Not too long ago, Todd McFarlane formed a video game studio with baseball star Curt Shilling and fantasy author R.A. Salvatore. Now, Gamasutra has an extended interview with the Spawn creator about the upcoming MMORPG the company has planned:

Now, in terms of the art, obviously to make a big game, an ambitious game like an MMO, you have probably dozens of artists working on it. Do you work on characters, or concept art, and then how does that become part of the game?

TM: You know what, I see myself as more of a director. It’s my job to take those twenty guys that we’ve got, talk to them about the philosophy of what it should look like and why, and here’s some ideas.

If anybody ever gets stuck I can draw, you know… “Guys, here! Let me draw it for you.” But I wasn’t interested in being the guy who came in and drew the stuff per se. I’ve done that. I was more interested in being part of a team effort. Basically the whole is way better than the parts, and arguably that’s what I do with my own toy company. I don’t sit there and sculpt every toy, but what I do is I give guidance every day, and I give philosophy, and they hear me talk about stuff, and the best days are when they take all that information and they turn it into something that’s three times better than I could ever imagine. Then I look at stuff and I go, “Wow!” I consider myself to be a pretty good artist and I would never have thought of that.

So, if you can be an inspiration to them, it catapults them to actually do even more, and that there’s a reasoning behind it, so there’s some uniformity to what we’re doing, then I go, “OK.” We’ll have done our jobs. This isn’t about an R.A. story, or Todd artwork. This is about — is this, at the end of the day, going to be a cool game to play? And if the answer is yes, then we all did our jobs and there will be plenty of pats on the back to go around for everybody. Matter of fact, if people think it’s a Todd art game, then I’ve done my job wrong.

They also talk a lot about the Halo action figures.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under Creators, Interviews, News & Views, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.