small, but the size of those hits is bigger than ever. If you’re a publisher with aMystor a
Tomb Raiderthat sells two or three million units, that’s great; your other ten titles can
be flops and you still survive. But if you’re a small developer with only one title in pro-
duction, as Smoking Car was, you absolutely need to hit the jackpot. Only a handful of
titles each year sell upward of half a million units, and that’s the category you need to
aspire to in order to justify the kind of budgets we’re talking about.
And to make a game withLast Express’s production values you really need a
large budget?
I think onLast Expresswe stretched the budget quite far for what we actually got up
there on the screen. We saved a lot of money; we got people to work for less than their
usual salaries or to defer salaries, we didn’t spend a lot of money on the film shoot, we
used a non-union cast and a non-union crew, and we didn’t have any big names. So we
pretty much saved money everywhere we could think of. And yet, just because of the
nature of the project, the scale of the game, the number of people that were involved,
and how long it took, it ended up costing a lot.
If you don’t mind telling, just how much did the game cost?
About five million.
And the development took four years; was that your original intention?
It took two years longer than planned.
What made it take so much longer than you thought?
Tool development was one. To develop our own rotoscoping technology, we had to do a
lot of tests — different types of costumes, makeup, processing — to get it looking the
way we wanted. That was one. And the 3D modeling; that model was huge, the train
interior and exterior, and the number of rendered images was tremendous. 3D model-
ing and rendering, animation, and tool development were the areas that burst their
boundaries. The film shoot itself actually came in on schedule and on budget; that was
the easy part.
So, looking back, do you wish you had managed to get the project done in a
shorter amount of time, on a smaller budget? Or are you satisfied that that’s
just how long was necessary?
Well, personally I took a bit of a bath onLast Express, financially. So in that sense, it
probably wasn’t a smart move. And I feel bad about our investors who also hoped the
game would sell half a million units, and were disappointed. It’s kind of like having pur-
chased an extremely expensive lottery ticket.
On the other hand, I’m proud of the game, I’m glad we did it, and I don’t think we
could have done it much cheaper than we did. I’m happy with the finished game. Of
course, the ideal would have been to design a smaller game. If at the beginning, we’d
looked at things and said, “OK, this is going to take four years and cost five million dol-
lars,” there wouldn’t have been a publisher in the world that would have touched it. I
wouldn’t have touched it myself! For better or worse, there’s a certain amount of willful
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 341