(piano music)

Today on Game Life we go deep inside the brain

of Greg Kasavin, Creative Director of the new game,

Transistor.

So if you like Bastion,

you will not be able to contain yourself.

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So there has been one Supergiant Game essentially.

Yeah.

You guys kind of came out of nowhere

in 2011 with this game.

It captivated people.

It was an arcade release and it kind of proliferated,

but now you're coming back.

And so Supergiant's second game is coming when?

Early next year with any luck.

With any luck and it's called Transistor.

[Greg] Yeah, that's right.

Now I got to play the game at Penny Arcade Expo,

out in Boston.

Yeah, sorry about that.

One day I will go to Penny Arcade.

I think you guys had the longest line

at Penny Arcade Expo.

That was crazy to us.

Yeah, we did not know what to expect

going into that show other than like,

Okay, we're going to announce this thing,

and we're going to let people play it.

Because we feel very strongly that we want to

let people get their hands on it.

You know an event like Pax.

We didn't know quite how people were going to take it

because you know with Bastion,

no one had ever heard of us.

But this time around,

we didn't know what all people's expectations

were going to be around it and so forth.

But the response we got was really, really terrific.

Well the vibe that I was getting,

was very much like, it was almost sort of like

Parasite Eve, or like Fallout,

in the sense of, it looks like an action game.

You're running around and there's enemies.

You could if you wanted to just go to those enemies

and start going bam, bam, with a sword and killing them.

But that would really result in your death.

What you had to do is,

you kind of like semi-pause the action

and plot out a series of strategic moves,

and then unpause and let it all take place.

Yeah, exactly.

We wanted this more thoughtful experience

where the combat could have sort of an ebb and a flow to it.

It's not just like you go in and you know,

disaster happens and the dust settles and everybody is dead.

That's kind of when we felt we were on to something.

It felt very powerful,

and since we wanted to tell the story of this

kind of powerful object that you discover.

It's like, Well it should grant you some sort of

extraordinary ability early on.

And yeah, people responded really well to it.

Well it's a weird game.

I mean, it's very hard to describe what genre it goes into.

If Bastion was our take on a fantasy themed world,

then this is our take on science fiction.

It's a game that we also consider to be in the same

genre as Bastion, like an action RPG.

But this time around there's much more of a focus

on like this more strategic combat system

in comparison to our first game.

We want to make a world that's kind of filled with mystery.

Hopefully we intrigue the player very early on

and then we're kind of

answering a lot of questions as we go.

We're very interested in synthesizing game play

and storytelling as closely as possible.

So let's take about your origin story,

because you were editor-in-chief of GameSpot for a while.

So what within you kind of prompted the switch over,

from editorial to game making.

I've been playing games since my earliest memory.

Oh sure.

I've always loved them.

I always wanted to make them

and from time to time I would try.

I would try to learn programming

and I would like just hit a wall.

Yeah I mean, I did the same thing.

When I was young I was like,

Oh video games, people make video games.

I'm going to make a video game.

Then discovered when I was like 13.

Oh wait.

Oh it is hard to make a video game.

Then I realized if I just wrote articles about video games

that was way easier.

You could get a whole article done

in the time it would take you to do

like one one-thousandth of a video game.

So at that point I kind of just switched over entirely.

That's very similar to my case.

Thankfully a friend of mine

who I previously worked with at GameSpot,

he know I had this long-term interest.

He was a producer at Electronic Arts

and they were looking for a new one at the time.

He's like, Are you still interested?

And I said, Yes.

And I applied and I got it.

So I went and worked on the Command and Conquer,

real-time strategy games for a while.

I was at EA for about three years.

That's where I met Amir and Gavin

who are the co-founders of Supergiant.

And we worked together on Red Alert 3 and stuff like that,

and Command and Conquer 3 before it.

We all quite around the same time.

They formed Supergiant, I went to 2K.

They just dropped everything and moved into a house

and started making Bastion.

About a year later I was able to join them.

That's where I am now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and now again

you are in a much better position than you were

when you were launching Bastion

because you've got this hit behind you,

and you can do something a little crazier.

I mean, obviously you don't want this to become your

Duke Nukem Forever, right?

[Greg] Well it's like we -

How dare you even utter the name.

We don't intend to yeah,

I don't think it's going to take us quite that long,

at least I hope not.

We've never worked on a game

where people had high expectations

as opposed to having no expectations.

But now people kind of know what we're up to.

They think they know what we are all about.

So we have to surprise them yet again.

Because I think surprise is very, very important

to just having a positive experience with a game.

It needs to keep surprising you.

So yeah, we'll have to see if we can do that again.

It's a challenge.

What do they say, You have your whole life

to write your first piece.

And after that you're on deadline.

Yeah.

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Between Peter and myself,

our Rolodex does not stop at Greg Kasavin here.

So I mean we know a lot of people

in the video game industry,

so let us know who you want to see on Game Life.

You're favorite video game developer

could show up on a future show.

[Peter] Or your favorite developer could be Greg,

in which case, just stop watching.