Playboy: The Mansion Interview
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Playboy: The Mansion Interview
by Buliwyf » Tue Jul 06, 2004 5:04 pm
Playboy: The Mansion Interview - 06 July 2004 00:02 - John [JCal] Callaham User Comments : 0
Playboy: The Mansion has already generated tons of game oriented and mainstream press for its use of the Playboy name and its founder Hugh Hefner in a game that promises to stretch the sexual bondaries of a mainstream video-PC game, and that's months before the adult sim game's scheduled release this fall. HomeLAN got a chance to chat with lead designer Brenda Brathwaite and Seth Spaulding of developer Cyberlore to talk about the upcoming game that will be co-published by Groove Games and Arush (with Ubi Soft publishing the game in Europe).
HomeLAN - First, Playboy: The Mansion had a huge presence at E3 this year. Were you pleased with the initial reactions that the game got from people who saw it at the expo?
Brenda Brathwaite - Absolutely. The entire Playboy presence at E3 was just incredible - from the opening party at the Mansion to the dozens and dozens of meetings that followed. For starters, we're very fortunate to be working with such an exceptional brand. Could we have possibly had a better opening party or a better location for the party? It's the Playboy Mansion. On the pure game front, I think it went very well, too. There was a certain expectation people held about this game, and that expectation wasn't all good. Many wondered if this was just going to be a great name slapped on a bad game, and heaven knows our industry has been guilty of that again and again. However, people were reassuringly pleased - and some where shocked - when they saw that we were completely devoted to making this a great game above anything else.
HomeLAN - Being the head of Playboy Enterprises is pretty much the average male's dream job. How hard is it to make that kind of experience into an entertaining game?
Brenda Brathwaite - Translating Hef's experience into a game was both easy and complex. It was easy because Hugh Hefner has already lived the life. We just had to make that life playable. So, we came up with a tycoon sim - starting from scratch, you have to build an empire one issue at a time. To do that, you'll need to hire and manage a staff as well as develop the relationships that will ultimately lead you to hot interviews, essays, cover shots and other kinds of content for your magazine. However, celebrities aren't terribly inclined to come meet someone they've never heard of (at least in the beginning of the game) who lives in a one room villa. So, you'll need to develop a more lavish pad and throw the kind parties you'll eventually become famous for. Naturally, all of this takes money and you get money by publishing good magazines. So, it all feeds on itself. Naturally, you'll also need to hire playmates, do centerfold photo shoots and keep the Playboy Bunnies on your staff happy, which most people are more than willing to do.
The challenging part was trying to compress his life - and we're talking over 50 years of the Playboy empire - into a game. The scope and impact of Playboy is pretty incredible, and to represent that in just 12 missions was very, very challenging.
Random trivia - Funny enough, a woman is now head of Playboy Enterprises, Christie Hefner.
HomeLAN - Does the player begin as the head of the Playboy empire or do they start from stratch as Hugh Hefner did?
Brenda Brathwaite - Almost scratch. You haven't put out an issue yet, but you do have a basic "Mansion" and a skeleton crew staff. We also started you out with a little bit of starting content for your first issue, just to get you off the ground. In the real-world Playboy Empire, Hef started out with nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
HomeLAN - What gameplay modes will be put into Playboy: The Mansion
Brenda Brathwaite - There are two, Empire and Campaign. The Empire game is more freeform allows you to go at your own pace and set your own goals while the Campaign games takes you through 12 missions that mirror the rise of the real-world Playboy Empire.
HomeLAN - What types of things does the player have to keep track of as they try to build the Playboy empire?
Brenda Brathwaite - Wow. Lots and lots of things. At its heart, this is a sim game, so there are dozens of little variables that you could focus on to tweak and improve your performance. Let me try to break this down into a couple, well, functional areas. First, there's your magazine and the money it brings in. Virtually everything you do costs money, so you need to keep that magazine rolling. To do that, you'll need to get six particular pieces of content a month, things like a celebrity interview, a pictorial and a Playmate centerfold. You can hire more expensive staff to produce better content or cheaper hacks to just get the issue out the door. How you get the content goes into the people and relationship area. You need to keep people happy. That's an axiom at the real Mansion. So, you have to make sure that they're satisfied and having fun. Talk to them, chat them up, flirt, learn what interests them, buy cool, hip items. The happier they are and the better they know you, the more likely they are to provide you with content of a high quality.
HomeLAN - How important is holding a party at the Mansion to building the Playboy empire and how hard is it to make the party attendees in the game happy?
Brenda Brathwaite - The high life! It's really important. That's how you schmooze and ask for content. It's where you develop relationships and introduce people you need to connect in one way or another. How hard is that? Well, it depends on how well you're doing. If you've had to hock everything but your couch to pay your staff bills, it's going to be pretty challenging. If you think beforehand and provide your guests with lots of stuff to do and are careful about the people on your guest list (i.e.. a party filled with confrontational drinkers might not be so great) as well as the number of people you invite, it should be challenging in a fun way, but not hard.
HomeLAN - How does picking Playboy models for use in the magazine figure in the game?
Brenda Brathwaite - First off, there are two types of models you need to pick: the cover model, which is always a celebrity and the centerfold, which is always a playmate. For the cover model, you'll need to build up a relationship with a celebrity and ask her to pose for the magazine. Based on a zillion little things, she'll either say yes or no, and return for her photo shoot later. For the centerfold, since she's a staff member, she'd be willing to pose for the photo shoot anytime, but if you want to play it right, you'll have her work out and improve her charm before you call for the photographer.
Interestingly enough, the photo shoot has developed into this fun mini-game in a sense. It's so cool to go in, take the pictures, ask her to pose on different things, try on different outfits. It's always fun to get your pictures back and see what you were able to do.
HomeLAN - What other gameplay elements in Playboy: The Mansion do you think are important?
Brenda Brathwaite - They all are, really. It's an interdependent web. One can't work right without the other. This is very hip, unless you happen to be balancing the game.
HomeLAN - How hard was it to get the visual look of the game right?
Brenda Brathwaite - I passed this along to Seth Spaulding, the lead artist on Playboy The Mansion.
Seth Spaulding - Very early in the project pre-production phase we had many discussions both internally and with Playboy on the visual direction for the game. The challenge here was to represent “real-world” people and objects in this high-life, wild setting. Playboy, as a brand has always been aware of their aesthetic, and they’ve been a great partner working with us to solve issues and providing amazing resources for us.
Knowing that our characters would be performing some pretty outrageous and humorous activities, we opted to go for a non-photo-realistic, but still not overly “cartoony” look for them.
Dealing with the aesthetics of the Mansion, which has a 30 year history in LA plus the earlier Chicago Mansion was a question of scope. How many eras should be represented? Is there one era on which we should focus? How much should we try to replicate the current LA incarnation? And what about eras of fashion which Playboy has witnessed for 50 years. We knew we wanted the player to be able to make a Mansion evocative of the actual Mansion’s classic styling but give the player freedom to branch out. To that end, we added many very modern styling elements from flooring and walls to chairs and artwork. In the end, you’ll be able to build some pretty creative places of your own.
Being deeply involved in the fashion world for the last several year with their own line, Playboy had very definite ideas on fashion. This helped us out a great deal because, well, we’re mostly gamer guys. Playboy had literally tons of fashion reference for us. Certainly not every outfit in the game is from their line, but almost every outfit was scrutinized quite closely for suitability.
HomeLAN - Is Arush and Groove aiming for an "M" rating for the game and are they expecting any kind of resistance to the game from retailers and certain members of the public because of its content?
Brenda Brathwaite - Yes, an "M" rating is what we expect. Will their be resistance? Probably. That said, there will also be an equally strong attraction to it for all the same reasons. I believe and I hope we're at a turning point in our industry. We're not the only game with sexual content on the horizon. As an industry, we've pretty much explored the outer limits of violence, and if anything, that's where the backlash will be. This game doesn't even explore the proverbial "outer limits" of sex. It just mirrors Hugh Hefner's life, of which the sexual revolution and sexuality is all a part.
HomeLAN - What kinds of extra content will be released for the game after the game's release?
Brenda Brathwaite - For the PC and Xbox, will have downloadable content.
HomeLAN - Finally, what is the current status of the game's progress and when will it be released?
Brenda Brathwaite - As I write this, we're past alpha and heading toward beta. All the core elements are in, and we're balancing like mad, fixing bugs and polishing the empire and campaign games. We will release the game in time for Christmas.
Playboy: The Mansion has already generated tons of game oriented and mainstream press for its use of the Playboy name and its founder Hugh Hefner in a game that promises to stretch the sexual bondaries of a mainstream video-PC game, and that's months before the adult sim game's scheduled release this fall. HomeLAN got a chance to chat with lead designer Brenda Brathwaite and Seth Spaulding of developer Cyberlore to talk about the upcoming game that will be co-published by Groove Games and Arush (with Ubi Soft publishing the game in Europe).
HomeLAN - First, Playboy: The Mansion had a huge presence at E3 this year. Were you pleased with the initial reactions that the game got from people who saw it at the expo?
Brenda Brathwaite - Absolutely. The entire Playboy presence at E3 was just incredible - from the opening party at the Mansion to the dozens and dozens of meetings that followed. For starters, we're very fortunate to be working with such an exceptional brand. Could we have possibly had a better opening party or a better location for the party? It's the Playboy Mansion. On the pure game front, I think it went very well, too. There was a certain expectation people held about this game, and that expectation wasn't all good. Many wondered if this was just going to be a great name slapped on a bad game, and heaven knows our industry has been guilty of that again and again. However, people were reassuringly pleased - and some where shocked - when they saw that we were completely devoted to making this a great game above anything else.
HomeLAN - Being the head of Playboy Enterprises is pretty much the average male's dream job. How hard is it to make that kind of experience into an entertaining game?
Brenda Brathwaite - Translating Hef's experience into a game was both easy and complex. It was easy because Hugh Hefner has already lived the life. We just had to make that life playable. So, we came up with a tycoon sim - starting from scratch, you have to build an empire one issue at a time. To do that, you'll need to hire and manage a staff as well as develop the relationships that will ultimately lead you to hot interviews, essays, cover shots and other kinds of content for your magazine. However, celebrities aren't terribly inclined to come meet someone they've never heard of (at least in the beginning of the game) who lives in a one room villa. So, you'll need to develop a more lavish pad and throw the kind parties you'll eventually become famous for. Naturally, all of this takes money and you get money by publishing good magazines. So, it all feeds on itself. Naturally, you'll also need to hire playmates, do centerfold photo shoots and keep the Playboy Bunnies on your staff happy, which most people are more than willing to do.
The challenging part was trying to compress his life - and we're talking over 50 years of the Playboy empire - into a game. The scope and impact of Playboy is pretty incredible, and to represent that in just 12 missions was very, very challenging.
Random trivia - Funny enough, a woman is now head of Playboy Enterprises, Christie Hefner.
HomeLAN - Does the player begin as the head of the Playboy empire or do they start from stratch as Hugh Hefner did?
Brenda Brathwaite - Almost scratch. You haven't put out an issue yet, but you do have a basic "Mansion" and a skeleton crew staff. We also started you out with a little bit of starting content for your first issue, just to get you off the ground. In the real-world Playboy Empire, Hef started out with nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
HomeLAN - What gameplay modes will be put into Playboy: The Mansion
Brenda Brathwaite - There are two, Empire and Campaign. The Empire game is more freeform allows you to go at your own pace and set your own goals while the Campaign games takes you through 12 missions that mirror the rise of the real-world Playboy Empire.
HomeLAN - What types of things does the player have to keep track of as they try to build the Playboy empire?
Brenda Brathwaite - Wow. Lots and lots of things. At its heart, this is a sim game, so there are dozens of little variables that you could focus on to tweak and improve your performance. Let me try to break this down into a couple, well, functional areas. First, there's your magazine and the money it brings in. Virtually everything you do costs money, so you need to keep that magazine rolling. To do that, you'll need to get six particular pieces of content a month, things like a celebrity interview, a pictorial and a Playmate centerfold. You can hire more expensive staff to produce better content or cheaper hacks to just get the issue out the door. How you get the content goes into the people and relationship area. You need to keep people happy. That's an axiom at the real Mansion. So, you have to make sure that they're satisfied and having fun. Talk to them, chat them up, flirt, learn what interests them, buy cool, hip items. The happier they are and the better they know you, the more likely they are to provide you with content of a high quality.
HomeLAN - How important is holding a party at the Mansion to building the Playboy empire and how hard is it to make the party attendees in the game happy?
Brenda Brathwaite - The high life! It's really important. That's how you schmooze and ask for content. It's where you develop relationships and introduce people you need to connect in one way or another. How hard is that? Well, it depends on how well you're doing. If you've had to hock everything but your couch to pay your staff bills, it's going to be pretty challenging. If you think beforehand and provide your guests with lots of stuff to do and are careful about the people on your guest list (i.e.. a party filled with confrontational drinkers might not be so great) as well as the number of people you invite, it should be challenging in a fun way, but not hard.
HomeLAN - How does picking Playboy models for use in the magazine figure in the game?
Brenda Brathwaite - First off, there are two types of models you need to pick: the cover model, which is always a celebrity and the centerfold, which is always a playmate. For the cover model, you'll need to build up a relationship with a celebrity and ask her to pose for the magazine. Based on a zillion little things, she'll either say yes or no, and return for her photo shoot later. For the centerfold, since she's a staff member, she'd be willing to pose for the photo shoot anytime, but if you want to play it right, you'll have her work out and improve her charm before you call for the photographer.
Interestingly enough, the photo shoot has developed into this fun mini-game in a sense. It's so cool to go in, take the pictures, ask her to pose on different things, try on different outfits. It's always fun to get your pictures back and see what you were able to do.
HomeLAN - What other gameplay elements in Playboy: The Mansion do you think are important?
Brenda Brathwaite - They all are, really. It's an interdependent web. One can't work right without the other. This is very hip, unless you happen to be balancing the game.
HomeLAN - How hard was it to get the visual look of the game right?
Brenda Brathwaite - I passed this along to Seth Spaulding, the lead artist on Playboy The Mansion.
Seth Spaulding - Very early in the project pre-production phase we had many discussions both internally and with Playboy on the visual direction for the game. The challenge here was to represent “real-world” people and objects in this high-life, wild setting. Playboy, as a brand has always been aware of their aesthetic, and they’ve been a great partner working with us to solve issues and providing amazing resources for us.
Knowing that our characters would be performing some pretty outrageous and humorous activities, we opted to go for a non-photo-realistic, but still not overly “cartoony” look for them.
Dealing with the aesthetics of the Mansion, which has a 30 year history in LA plus the earlier Chicago Mansion was a question of scope. How many eras should be represented? Is there one era on which we should focus? How much should we try to replicate the current LA incarnation? And what about eras of fashion which Playboy has witnessed for 50 years. We knew we wanted the player to be able to make a Mansion evocative of the actual Mansion’s classic styling but give the player freedom to branch out. To that end, we added many very modern styling elements from flooring and walls to chairs and artwork. In the end, you’ll be able to build some pretty creative places of your own.
Being deeply involved in the fashion world for the last several year with their own line, Playboy had very definite ideas on fashion. This helped us out a great deal because, well, we’re mostly gamer guys. Playboy had literally tons of fashion reference for us. Certainly not every outfit in the game is from their line, but almost every outfit was scrutinized quite closely for suitability.
HomeLAN - Is Arush and Groove aiming for an "M" rating for the game and are they expecting any kind of resistance to the game from retailers and certain members of the public because of its content?
Brenda Brathwaite - Yes, an "M" rating is what we expect. Will their be resistance? Probably. That said, there will also be an equally strong attraction to it for all the same reasons. I believe and I hope we're at a turning point in our industry. We're not the only game with sexual content on the horizon. As an industry, we've pretty much explored the outer limits of violence, and if anything, that's where the backlash will be. This game doesn't even explore the proverbial "outer limits" of sex. It just mirrors Hugh Hefner's life, of which the sexual revolution and sexuality is all a part.
HomeLAN - What kinds of extra content will be released for the game after the game's release?
Brenda Brathwaite - For the PC and Xbox, will have downloadable content.
HomeLAN - Finally, what is the current status of the game's progress and when will it be released?
Brenda Brathwaite - As I write this, we're past alpha and heading toward beta. All the core elements are in, and we're balancing like mad, fixing bugs and polishing the empire and campaign games. We will release the game in time for Christmas.
- Colonel Ingus
-
- Posts: 1147
- Joined: Fri Apr 18, 2003 11:05 pm
- Location: St Paul MN
by Colonel Ingus » Tue Jul 06, 2004 5:10 pm
BAH!
Update Leisure Suit Larry!
Update Leisure Suit Larry!
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ... Benjamin Franklin
by Jeffro » Tue Jul 06, 2004 11:04 pm
Originally posted by CodeRed68
I hear there is another sim type game coming out with strong sexual content.
Anyone know the name of that game? I can't remember..
The sims 2?
I saw a pic of the early version and it had two chicks in lingerie kissing.
http://www.purevolume.com/vagabond
2.4 Ghz, 4x256 RDRAM PC1066,
Radeon 9700 Non-Pro, 4.6
Catalysts, SB audigy 2, DSL
by Jeffro » Tue Jul 06, 2004 11:06 pm
Originally posted by Colonel Ingus
BAH!
Update Leisure Suit Larry!
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude
Capturing the outrageous style of the long-running adventure series, the next Leisure Suit Larry follows Larry Lovage, nephew of Larry Laffer, and his adventures at Community College
Release date: 10/05/2004
http://www.purevolume.com/vagabond
2.4 Ghz, 4x256 RDRAM PC1066,
Radeon 9700 Non-Pro, 4.6
Catalysts, SB audigy 2, DSL
- Mr. Slayer
-
- Posts: 1161
- Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 6:42 pm
- Location: Phoenix, AZ
by Mr. Slayer » Tue Jul 06, 2004 11:07 pm
Cool.Originally posted by Jeffro
I saw a pic of the early version and it had two chicks in lingerie kissing.
Mr. Slayer
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