Tell us about Sinking Island.

Sinking Island is the first of a series. Benoît wants to have, on one side, adventures like Amerzone, Syberia, Paradise, and Aquarica, which are about fantasy and animals. And on the other, he wants to do something which is closer to what he does in graphic novels, a recurring hero in detective stories and murder cases. So Sinking Island introduces a new character, a man called Jack Norm, who will hopefully, if the first game is successful, be acting in various video games. It's a detective story, and the principle is that every story is set in a "closed" place, in which a murder is committed, and you have to guess why, by whom. This will be the principle of the games. Now, the first one, Sinking Island, takes place on a small tropical island. On this small island there is a billionaire who builds a hotel. Have you seen pictures of this crazy hotel in Dubai? It's a kind of tower, similar to ours. The interesting part in the game is that things are disappearing; the island is sinking underneath the weight of the tower, because the architects made it too heavy. It's one of these islands built on coral, and it just crushes under the weight of the tower. So the first day, if you don't collect the clues, they disappear, because water is spilling in. You have a limited amount of time, three days in simulated real time, and if you can't solve the crime, game over.

Olivier Fontenay: It's really the opposite of the classical adventure game, where day by day you have access to a wider area. It's exactly the opposite.

When you say simulated real time, what does that mean?

Olivier Fontenay: Meaning that the game is going to be played probably in six to seven hours, and if you fail, you fail. You die. You'd have to restart, but not from the beginning. You will automatically go back to a checkpoint that you will have reached before. There will probably be two checkpoints each day.

So it's not minute-for-minute real time.

Michel Bams: No. The interesting thing from a graphical point of view in Sinking Island is to have this contrast between a kind of art deco tower, which is a tower like 200 meters high, and this tropical environment with a lagoon and palm trees.

Will this game definitely have prerendered 2D backgrounds?

Michel Bams: Yes.

Does it contain fantasy elements?

Michel Bams: No.

Olivier Fontenay: It's a very realistic atmosphere in this game.

Michel Bams: But the plot is strange.

Yeah, the island sinking is a little weird.

Olivier Fontenay: It's not that bizarre. The reality is that there are some islands that are really sinking.

Michel Bams: They think that if the temperature continues to rise, some of these islands will just disappear. And on the other side there is this hotel in Dubai, a high tower, so it's more things that are taken and mixed together to create something that looks like fantasy but in fact could be true. In Benoît's games, you're always close to reality.

That's what helps you buy into the fantasy, you don't realize you've crossed over from reality to fantasy.

Michel Bams: [Showing concept character art at E3, not yet publicly available] This is Jack Norm, a character who's about 38, ex-policeman now a private investigator, drinks, not necessarily an athletic man but able to run or to fight if needed. But he will first think, before trying to use violence. He's not a pure Columbo-like man; if needed he might use force.

Does that mean there's going to be fighting in the game?

Michel Bams: No.

When is it scheduled to come out?

Michel Bams: Spring 2007. We want to use the same principles of 2D backgrounds with 3D characters and have as many things as possible moving on screen—birds, water. We'll add wind in the trees, things like this to bring life. We want each screen to be animated with two or three things like that.

Is the production time shorter than on Paradise?

Olivier Fontenay: We started pre-production on this in November, and we started production on the end of January. We have a rather classical twelve months of production, so it's probably two or three months less than Paradise.

Michel Bams: Paradise is the first game that we made as White Birds, so we had to set up the team, and there's always an experience curve that you have to build up. Now the team is there, there's two separate teams, so things are more on their way, allowing us to produce it in a shorter time.

Are these going to be shorter games, because they're part of a series?

Michel Bams: We don't want the player to be counting the screens, saying "Okay, this game is a 165 screen game, while this one was 172." We want to provide the player pleasure time, because you buy a game, it's expensive, you have to have time with it. If you end it after two hours, that should be the price of a movie ticket. So in terms of length of gameplay, it will be about the same time as Paradise; even more, because there will be more puzzle solving. It will probably be a little higher in terms of difficulty.

Olivier Fontenay: There is also something a bit different, but it's a bit early to talk about it, in the general interface of the game. You will, as usual, direct the 3D character, you will collect some objects, speak with various people, but there is something additional that you have to do to really solve the murder mystery. There will be 12 different questions that you have to answer using what you have collected within the game, in a different interface. But it's really a bit too early to say more.

Interesting. So it's really a classic detective murder mystery.

Michel Bams: Absolutely, that's the idea. In fact, the whole idea was to add Benoît's quality into a classical detective story. We hope that the storyline is also... I mean, one of the classical aspects of these games is always that what seems very obvious is not. The story's really tricky. The scenario is really unexpected.

I have one general question for you. Benoît gets all the attention—I honestly don't know who else on the team does what. How do you feel about that?

Michel Bams: Benoît does almost everything. We just watch him work. [laughter] White Birds is also Benoît's company. I mean, there's four of us, we decided to create the company together, and Benoît is one of the four. He's the author of the company. It doesn't mean that every White Birds Productions game is going to be Sokal, because he has limited time. It's really that with Paradise and the Sinking Island / Jack Norm series, he wishes to be author. When he's author of the game, he writes the scenario, he does lots of preparation sketches, and he supervises the whole rest of the production.

Olivier Fontenay: He works as much as the director of a movie. He's there every day working with the team, managing the team, the artists, the storyline, as much as the director of a movie. He's the artist. We are very proud of the game, all of us, the whole team is very proud of the game, but the whole team also knows very well what Benoît is doing exactly to create this game. When you are on a Spielberg movie, everybody works on the movie, doing the set, the lights, the actors, but this is a Speilberg movie. This is a Benoît Sokal game, but there were more than 35 people involved full-time on Paradise, Benoît being one of the 35 people.

Adventure Gamers would like to thank Michel and Olivier for taking the time to answer our questions at E3.