Dev Box Interview: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories’ Producer Tomm Hulett

Written by 2.o | January 13, 2010

Silent Hill Shattered Memories Dev Box

It usually takes a small army to create the video games that we play, and, most of the time, all of the focus gets put on the game itself, and not on the people that came together to make it. Our Dev Box interview series takes a look at some of the unsung heroes (developers, producers, artists, etc) that have committed their lives to entertaining all of us. In this week’s Dev Box we are letting Konami’s Producer Tomm Hulett, who recently looked on “Silent Hill: Shattered Memories” provide us some insight into who he is as a gamer, and how he ended up working in the game’s industry.

Name: Tomm Hulett
Title: Producer
Company: Konami
Job Description: Creating new game concepts, finding and hiring appropriate developers, directing the game’s development and ensuring a quality product
First title worked on: for Konami, “Coded Arms: Contagion.” First title ever, “Global Gladiators” (Virgin)
Most recent title worked on: “Rocket Knight” (XBLA, PSN, Steam)

What game has most influenced you, and why?
A lot of games have influenced me in a ton of different ways. Two standouts include “EarthBound,” which showed me how different and artistic games could be, and “Silent Hill 2,” which shaped my views on what a good “Silent Hill” game was.

What are you playing right now?
I just finished “Batman: Arkham Asylum,” which is an amazing game and probably my favorite of 2009 (except “Shattered Memories” of course!). I plan to keep playing until I’ve found all the Riddler Challenges. Also “New Super Mario Wii” when I get friends together. I’m looking forward to “Cave Story”’s release as well.

What was your first break in the games industry?
When I was 10, we moved to Orange County near Stephen Clarke-Willson, who my dad had done business with previously. Stephen had since gotten a job at Virgin Games. My dad told him I was really into video games, and not long after that, he gave me a tour of the company and let me borrow his Super Famicom (this was before the SNES came out in America). The next summer Virgin hired me to test games one day a week.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
“They’re only video games. This is supposed to be fun.” And it wasn’t to me directly, but probably Miyamoto’s famous “Delays are temporary, but a bad game is a bad game forever.” (though that one gets me in trouble a lot! Ha ha)

Where do you look for inspiration?
I play older games a lot to find what it was that made them so memorable. I think the industry as a whole has forgotten a lot of lessons it learned in the 8 and 16-bit days about focus and simplicity. Releases like “Megaman 9″ tend to support this. There are reasons that people still speedrun NES games.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about game development?
The single biggest lesson is just how much is actually involved in making a game. Whenever you play a game or read a review as a consumer and think “What!? There’s no possible reason for the game to be like that!” there totally is. I’ve become a lot more forgiving of games with minor flaws (and a lot more critical of games with major ones). Whenever you find something frustrating in a game, yes the developer knew about it, and the version you’re playing is probably waaaay better than it used to be. Making games
is hard.

Who do you think will come out on top this console generation?
(declined comment)

What do you think is the biggest problem current games suffer from?
(declined comment)

What is the most important thing that has happened to gaming in the last 10 years?
Probably the downloadable space. We’ve reached a point where console games have to be huge and expensive for consumers to spend hard-earned money on them. Not every publisher/developer is equipped to dish out millions of dollars to make a game. If they tried to compete next to the big triple-AAA products there would be a lot of consumer disappointment and frustration. With services like XBLA and PSN, smaller games can exist and be just as viable as the big boys. On a related note, another important thing is the retro services like Wii’s Virtual Console. A few years ago Kojima blogged that video games were a temporary medium, because once a console’s run was finished, all the games would soon become unplayable (on the later consoles) and later generations could never experience them. This problem is now solved (and it allows me to research retro revivals a whole lot easier).

Where do you see gaming in 5 years?
The current consoles can do a lot of amazing things to improve immersion and sense of place. For the past few years a lot of companies have been making the same games they were making 10 years ago, but with prettier graphics. But you can use “next-gen” power for a lot more than just graphics. I’m hoping that this is realized and we see a lot more immersion in the form of gameplay, objectives, NPC AI, adaptive enemy AI, etc. In “Shattered Memories” we tried very hard to make our puzzles make sense and be things you would do in real life. Basically I want more games that do that so I feel like I’m doing exciting things… rather than matching colored objects to same-colored doors to pad gameplay time.