Ok, so tell me about the name SOGA.

John Lawrence: Well, I'm John Lawrence, General Manager of SOGA Interactive, the SOE Studio in Taipei, Taiwan. The GA in SOGA comes from a previous joint venture partner - the company that published Lineage and Lineage II in Taiwan. When first we were first in Taiwan had had a joint venture agreement with them to publish EverQuest II but subsequently bought out shares of the company and are now a wholly owned subsidiary in Taiwan of SOE. But we liked sound of SOGA so kept the name.

I originally worked on EverQuest back in San Diego. When I came to Taiwan, I then worked on EverQuest II - we did the new character models for EQII that were released in the states. Then began work on EQII expansions packs; specifically the adventure pack - Fallen Dynasty. After that, came producing Kung Fu Hustle.

Tell me what to make of Kung Fu Hustle?

John Lawrence: We're working with Stephen Chow. If you've seen movies like Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle you'll know Chow's sense of humor; we're trying to take his kind of absurd slapstic, and combine it with the old style Hong Kong movies - the campiness of that era - and put everything together into a fighting and "beat 'em up" game.

We'll release it first in China then hopefully in the US, too. It's a fighting game and "beat 'em up" game that doesn't take itself seriously.

We've thrown out a components that a lot of new games have been putting in that have made it difficult for people to get into the "beat em up" games that come out recently. Most notably, the full 3d camera. We've opted for the whole old school, side scrolling view from the old 2d games. Of course this is a 3d game, the game is still rendered in 3d. But as far as the camera and controls, it's almost the same as back in the late 80's early 90's when we were playing all the classic side-scrolling fighting games.

So the content is kinda nostalgic and so is the gameplay...

John Lawrence: Yeah, exactly, on all levels. I don't want to say it's looking back because it's something that's very fresh. No one has done anything like this before, it's kind of like, without trying to sound like we're tooting our own horn too much...George Lucas looked at Flash Gordon and the old movies from the 30's for the inspiration for Star Wars. It's the same thing with Stephen (Chow) for Kung Fu Hustle. He looked at the old Shaw Brothers Hong Kong Kung Fu movies form the 60's and 70s and he took a lot of elements from those and put a lot them in his movie KFH. We've tried to adopt the same thing.

This is a licensed game. This is a Stephen Chow game. We wanted to, and so did Stephen, use that same philosophy in finding what was cool about those things when we were kids. What was cool about those games that we played in the arcades and on the consoles when we were kids? How do we repackage it and take all of that awesome stuff that people have kind of forgotten about and bring it back with a presence and style that is still relevant for today?

What I found exciting tonight is that whenever anyone was speaking about their new game tonight they weren't referencing other games; they're referencing TV shows and films. Is that a trend at SOE as a way of competing to with traditional entertainment or pull people into games?

John Lawrence: I can't speak for the other guys. That might be happening. Especially as you can do a lot of really cool stuff now with the PS3. In our case, I would say we never really looked as competing with any other medium. We wanted to recreate the visuals and feelings and some of those things you would see in those old movies; try to bring those into an interactive experience. But above all we wanted to make something that's a fun game. Those images and the kung fu moves are just a vehicle for us to bring the slapstick kung fu action to a new generation of gamers.

It's coming out in China first?

John Lawrence: That's right. It's going to be coming out in China sometime this year. We're not 100% sure about what's going to be happening in the states right now. But due to Stephen's popularity and to the fact that gamers in the US are going to be demanding it, I'm pretty confident we'll be releasing in the US.

Let's talk more about the game play. It's a side-scroller...

John Lawrence: So the game play - there are two modes to the game. There's Story mode which is where you learn how to play the game. It's a co-operative mode. It's like when you played Double Dragon with your friends. You're in the game with your friends and you're going from the left to the right of the screen, scrolling and of course beating up enemies along the way. So that's where you learn all of the new moves that you can - you upgrade your moves, learn kung fu moves, defeating enemies by clearing these levels.

That's straight horizontal?

John Lawrence: No, there's a lot more dimensions to it. We wanted to add stuff to it...if you remember Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon...when people were running across walls and running through the air, they'd jump in the sky and run across rooftops and stuff like that - we have a system like that in the game where players will be able to run through the air. So there's usually the fighting action, when you're engaged with an enemy or another player - it's going to be along that side-scrolling axis, but there's going to be times going to be times when you'll be able to use that skill to fly through the sky and that's where we introduce depth into the game.

So we're really using the fact with 3d now you can unique moves like that. It's taking the old premise of game play and adding a lot of new elements to it. But the fighting is usually going to be along that axis just because it's really difficult to for players to control the camera at the same time as they're controlling their character. The game stops being casual as soon as you make the player control the camera and the character at the same time.

Game play is THE topic to address with a fighting game - a lot of people say that fighting games haven't been perfected. How have you taken an existing game play mechanic and addressed that problem...gradual introduction of moves?

John Lawrence: Because this game is going to be free, the goal is for it to be really accessible to a new generation of players. Above all we wanted to make it easy to play. We've taken a lot from the fighting games that...let's back up. One of the things that I find frustrating about a fighting game is when you walk into an arcade and you've never really played before and somebody challenges you who's awesome and they immediately beat you - that's a bad feeling and you never want to play again. To me that's the biggest problem in fighting games.

We wanted to address that by having two modes of play. The co-operative mode - which is Story mode - where you learn the moves, learn the ropes, and you're fighting with your friends. Then after that you gradually, once you learn the controls and how to play with the character through that mode, you take what you've learned and go into versus mode where you actually challenge a guy. We wanted to make it so the learning curve is a little bit easier for new players to get in and they're not immediately frustrated by getting their ass kicked by the guy who's been playing the game for the last 2 years and all he likes to do is destroy newbies. For me, that is one of the biggest problems in fighting games that we wanted to address with Kung Fu Hustle. And we did it by having these 2 modes of game play.

But as far as the fighting mechanic the other thing we're doing of course is the combo system. We have a combo tree...the combos aren't that deep. What we're doing is a little bit more like Street Fighter where you have a couple of moves and you string together the combos. Rather than something like Virtua Fighter where it's about precision accuracy and getting all the right moves at the right time and you have to time each move so you can see the animations are clearly divided into the execution, collision period, animation and the recovery period. We have a little bit of that but we're more like Street Fighter where you have a couple of basic moves that you string together yourself.

I much prefer that. One of my biggest gripes about fighting games has been having to memorize the special moves. UpUpDownRightLeftArrow....

John Lawrence: It's the same with us. In some ways I think that what we're doing. People are going to have to play the game and decide for themselves, really. I think if we're successful with what we want to try to do is to make a fighting game that almost anybody can play.

That's another theme that I've been seeing tonight...low barrier to entry. Two themes - traditional entertainment/ low barrier to entry.

John Lawrence: When I reflect on the presentation (tonight) a lot of people are saying the same thing - it's high production value, low barrier to entry. There's definitely something for everybody but for us and the guys working on the game at the studio we don't have a lot of time to play a hardcore MMO. So we wanted to create something more for us. Something that you could get into for a little while when you're bored, you can have fun with and then you can get out of. It's not a chore; it's not something you feel obligated to regularly play.

Are there boss battles?

John Lawrence: There are in story mode. There are mini-bosses, bosses, and then guys that are really easy to kill. The bosses are going to be a little bit difficult to kill...but most of the characters are going to be pretty easy to kill. There's nothing to it. If you know a couple of basic combos you'll be able to kill anybody. The challenge is going to come from the composition of enemies with different patterns. It's not about you defeating any one enemy. It's about how you're going to defeat this different composition of the different enemies that you've defeated before.

And weapons?

John Lawrence: Some of the characters have weapons but at this stage we wanted to keep the Kung Fu style really distinct for each of the characters so you're not going to be able to interchangeably use different weapons that you find.

Can you use the environment to your advantage?

John Lawrence: We're not sure yet. At this stage we'll have a lot of destructible elements in the environment...but we're not sure yet if it's useable. We have a system that's close to supporting it but we're still play testing it and determining if it's something essential to have to make the game fun. You'll definitely be able to kick things like the table and kick things into people. But whether you'll be able to pick something up and throw it, we haven't determined.

I read somewhere that you're pulling from some different fighting styles...how influenced is it by actual Kung Fu...or Tai Kick Boxing?

John Lawrence: We pulled from a lot of different martial art styles. A lot of the styles you'll be able to recognize, like the Mantis style, the Snake style, Nanchen -southern fist style of Kung Fu, 12 Kicks based on Tae Kwon Do, you'll see a lot of different styles in the game. But one of the things that was interesting was when...the thing about Chinese Kung Fu is it's something that grows and changes over the years and certain moves that you saw in the movies in the 70's and 80's are different from the 90's and 00's.

When we were making the game and doing research on Kung Fu action and Kung Fu moves we were wanted to be very pure about saying "this character has this style and all of his moves have to be according to that style" because we wanted to give the authenticity of saying you learn this martial art so it has to be this style. But one of the interesting things that our choreographer taught us...he's a pretty seasoned martial arts movie choreographer, he's worked on movies like Kill Bill and done a lot of Kung Fu movies...he said to us, "you know in Hong Kong movies we don't care about the styles, if you have a move and it looks cool, then it's Kung Fu" that's the key thing. After we had that conversation...I can kind of see that. Now the philosophy, "If it looks cool, then it's Kung Fu."

Did you have actors doing motion capture?

John Lawrence: Some of the actors we had....remember the crazy 8 scene in Kill Bill? the guys with the masks...turned out there were only 4 of them. They just kept repeating them over and over again. One of those guys worked with us on the mocap.

Tell me more about your choreographer?

John Lawrence: He was on the team that worked on Kill Bill, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.... and a lot of Jet Li movies.

We're just at the beginning of talking about this game so we don't have playable tonight but soon you'll be able to play the game and I just think it's going ...even though looking to the past a little bit I think that by taking the cool games that we played when we were kids and those elements and using the technology that we have now we'll be creating an experience that people like to play.