Should game developers and designers have their names on the boxes of the games they make?

We posed this question recently to EA CEO John Riccitiello, who explained why Steven Spielberg's name should be on a game box and why Will Wright's shouldn't.

We've read discussions from gamers arguing for and against the idea. Those against say there's too many people to name, that manuals and the end credits are enough and that's it not fair to single certain people out. Those for having names on boxes, including one David Jaffe, say that games should give credit like movies do because the creative and technical folks behind the project really make the game, and the name recognition allows game makers to have the credibility and leverage while making their way through this booming industry.

You can expand the "Boom Blox" images above to test our first example.

Now let's see what what the boxes of "Super Mario Galaxy," "God of War," "Halo 3" and "Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution" would look like if their creators were given credit... Read more...

David Jaffe, who politely refers to me as "Mr. Totilo," has posted his commentary about my interview with EA CEO John Riccitiello regarding crediting individual game developers. Read the whole thing, though if you want to know just how strongly he feels, this excerpt will do:

(Curses cleaned in the following excerpt to meet MTV's language standards, Mr. Jaffe): Read more...

"God of War" and "Twisted Metal" creator David Jaffe didn't grow up a rap guy. But now he's listening to a lot of it, especially the more aggressive stuff of the 90s.

Why?

Consider it emotional research for Jaffe's next game at his studio Eat Sleep Play. Late last week he told me that "Come Sail Away" from Styx was his unlikely soundtrack of inspiration for "God of War." Now he's on an N.W.A and Public Enemy bender.

I joked that that must mean he was asked to help out on the new "Saint's Row."

Completely wrong, he said.

Instead, he caught me by surprise by delivering an unusual theory about how video games should relate to music (hint: he says "NBA Street" gets it very, very wrong). In the process, he talked about why "Shadow of the Colossus" didn't make him cry, what game developers could learn from Martin Scorsese, and --because it's what must happen at least once a day in any true gamer's life in 2008 -- we chatted some "Endless Ocean."

How do you give gamers the feeling of a rap song without putting a rap song in a game? Read on for one of my favorite chats with a game developer so far this year.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

(Below is the beginning of my latest GameFile column. For the full thing, check out MTVNews.com)

David Jaffe, outspoken video game creator, is known for many things. He was the lead creator of "God of War." Among gamers, he's famous for that. He is outspoken and curses more in his interviews than most game designers. That's one of his calling cards.

But does the world truly appreciate David Jaffe's mastery of analogies and comparisons? In an interview with GameFile last week, Jaffe peppered his discussion of "Twisted Metal: Head-On: Extra Twisted Edition" — which may or may not include the work of six game developers who died in a plane crash — with a smattering of comparisons you typically just don't hear from a game developer trying to get people excited about his game.

"The George Bush of Video Games"

Before "God of War," Jaffe made his name making "Twisted Metal" games. The point of the PlayStation series was simple: a multiplayer game featuring cars armed with guns and missiles. "It's loud," Jaffe told GameFile. "It's obnoxious. It's violent. There's not a lot of subtlety to it." It hasn't gone over well with non-Americans, selling the bulk of the series' 8 million copies in the U.S. and, according to Jaffe, befuddling non-Americans in Sony who don't really get it. "It crashes and burns everywhere it goes outside of America," Jaffe said. "It's the George Bush of video games."

"The 'Full House' of Video Games"

The "Twisted Metal" series is popular. It's popular enough to have spawned nine games, including this new one, which combines the content of a PSP "Twisted Metal" released in 2005 along with so-called "Lost Levels" and a lot of bonus content. The bonus material includes a section that lets players walk around on foot in a sort of prison/ virtual museum as "Twisted Metal" antihero Sweet Tooth, an angry clown who drives a heavily armed ice cream truck. The bonus material also includes a documentary about the history of the series. In that video, as he did in the interview, Jaffe admits that the popular "Twisted Metal" isn't discussed by, well, just about anyone. "It's like we've never really been, for the most part, a critics'-darling title," he told GameFile. "It almost kind of always felt to me [that] in terms of just the respect the title got, it almost felt to me like sort of the 'Full House' of video games. Tons of people watched it, but nobody likes to really talk about watching it."

Check out the rest of this column at MTVNews.com