Ready 2 Rumble Revolution - Atari Interview

The producer of Ready to Rumble Revolution on bringing the fight to Atari.

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Kikizo: You're pushing your luck with some of these! Were the characters you took out too much like the real thing, or were you just afraid that particular real-life celebrity wouldn't respond so well?

Geudelekian: Sometimes it's column A, sometimes it's column B. Sometimes we had someone whose likeness was just uncanny, and you were just like "yeesh!" And we could try to just change the name or make it less of a reference, but that's not going to work. So there was that, and then sometimes it's just - in Ready 2 Rumble 2, for example, they had a Michael Jackson lookalike.

Kikizo: Did the shit hit the fan on that one?

Geudelekian: Oh yeah. Really. And so we said "we're not going to touch that". So some decisions were legal, some decisions were context-based.

Kikizo: I'm sure you can get away with the current selection, but there are some asshole celebs out there. Mind you, controversy can make good PR.

Geudelekian: We hope so, we hope to have a little bit of controversy! It never hurts. At the same time, this is meant to be fun, it's not meant to be taken seriously...

Kikizo: Yeah, it's kind of like that old British TV show Splitting Image, with the puppet caricatures...

Geudelekian: Yeah, I remember the French version.

Kikizo: That was blatant parody in the same way this is, so I'd say to those celebs "Get over it, guys."

Geudelekian: Yeah exactly - get over yourselves, move on. Or go buy the game, enjoy it! You're a character in a videogame!

Kikizo: And we suppose the player could always cook up his own, perfectly legit celebrity caricature in character creation mode...

Geudelekian: You're so astute - no one else has just come out and said that. [laughs]

Kikizo: That was one of Facebreaker's strengths - they had a really good character creation mode.

Geudelekian: Yeah, it was fantastic. We've got a very robust Create-A-Boxer mode, with over 150 customisation options. And that Create-A-Boxer mode obviously fits directly into Championship mode. In Championship mode, you set your boxer up on a weekly schedule. And that weekly schedule is comprised of weekdays for training, and weekends for fights and tournaments. And just to make things easier for the casual set, we pulled all those training exercises out of Championship mode and created a mini-game mode.

Now, unlike the waggle-fest mini-games that we're used to on this wonderful piece of hardware, this set of mini-games I find really cool because it actually correlates directly to the fighting engine. And each event almost surgically excises one section of the fighting engine, and has you completely focus on that. And so in that way, when you're in Create-A-Boxer mode and you're building up a boxer, you're still also training yourself... All of those mini-games are specific facets of the system.

Kikizo: Are there any plans to let players upload their own custom creations?

Geudelekian: No, and that's the eternal debate: do we want to deal with Friend killers? No we don't.

Kikizo: Thanks for your time.

Ready 2 Rumble Revolution is down for release on Wii this spring.

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