked me if we were going to do anything else with the game. So I called Phill Simon, who’s the other producer on the game and asked him what he thought we could do. He said, “Why don’t we make a ‘making of’ segment?” I recalled that we had this extra footage of behind-the-scenes stuff we had shot on high 8. And I still had that tape. So we thought, well, maybe we could put together a DVD with a ‘making of’ director’s commentary on it. Like when you get a video and it has all these special extras on there. I always loved hearing all that stuff; why they made the decisions they did or used this process; what happened during the production.
LM: Sometimes the special features are the best part of the DVD.
Alex: Yeah. And fortunately, this is one of the best-archived projects I have ever had the fortune to work with. So Phill is going “This is great stuff! Great stuff. If we could finally do it–that would be wonderful.” We had planned on this back when the game first released, but we didn’t have a medium for it. Now that the game is being re-published with a DVD, we can include this.
The main theme of the “making of” segment is to tell everyone what it was like to make the game and also put faces to each member of the team. Actually we only have the one photo in the bar. There’s a photo of us as a football team inside the bar level of the game. We are all painted in as football players. Nobody really knows who each of us is. I am making a screen right now, which highlights each face and says who it is.
LM: Did you have any further plans for Bad Mojo back when it first released?
Alex: Well, I did think about putting the game online. Vinny, Phill and I actually got spun out of Pulse Entertainment as Jinx. But we had a contract with them to do another game. The three of us picked up that contract and finished it. You might have heard of it. It’s called Space Bunnies Must Die. It’s not our best effort.
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