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David Jaffe Stops Being Nice, Gets Real
This past weekend, an inebriated David Jaffe (designer for the hit God of War title) said some very blunt things to GT.tv. Among his statements in the heavily edited piece are comments about his work on God of War 3, his failed PSP game, and his place in the pantheon of game designers. From the horse's mouth: "I think I'm a b-level game designer, I KNOW THAT ... When these guys come up and shove a microphone in my face and say 'whaddya think?' maybe I have a healthy enough ego to give you an opinion cos you asked for it, but I don't think I'm the sh**! I don't think our fighting system's as good as Devil May Cry! I think I'm just doing the best I can and I'm grateful people like the sh** our team's pr--"
Was he drunk? So what. For being drunk he was pretty damn lucid, truthful and fair in his comments. If he was drunk, he speaks better than I do when I'm sober. And good for him for telling the PR rep to fuck off. Otherwise everything out of his mouth would have had to be pro Sony.
Anyway my points DO stand, even if some of my conclusions are unfounded. And ultimately it will be some time before we really know the impact of this interview. I mean, this is the game industry, I wouldn't be surprised to see people fall over themselves to pick sides on this one, and we'll see interview questions about this interview in other people's interviews. "What's your opinion of... blah blah blah."
I've spent a good deal of my professional life operating within the game industry, and I can almost certainly say that this will, if anything, do great things for Jaffe's career and undoubtedly will not hurt him.
Gaming has been looking for its "rock heroes" for a long time. Game designers have never been glamorous in the traditional sense, but publishers have been trying to cultivate this meme for a long, long time. Hell, why else bother to stage game events at the Playboy Mansion? Why the hell else would a second-rate Fabio lookalike be plastered all over the cover of magazines instead of the games he's developed? The industry in general is desperately tired of being perceived as a bunch of top-buttoned mouth-breathers lurking on the edges of social accepability, and has been looking for their "ambassador of cool" pretty much since its inception. If anything, I would expect to see SONY start trying to capitalize on Jaffe's new rebellious "TOTALLY RAW AND REAL" image long before I'd expect to see any sort of corporate backlash.
To draw a parallel, the band Rage Against the Machine made a fortune writing lyrics with an anti-capitalist perspective, but were marketed part and parcel by Sony's record division. It's not in Sony's best interest to support their "message", per say, but it is beneficial to them to cultivate an artist with that sort of "counter-culture" appeal because it smooths out their rough corporate edges in the eyes of the populace. Sure, it's conjecture, but if you ask me, all signs point to the fact that Sony would love nothing more to have David Jaffe be their own personal "renegade." I didn't exactly see that marketing fellow put the kibosh on any of the tirades in that video.