It’s a simple question, surely many of you could name one, but I bet there is a game that you have played for many hours and yet it would never occur to you to think that it is Spanish. And of course, if we ourselves don’t realize that high-quality games are completely Spanish-made, how are they going to know outside?
A few days ago at GameLab 2008 (professional meetings in the electronic entertainment industry), Gonzalo Suárez Girad (he designed and directed the video games in the “Commandos” saga) commented that sometimes being on the other side of the pond, he sees how Spanish video games are highly appreciated, but their creation is attributed to people from there, that is, they believe that they are American or English games.
If in Spanish cinema we expect to see naked women, what will we expect from our video games?
Recently, Spanish games are entering with more force into this difficult terrain, of course with well-deserved merits, as is the case of the PS3 and Xbox360 video game “Clive Barker’s Jericho”, a purely Iberian harvest from the hand of Mercury Steam.
Other of the most popular market launches, which we were responsible for, were “One” for the N-gage, “Blade the Edge of Darkness”, “Horsez” for the Nintendo DS, and other very extravagant ones such as “Imagine being a DS fashion designer”, “Imagine being a DS veterinarian” or “Rafael Nadal DS”. Despite what they imply, we must also be proud of these, because they mean the leap to complex platforms and “next-gen” consoles, beyond the PC. Other video games are currently being designed that will surely make people talk, for example “Playchapas:Football Edition” for PSP, “Kroll”, which dares to fully exploit the field of games for the iPhone, or “Lord of the creatures”, a project that innovates even in the way of playing (in a room similar to a cinema, with fog effects, splashes, sound in the seat…).
As a final conclusion, I will say that it is incredible. We have video games at the level of the World market and many times we don’t even realize it, even less so outside of Spain. From “The Abbey of Crime” to “Jericho” a lot has been done, but there is still a long way to go in the future, hopefully close.