00:02Rated T for Teen
00:17When Sega acquired us, it was part of a movement to do more western development, to expand development around licenses.
00:26The strategic acquisition of San Francisco-based developers Secret Level was a key step in Sega's goal of securing the
00:33Iron Man property.
00:35This acquisition also raised the stakes for the once independent developer.
00:40Iron Man means a lot to our company. It's a chance to really reach out and hit the mass market
00:44in a way that we don't often get the chance to do.
00:46It's a real testament to Sega's commitment to the project, to Marvel in general, that they're going and building up
00:51their internal studio around the Iron Man franchise.
00:53The problem with a lot of licensed games is that they don't have enough time.
00:58So one of the ideas behind acquiring a studio like Secret Level was, hey, if we acquire Secret Level and
01:04we then go and sign a license with Marvel,
01:07we can go instantly to Secret Level and say, hey guys, we have this great license, start working right now.
01:13Once the license was secured, Secret Level had to begin designing a game based on a character with virtually unlimited
01:19abilities.
01:20This presented some development challenges.
01:23How are we going to do this? This guy, he can do everything. He can fly as fast as airplanes.
01:27He can hover. He can get on the ground and ground pound and shoot far away.
01:31He's got super strength. He's got, you know, the armor shield, the unit beam, the repulsor blast, all these different
01:35things. You've got to balance gameplay.
01:36So how do you make it so that all these things that he can do are viable tactics? And you
01:42don't say, you know, I can just get through the game by sitting back or I can just get through
01:45the game by charging in.
01:46Iron Man is sort of a one man army. And so he's going out there and he's fighting soldiers and
01:52huge battalions of enemies. So we wanted to get that war feeling.
02:00How do you make a threat that this guy can't overcome, but also how do you how do you create
02:04the controls to make this guy work?
02:11The prototype literally took a week to throw together. I think created a really strong. First of all, it was
02:17kind of fun. OK, and that's that's obviously a good sign.
02:21It's going to be layered gameplay. When you're getting close, you can take out a lot of guys quickly. When
02:25you're farther away, it's a little bit slower.
02:27You have energy usage, which restricts some things. We always want to make it so you can always fly.
02:32What we needed to do from very early on is get the flight down and not flight in a drifting
02:37up in the air kind of way, but like pounding against the air at hundreds of miles per hour.
02:41And how do you keep up with that? And how do you draw terrain fast enough?
02:51We didn't want to have a game where you're just a character running through, you know, a street or whatever.
02:55It's you can fly.
02:56When you've got a character that can fly anywhere at any time, you've got to have an area that's ready
03:01for that.
03:02We want to have tracer bullets constantly zipping by and we want to have a chaotic battlefield type feeling.
03:10We have to constantly keep the action and we have to keep it around the player, but not so difficult
03:15that the player feels totally out of control.
03:17And so I think that's an area that we're really working on, you know, how many missiles can come at
03:22you at the same time, how many people can be firing at you.
03:25Constantly twisting that dial, getting it just enough, but not enough to be frustrating.
03:30Trying to find, you know, the perfect match of the flight, the melee and the range combat and all bringing
03:34that together and making it look beautiful and really, you know, feel like an extension of the film was all
03:38things we had to think about.
03:39When that started coming together, we said, you know, this is going to be a really cool game on its
03:44own. It's a great license. Everyone agreed with that. But this is going to be a really cool game.
03:48We'll be right back.
03:57We'll be right back.
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