Sidhe Spotlight

We sit down with NZ based gaming developer, Sidhe Interactive.

We recently sat down with Mario Wynands, Managing Director of Wellington-based Sidhe Interactive, to ask him about the company he helped form, the difficulties of being in New Zealand, and his thoughts on the gaming industry.

In 1997, three people with a love of videogames began tinkering with a PlayStation home development kit in their spare time. After a couple of years spent learning how to make games, these people got a deal to make a PSOne title called Champion Surfer. By the end of this project, Mario says, Sidhe Interactive was a ‘real company, employing six to eight people’.

From there, Sidhe steadily grew as it acquired more licenses to work with. After Championship Surfer, they worked on the spectacular Barbie Beach Vacation, surely the pinnacle of interactive entertainment. Not satisfied even with this, Sidhe continued to look for more licensing deals – and in 2002, after a year of negotiations, and having beat out a number of prominent Australian developers, they secured a deal to create Stacey Jones’ Rugby League for the PS2, PC and Xbox.

Nowadays, Sidhe employs over fifty people, and has recently released Rugby League 2 for the PS2 and its first original project, Gripshift, for the PSP. However, Mario stresses that it wasn’t easy getting to their current position. “The fact that we are based in New Zealand has certainly made things much more difficult,” he says. “It’s harder trying to attract publishers simply because we are so far away from where they are based”.

It doesn’t help that the industry itself can be very hard to get a foothold in. Despite the size of some of the bigger publishers, there are still “relatively few people within them who actually decide what games to pick up”. Establishing a relationship with these people is essential, says Mario. “It doesn’t matter how good your game is, if you don’t know the right people, it simply won’t succeed”.

This is partly why Sidhe spent a good few years working on smaller licensed products. “Finishing these licensed games helped build our credibility with publishers,” says Mario. This cautious approach obviously paid off when the Rugby League games came their way. However, another reason to take it slow is the volatile and unpredictable nature of the entire gaming industry. “There’s no easy formula for making games – the gameplay, or what makes the game fun, is so intangible that it’s almost impossible to predict whether a game will be a success or not”. As an example, Mario cited Elixir Studios, creators of Evil Genius and Republic for the PC. “They rushed straight into creating their own intellectual property, and when the games didn’t sell too many copies, they had nothing to fall back on”.

To this end, Sidhe are only now beginning to create its own original games. Gripshift, a racer/puzzle hybrid on the PSP, was their first attempt. “It’s selling okay,” says Mario. “But even if it didn’t sell well, we would still be able to fall back on our licensed products and their sequels”. Creating this sort of safety net has been essential to Sidhe, in a world where developers rise and fall with disturbing regularity. Mario also outlined Sidhe’s ‘three-pillars’ strategy – they would continue developing sequels in the Rugby League series, keep developing titles based on licenses, and also develop their own projects.

Mario admits this plan is quite conservative, but the results speak for themselves – after almost ten years, Sidhe are continuing to grow, and are in a position where they don’t have to put the company’s future on the line with each title they develop. It is this attitude that has allowed them to carve out a space in the industry so far away from any of the big videogame-playing countries.

Mario also had a couple of comments on the New Zealand gaming industry. Sidhe is almost entirely made up of kiwis, which is quite an impressive feat. “If we can find fifty talented people here, it means there are probably twice as many other New Zealanders out there that we haven’t found”. While the standards required for getting into the games industry are always getting higher, Mario strongly urges kiwis to give it a go without moving overseas. While console development is extremely hard to do well, there are other channels to explore, such as the growing indie game scene on the internet, or Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade.

It’s encouraging to see companies like Sidhe achieving what people would have assumed to be impossible – namely, creating a successful developing company right here in New Zealand. If you’re interested in getting into the industry, just take a look at Sidhe Interactive, and remember that it is possible to achieve things in your own backyard.