Originally begun as a release from a computing course at the University of Toronto, Metanet Software, the operating name of Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard (pictured), developed the 2005 Independent Games Festival Audience Choice Award winner N, and has since worked as publisher of N+ on Xbox Live Arcade and as licensors of N+ for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP (where it is to be published by Atari.)

How did N go from a freeware Flash game to Xbox Live Arcade and the handhelds?

Raigan Burns: It was originally made for a Flash games contest in which it didn’t even make it into the finals. That was kind of demoralizing, so we just put it on the internet.

Mare Sheppard: After we won the IGF Award, Microsoft got in touch, and eventually Atari got interested. That’s how that whole… thing started.

Aren’t you happy about the handheld version?

MS: Currently it’s not working – it’s not the game we wanted to make. In part it’s understandable, Atari wants to expand the audience, but there are a lot of changes we haven’t been so happy with.

What happened?

MS: We’re licensors instead of publisher. Being publisher on XBLA allowed us to direct the project, as we had final say and were doling out the cash.

RB: The developer is local, so we thought it was the perfect set-up – we could see them weekly. But we’d have two-hour meetings with a list of fixes where they’d say ‘yes’, write it down, and never change it.

MS: The one thing the handhelds are going to do very well is content sharing, though.

Why did you have to remove content sharing from the Xbox Live Arcade release? Halo 3 has it, after all.

RB: With Halo 3 they’re hosting the content themselves. You can rent a server from Microsoft, for more than the whole budget of N+, and they will be completely happy. Our system hinged on using the leaderboards, and Microsoft will not allow any questionable content on there. They can’t police it.

How strict is Microsoft about this ‘questionable content?’

RB: Before we could begin certification we had to fix a bug: “level names should not be horribly offensive in their manner”. The level was called ‘pee-pee soaked heck-hole!’ But really, when it comes to Microsoft’s argument against the level editor: “What if you make a penis shaped level?” In Halo people are running around with giant guns, teabagging each other – where’s the line?

Do you have more respect for publishers now you know first-hand what they have to deal with?

RB: Sure, there’s a lot of work to do, and you should get something for doing it, but you shouldn’t get to own someone else’s idea or take the lion’s share of the royalties. That’s just a scam. The one thing they do well is marketing, but it’s not right that a successful strategy is to spend more money on marketing than on development. It’s an arms race that you have to participate in but it’s so negative. It atrophies the game development part and makes it subservient to the business. It’s dangerous that the business of games could be the business of anything.

What does it mean to be indie now?

RB: It’s pretty nebulous. I’ve been toying with the idea of ‘alternative games.’ We need another description. Indie is useless – it just means you’re independently owned. I mean, id and Valve are independently owned, but they’re still operating in the mainstream.

I think it should be based on some sort of mathematical formula, where you take the number of people at a company and divide it by the number of people who don’t do any development. But under that metric, Introversion is screwed. They’re the Sex Pistols of gaming? They’re the Sex Pistols if there was one Johnny Rotten with four Malcolm McLarens. Even if the most important thing about making games is marketing, without Chris Delay they’d be screwed. However, without them, he’d still be making great games.

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