What we learned in “Calling All Cars” is that right now on console we’re not interested in doing what we thought we were going to be doing entirely as a company.
– David Jaffe, San Diego, January 31, 2008

David Jaffe would keep making PS2 games if he could. He’s done with $10 PS3 games. And he’s got some ideas for PC. And he’s not making a Nintendo or Xbox game any time soon. Those are his plans.

So if David Jaffe was on your fantasy game development team, which console would you assign him to?

He has overseen hit PlayStation 2 games, and made a return to the platform this week with his new studio Eat Sleep Play’s “Twisted Metal: Head On: Extra Twisted Edition.” But he’s also already dabbled in small downloadable PS3 games, with “Calling All Cars,” flirted with PSP development, and now that he’s not a Sony employee anymore, maybe he could start making games for the Wii or Xbox 360?

Jaffe and I talked through the possibilities last week, as he confirmed that Eat Sleep Play just started development a few weeks ago with the first of three contracted PS3 titles — coming late 2009 at the earliest — and that he won’t be making games for any other console any time soon. “We would love to be with Sony as long as they’ll have us,” he told me from his home in San Diego. “We have no interest in going anywhere else.”

Nevertheless, Jaffe had some surprising things to say about his future on PS2, PS3 and PC, including a complete about-face on what he thought Eat Sleep Play was really going to be focusing on.

Read on and see what you think of his plans.

I asked if he thought he was done with PlayStation 2 development.

Jaffe: “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure, that, given that all of Eat Sleep Play’s focus is on the PS3…. Scott and I had talked in the past about “Let’s make more of these. Let’s make a bunch more ‘Twisted Metal’s for PlayStation 2. We could bang them out in 10 or 11 months. Make the fans who love them happy. If Sony came back and said we really want you to be our PS2 team, we’d probably say no because it’s probably not good for the health of our company. But it’s still pretty… I love the PlayStation 2. I’d love to keep working on it if the business factors were there. But they’re just not. Not in terms of not enough sell. But we want our company to compete with other developers out there…. And our programmers who are top of the line and our artists who are top of the line. They’re going to want to push the envelope.”

I inquired about him working on Nintendo or Microsoft platforms and he started teasing PC development:

Jaffe: “On the console side we’re definitely with Sony as long as they’ll have us. On the PC side we’re absolutely crazy eager to get into the casual market, the kind of small downloadable games market. Right now all of our attention and focus is with our Sony deal and we’re happy with that. But we think that in the relatively near future you might start hearing something from us coming out on that front.”

I wanted to know what lessons he learned from the development of “Calling All Cars,” last year’s downloadable PlayStation 3 multiplayer car-combat-basketball game. This got him talking about himself and about how his vision for his game development future on PS3 has significantly changed:

Jaffe: “I think I learned two lessons. One of them was a work ethic question. I really had to find a balance after ‘God of War‘ between living a real life and doing my work, which I love to do. And on ‘God of War’ that was all I did. And it came at great expense to my personal life. On “Calling All Cars,’ I figured, well, I’m going to not do that as much. And I didn’t and I think I let go of the gameplay reins more than I should have looking back. I think ‘Calling All Cars’ could have been a much better game had I been a little bit more obsessive. I think there’s a healthy amount of obsessiveness and addictiveness to your work and to the games that you’re working on that you need to have in order to stay competitive. And in order to stay content with the products you work on. And I think I didn’t do that in “Calling All Cars.”

“It’s not that we were lazy, especially the online guys at Eat Sleep Play, and the guys at Eat Sleep Play busted their ass. We all did. But there was a lack of a purpose and a mission that this thing had to be the best f—ing game ever. And I think when I don’t do that — that was the first time in my career that I didn’t do that — I put a game out with the team and, you know, there’s a lot of people who like it, but it wasn’t the hit that we wanted. And it wasn’t received as warmly as we had hoped.

“So now on ‘Twisted Metal,’ our new game, I’ve absolutely opened the valve to obsessiveness a little bit more and I’m still trying to walk a line to find the balance and I’m coming back toward those moments when you can’t sleep at night and won’t let it go and have to bang your head against the wall until you break through. I’d like to think that that lesson was learned and applied to ‘Twisted Metal Lost.’ We’ll see when people play it. And see what they think.

…

“From a gameplay standpoint, [I learned that] probably the fact that there’s some neat things you can take from old-school game design. But for most people these days it should kind of just stay in the past. People just want more meat on the bone. They want more strategy. They want more options. They want bigger levels. And even though you can as a designer justify reasons why you did the things you did. I understand that intellectually. They’ve just been conditioned by the current marketplace to want bigger and better and badder and if you don’t give them that then you do so at your own peril. And so I think with ‘Calling All Cars’ we could have had more weapons. We could have had bigger levels. We could have had a lot of things that I think would have actually hurt an aspect of the gameplay but looking back now, I go, ‘You know what? You also have to keep an eye on the sense of production value that you’re giving to the player, their perceived value of what they’re getting for their money.’ And we didn’t do that. We were trying to be purists. And granted sometimes in that game we weren’t good enough in going for the purist’s goal. The in-game wasn’t good enough to get over the hurdle that the perceived value was so low.

“What we learned in ‘Calling All Cars’ is that right now on console we’re not interested in doing what we thought we were going to be doing entirely as a company, which was doing PSN console-based small, $9.99 downloadable arcade games. We’re definitely not exploring that. If you start looking at ‘Gran Turismo Prologue,’ and ‘Warhawk,’ how Sony chooses to distribute the game that we are making for them, that really is a Sony decision. We love from a gamer’s standpoint and a business standpoint, we love the fact that Sony seems these days to be releasing some games on Blu-Ray and download. If Sony deems our game worthy to be given that treatment, we would be thrilled. And I think right now it’s way too early for them to look at it and say this is what we need to do in terms of distribution.”

***

More PS2 development? He wishes. PS3? Not the way he was expecting? Wii/360? Not now, maybe not ever. PC? When you least expect it.

David Jaffe is among the industry’s most talented and recognized game creators. You’ve just read how he’s writing his own ticket. Sound like a good plan?