Ready At Dawn’s co-founder on the Olympian task of PSP development.

The action genre has had a rocky time of it on PSP. Few firstperson shooters have taken off, and even a flagship franchise such as Killzone opted for isometric presentation. Ready At Dawn’s PSP efforts, meanwhile, have proved the platform’s capabilities, establishing the handheld as a happy home for thirdperson battling. With Ghost Of Sparta, the studio’s second portable instalment in the God Of War series, hitting shelves, we sit down with disarmingly candid co-founder Ru Weerasuriya to talk about the device’s limitations and future iterations.

“To tell the truth,” says Weerasuriya, ”during our first conversations with Sony I think even they were saying: ‘I don’t know if PSP’s capable of doing a GOW game. How about we do a side-scroller?’ And I was like: ‘Really? You can’t just translate it and make it a side-scroller!’ We almost had to convince them that we needed to make it a true GOW game!”



The proof is in the pudding – with over two-and-a-half million sales worldwide. But despite the company’s reputation as a go-to PSP developer (or perhaps because of it), Weerasuriya is frank about the platform’s shortcomings. “It was the first portable that Sony released – it’s a trial by fire,” he says, mollifying a fearful-looking PR. “It’s a good platform and you can make amazing things on it. I think that we’ve tried as much as possible to prove that in the last seven years.

"But it was doomed from the beginning, that’s its biggest problem. It was doomed from the very get-go. There are some things which aren’t conducive to calling it a true portable gaming platform and calling it a connective platform, although it has Wi-Fi. There’s so many things that publishers and the manufacturer and Sony dropped the ball on – it’s natural, it’s the first one. The hope that you can have is that they learn from that experience when they make the next one, and that they solve the issues with the PSP and the PSP Go – and also that they learn from what the others are doing, because there’s plenty of other manufacturers that have done pretty amazing things when it comes to mobile gaming.”



Mobile gaming has a lot to teach home console developers too, says Weerasuriya. “I would love to get to the point where we could maybe make smaller games – two or three hours, core experiences – just like a movie. I think that I would want to see that as a future for games overall, regardless of the platform. You pick up the game, and then three hours later you’re done. Maybe they’re cheaper – $9.99 or $19.99 – but smaller experiences where you feel satisfied, where you feel like you’ve got your entertainment out of it. I would rather do that than keep doing these big games. Hopefully that’s also the way other people will start thinking, because personally I’m tired – I don’t even have the time to play these games for 16 hours. I’m pretty fervent in thinking that’s the way it should go. Not everybody believes that, but I really think that we need to make great, concentrated experiences.”

Ready At Dawn has certainly earned Sony’s ear – and with the company’s PSP Go pointing to a download-only future, perhaps it’s now more than ready to listen.