The AR Show: Susan Cummings (Tiny Rebel) on AR-First Storytelling and City-Scale Games with Wallace and Gromit
JJason McDowallSep 20, 2021 at 5:58 pm57min
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00:03Jason McDowall
Welcome to the AR show right dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. today's conversation is with Susan Cummings. Susan is the managing director of tiny rebel games and the founder of fictioneers. Susan and her team were awarded a major UK grant for augmented reality storytelling, which led to Wallace and Gromit the big fix up. This effort was followed by the release, the summer of Wallace and Gromit fix up the city and ambitious city scale AR game that takes place in San Francisco Bristol in Cardiff, including her work at tiny rebel Susan spent more than 20 years in game development in publishing. She was a key player of the origins of Rockstar Games, and held vital roles as the VP of publishing and VP of business development at touquet. Games and parent take two interactive. In this conversation, Susan shares insights into the origins of Grand Theft Auto, and some other big deals and projects in the early days of console and PC games. She goes on to talk about the challenges and telling compelling stories with AR,
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01:03Susan Cummings
it starts with you joining Wallace's company and becoming a member of sticking spanners. And you start doing jobs and you start encountering characters. And over the course of the story, you know, heats up, bad things happen. You save the day, right? But what happened, what would happen if we shut that up, and started with grommet getting kidnapped? And then go back to find out why. And that's what we do in film, right? Film started with traditional stories, and then we started tinkering with it messing with it. And so that I think is the next step is, that was a great experiment. How could we make that better? From a pacing standpoint? How could we start with a conflict? And how can we lead you on cliffhangers every day? So that sort of duration i think is what happens next to tell him a great story.
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01:45Jason McDowall
You also talk about some of the lessons learned and making compelling and accessible city scale AR based games for mobile, and the challenges of immersion in C through AR glasses. A quick note of disclosure, I'm an investor in phantasmal. One of the companies Susan mentions when describing her efforts and fictioneers let's dive in. Susan, I remember, I really got into gaming in the 90s like this was the beginning of the PC gaming era. consoles were really taking off at that time. And one of the most notorious games I think still of all time was Grand Theft Auto. And you have a lot of insight into Grand Theft Auto How did that franchise come to be?
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02:23Susan Cummings
You know, I don't think the whole story has ever really been told. Funny enough. But so grand theft auto I came across because I was working with dmg interactive in the States. This is what I was a recruiter, my earliest days in the game industry. And I was doing a lot of work with them, and BMG decided to get out of the games business, at least in America, it wasn't going so well for them in the States. And so I was introduced to the people running BMG interactive in Europe, which was Sam Houser, his boss with a guy named Gary Dale, and they approached me about signing off the rights the US rights to all of their products, including Grand Theft Auto. And so I spent a fun period of time talking to most of the game publishers in the States about this game that no one had heard of this top down still my favorite GTA I have to say the top down cartoon a Grand Theft Auto. Funny enough, we were about to sell the rights to th Q and th q thought they had the rights to this to the point that it was in their marketing materials to pitch out there to retailers. It turns out that BMG was actually going to sell the company to a company that I don't think anyone will have ever heard of anymore called American soft works, which is a little company in Connecticut, and American softworks was about to buy BMG interactive. And Ryan Brown was running take two at the time, Ryan passed away. But the old friend of mine, he's running Take two. And he used to call me at two o'clock in the morning about deals. And he said, Susan, I heard that BMG is getting out of the business and how do I get involved in this? How do I buy the company because I heard that someone's buying the company and I said, I have no idea what you're talking about, cuz I didn't know I was I was nobody at the time. And they didn't bother to tell me they were looking at doing this. So I found that it was true. And I made this introduction now take two at the time was, you know, $5 a share if that like their stock was in a gumball machine in the lobby, they will do horrible FMV games. And Ryan probably the best person I've learned most about deals from in my career Ryan talks to them and the next thing you know, American software x gets the PC version of Grand Theft Auto and he takes everything else and that over the next few years became Rockstar Games and it took some time for it to gain traction. They did a surfing game that nobody wants to ever heard of. And then and eventually Grand Theft Auto two and then finally Grand Theft Auto three which is the one that really put it on the map and sold the PlayStation but it could have gone so many other ways. You knew Wow.
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04:45Jason McDowall
That's amazing. Two o'clock in the morning. I get this Yeah. What were the magic words that he said to the BMG folks in order to get everything except for the PC rights.
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04:56Susan Cummings
Ryan just knew how to do deals like you know, I
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