Interview de Thomas Nielsen

Puissance-Pocket : You develop a Pinball game, although Pinball of the Dead, Pinball Advance and Paragon 5 Pinball exist. Why have you chosen to fight against Sega, or Binary 9 ?

Thomas Nielsen : Hopefully, we will not have to fight at all. There is always room for good games, and there will always be several games in the same genre. Just look at platform games on Gameboy Advance. It’s no secret that we would of course have liked it if Palladium was the only Pinball game available on the platform, but being a technology company rather than a marketing company, we prefer to do what we know we can do very well, even if there is competition in the genre. We think our approach to pinball is good enough to perform very well against the competition, so it was only natural for us to do the game on Gameboy Advance.

Puissance-Pocket : Is it difficult or easy to develop on Game Boy Advance ? Why ?

Thomas Nielsen : If you have experience on similar systems, it is almost never difficult to work on a new one. If you, as a programmer, has done Windows development most of your life, then I would imagine Gameboy development is rather difficult – if you want to push the machine, at least. However, if you have worked previously on older systems – C64, NES, SNES or the likes, it’s not that difficult to do basic things. But doing something that really stands out from the rest, is always difficult .. on any platform.

Puissance-Pocket : Why did you choose the Game Boy Advance to create this game ?

Thomas Nielsen : We have always been very impressed with the sales of Gameboy and Gameboy Color, but we never liked the systems much (we would rather play GameGear any day). When Gameboy Advance was launched, we finally saw a system that was really cool, and we knew it would sell like crazy all over the world. As pnball is a game well suited for portable gaming – You can pick it up, play it for a few minutes, and then put it away again – it was the right platform for us to choose. As mentioned, we did do a Nintendo64 version of the game as well, so we did consider whether or not we should implement the game on a 3d system instead. We finally decided to take on Gameboy Advance first, and then do the 3d implementation later, when the 3d console market has stabilized.

Puissance-Pocket : You search for a publisher actually. Which are targeted ?

Thomas Nielsen : Yes, we are looking for regional or worldwide publisher(s), currently, as we are not working with one at the moment. We are open to any proposals, really, and for any platform. The Gameboy Advance version is the first version of Palladium we’re bringing to the market, but we’re interested in bringing it to other platforms aswell.

Puissance-Pocket : Do you want to develop on Gamecube ? What do you think about it and it's release date in Europe ?

Thomas Nielsen : We are looking very much forward to the release of Gamecube. We love playing games ourselves - Nintendo 64 brought some of the best games we have ever played - so we are naturally looking forward to seeing what Nintendo has in store for us. On the development side, we haven’t decided yet. There is a lot of competition in the console market currently, and both and GameCube, PS2, Xbox are great machines. Also, we will need a publisher willing to help us get into new platforms, so this is a factor that needs to be considered as well. Clearly, we would love to bring Palladium to Gamecube ;)

Puissance-Pocket : Finally, have you other projects for the Game Boy Advance ?

Thomas Nielsen : We have a lot of projects cooking, but being a small team as we are, we take them one at a time. We will keep developing for Gameboy Advance for quite a while, as we are very happy with the system – I’ll make sure to notify you as soon as we can tell you more about our next projects.