Interviews

Frogwares CEO Waël Amr Speaks
on Sherlock Holmes & the Silver Earring & More!
Interview conducted by Randy Sluganski

We recently had the opportunity to chat with Waël Amr the CEO of Frogwares not only about their newest release - Sherlock Holmes and the Silver Earring - but also much more. Waël Amr is a rarity in this industry, he tells it like it is and does not mince words. His unwavering support of the adventure genre is to be applauded and, as you will read, he is not reluctant to speak his mind on the subject.

JA - You now have 2 Sherlock Holmes games to your credit, what would you say you have learned that can be applied to the next game in the series?

Both games are truly different!

The first one The Mystery of the Mummy is a nice gentle average adventure game, it is quite superficial concerning the character development but an entertaining game with a certain appeal as far as it sold very well.

The Silver Earring is a game dedicated to Sherlock Holmes fans, inspired by a novel written by a fan. The character of Sherlock Holmes, his relation with the other characters, his means of investigating, and his way to reveal his thoughts and the truth, deeply influence the gameplay and it might not offer all the flexibility that some players could want.

Your question points at the problem posed when you begin to create a new series: if you intend to successfully sell games with some recurrent and newer elements (story telling style, graphic style, technology, dialog type), does a game dedicated to the Holmesian community have a better chance to become a series, or more exactly does a game realized in the pure Sherlock Holmes style have a chance to meet a wider public than the only (but numerous!) Holmesians?

I think yes, the feedback we had from players on The Silver Earring was the best we’ve yet received from any of the games we have developed and for me the key points are:

Respect the original characters:

This is given is by the story itself but in the case of Sherlock Holmes, it has to be considered an independent topic.

Sherlock Holmes is the perfect brain (even though for spite he pretends his brother Mycroft is even smarter) and we had to think about the correct way to present Holmes behavior in the game, even if it opposes the gameplay, I will give you few examples:

Sherlock Holmes is not always running: Holmes would never run inside Sherringford Hall or 221b Baker Street because it makes no sense, even if some players would prefer that he move quicker.

You must find everything in an area before leaving: Sherlock Holmes is a man of perfection, he will not leave a place until he will find the necessary elements to advance his investigation.

We never hear Sherlock Holmes provide hints, he does not share his deep thoughts even with his friend Watson, you must form your own conclusion, and he will form his.

We cannot intervene on the issue of the plot: you can fail during the investigation but to choose the right or wrong person instead of Holmes wasn’t realistic for us.

The dialogues are in the purest Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) style, the relations inside the triumvirate (Holmes/ Watson/Lestrade) is authentic, the Baker street apartment looks like you would expect: slippers, tobacco, harpoon on the wall, etc.

An excellent story influencing the gameplay:

We did think, as The Silver Earring was first a book, if you could guess the solution before reaching the conclusion (if you are a mystery fan), you would be extremely pleased. Of course, you can write to the author to verify your conclusions before reaching the end of the book, and ask for a reply, but most of the time, you just continue reading to the end and keep your satisfaction to yourself if you guessed true.

True mystery fans like to be surprised and even if they want to guess a part of the truth, they want a part of it to be very challenging, almost impossible to discover, except for a hard working, superior brain.

This is where Sherlock Holmes intervenes. If you like Sherlock Holmes (and this game is made for Sherlock Holmes fans) you admire him, and that is precisely why we conduct this game like a story or a movie, you can guess, you can form your conclusion, you can intervene, you get exactly the same elements as Holmes to solve the mystery and recreate the story around The Silver Earring. But he will make the conclusion, gathering all the pieces of the puzzle, in his own particular dramatic way, making you jaw dropping at every second of the 23 minutes case conclusion.

Excellent graphics which can compete with the lords of the adventure category, within the limit of the point-and-click technology.

The correct technology and interface, despite it not being a real key point in our genre I believe.

The music is very important for me, and we try to give the best we can in this area, but it’s obviously not a key point for many players.

I wish to add that The Silver Earring is the first game on which we worked independently; it means team, story, dialogs, technology and money. That wasn’t the case on our previous titles. For us the difference is huge and the freedom we got from this independence helped greatly to improve the quality of our game.

JA - Is there any specific Holmes story that was used as an inspiration for the writing of Silver Earring?

The story was written by a fan before we developed the game; you would have to ask the author about that! There are 56 Novelette and 4 novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I know the author used the early writings of ACD, The adventures of Sherlock Holmes, to create his story. Personally I think that A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four contain a wealth of information about Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles is wonderfully written and the Valley of Fear is….frightening above all due to the human evil madness always present in this story.

We submitted the story and the game to the Sherlock Holmes Society and they validated both. After The Mystery of the Mummy they were delighted with our new turn, we now collaborate together on a TV show dedicated to Sherlock Holmes Societies all over Europe.

JA - The Silver Earring is almost an entirely different style of game from Mystery of the Mummy – is this due to constructive criticism from the fans and if so what type of feedback did you receive.

The general feedback for The Mystery of the Mummy was good, the feedback of the adventure gamers was average, and the feedback of Sherlock Holmes fan community wasn’t particularly flattering.

And I agree with the three of them, casual gamers can have a lot of satisfaction with the Mystery of the Mummy, it is easy to handle, slightly difficult, with a correct realization. The adventure fans ask for more so logically a lesser proportion will greatly appreciate it. And the Holmesians are clamoring for proper respect of the master!

We listened to the feedback and we tried to adapt. When we did Mystery of the Mummy we were a team of less than 10 beginners; The Silver Earring had 30 experienced people and the best Sherlock Holmes story ever used in a Sherlock Holmes computer game (J). When we hear critics we take them right into our heart and after being relieved of the pain it caused we try to see if people are slightly right, and most of the time they are. After the release of The Mystery of the Mummy we thought we would need more time, more resources, more attention, more concentration to do the next game, and in the end it was worth it, The Silver Earring is a true Holmesian game, with an excellent plot and one of the longest end movies ever in a game and it will remain a reference as the Sherlock Holmes game. If sales are any indication, we were right to improve the quality and players do appreciate it.

JA - Frogwares games for the most part seem most concerned with strong characters, crisp dialogue and logical puzzles. Can you elaborate on how each of the above combines to create an interesting adventure game?

I do consider there are two kinds of adventure game, even if there is no real purpose in this classification; it helps to answer your question.

The discoveries game, as is the case for Journey to the Center of the Earth for example, or Syberia or Myst. Even if they are rather different, the first appeal for these games is certainly for the wonderful graphics, the capacity of these games to immerse the players in a fantastic atmosphere, to give a kind of new breathe and dreams to the players. The triggers are different: Myst is based on puzzle solving while Syberia is based on the story and cerebral challenge is not its key point. Journey to the Center of the Earth tries to play on both sides, a deep immersive story, puzzles of various complexity, we couldn’t do as much dialogs as we wanted as the publisher limited them to ten thousands words due to localization cost (while the American version was done by fantastic volunteers, among them the incredible John Bell, the European versions were done by localization studios), the content of dialog was limited to “hello, do that, goodbye”. It was really frustrating for us and for the players.

The Silver Earring belongs to the second category, the investigation genre same as Post Mortem or Jack the Ripper. But what we wanted with The Silver Earring is the best possible detective story, being faithful to Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is the best detective, and the best deserve the best! It means an excellent plot and story, a deep study of the Victorian architecture to create wonderful graphics, a violin from the late 19th century in the background, a lot of characters to meet, nice voice acting made-in-England, ironic tone into Holmes voice, Lestrade jealous and competing with him, Watson seeing but failing to observe.

We had to create a game from the original story and these elements needed to be balanced. The levels are very different from one another; the first one is more focused on dialogs and hints research just after Sir Bromsby’s murder. The second is more focused on puzzles; the third has some stealth sequences.

It means all levels are very distinct in the gameplay and the global game is well balanced without repetition.

Both styles require different deepness into the various sides that are the characters, the story, the dialogs, the graphics, the puzzles, in order to create different emotions. If the basic components are the same they need to be balanced differently to create an entertaining and believable world.

JA - The puzzles in Silver Earring are truly a mixed bag and, I think, showcase your familiarity with the adventure genre and what gamers want. What are some of your favorite types of puzzles in a game?

Personally I prefer the mathematical puzzles despite that they are quite hard to place into games, they are few reasons into a constructed plot to implement truly mathematical puzzles. Mysterious Journey I & II are challenging in this domain, as well as the Myst series.

We think puzzles must serve the story and not to be in the center of the game, so they must be various in their genre and difficulties. We gradually reduce complexity in our games, as we see no real point into making very complex puzzles with a strong story, if we have to make a choice between the two and we choose the story.

JA - One of the very few criticisms of Silver Earring has been about the dreaded pixel-hunting. But can you truly make a point-and-click adventure game without pixel-hunting?

Pixel hunting or not is a choice. A detective story is based on the research of clues and hints, they have different forms, dialogs, items or observations made by the investigator. They all help to from conclusion, for example to answer the quiz at the end of every level in The Silver Earring. What we didn’t want with this game is that people cannot play through it without understanding it, without getting interested in it. The quiz is done for this purpose and leads the players to form his own conclusions. We first thought that we would not change the cursor to show the hotspots, but we came to the conclusion that it would be too restrictive during the beta testing. You can perfectly do an adventure game without pixel hunting or other difficulties, but that would probably not be a game with the ambition of The Silver Earring in the investigation genre.

JA - Frogwares seems intent on bringing classic novels and characters to life in their adventure games: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Sherlock Holmes, et al – why do you think there is a market for the classics in today’s eclectic game atmosphere.

We enjoy good stories; we enjoy what human beings are able to do in their specificity: imagine and create.

Classic authors do help when they are good, it would be very pretentious to pretend to have more capacity to anticipate the future than Jules Verne, nor more capacity for analysis than Sherlock Holmes, and they are an excellent base of work.

As far as graphics go, they are an important part of the game, the choice of classic author allows us to use more fantastic architecture than today’s and copy their style, Journey to the Center of the Earth was very interesting in that domain, we studied deeply Art nouveau and Art deco to work on the sets and create an underground world a la Jules Verne. My mother and I are really keen on art deco furniture and our home is fully decorated with Art Deco elements.

We did the same with Sherlock Holmes and the Victorian era, I went to London a couple of times to take over 4,000 photographs of streets, houses, interiors, etc.

Working with Jules Verne or Sherlock Holmes immerses more easily the player into a world he already knows before playing, being known by the player we can create more interesting and complex stories as the players don’t have to learn everything from zero, where the heroes are, what do they do, why they do things this way and not another.

The classical genre brings the idea of a time period with different values, different time pace, more self-confidence, than today’s marketing-cynical world. Adventure games with classical themes are also educational, the language used, the architecture, the graphics, allow the whole family to play them and learn from them, this is a reason why France or Germany has such high sales in the genre.

We receive a lot of mail from mothers playing with their kids, urgently looking for a solution when they are stuck, before a family crisis occurs. 70% of our players are women (ladies, if you are reading, this is for you: we love you!), women find more interesting features than men in our video games, our author for Journey to the Center of the Earth is a member of the female minority working as game designers in the industry, and she is working now on Around the World in Eighty Days which will be released in few months. I hardly expect women to play Bob the Metawarrior exterminating mutants of the planet Zark for the clear reason that something happened somewhere and one space government requires immediately your testosterone gun.

At least with Sherlock Holmes or Jules Verne you know that you’re not going into a B class Hollywood (or Bollywood) movie.

JA - Frogwares gets better with each game and seems to be poised on the verge of a blockbuster title – and it may well happen with the US release of Silver Earring – what do you think needs to happen for your products to be successful in the U.S.?

I’m not a marketing and sales expert, and I’m not the best one to give a reply but to speak on a (truly sad) business point - To have success you need to have a good day one release, it means many boxes on the shelves and to have many boxes on the shelves you need to do an extensive marketing, which means money, and who has money? Big publishers. So you will probably have more success dealing with a big publisher than a small one (brilliant deduction…). More generally the first sales of a game depend on its marketing, the second on its quality. It means that virtually the quality of a game is not important in the first weeks (if you had the chance to play to Spiderman 2 on PC, you probably know what I’m speaking about), but only after the marketing efforts end their effect.

But the quality of the marketing is important too, it’s very simple, since I do games, I met less than 10 people working for publishers considering that the sales of a game are due to its quality, and just remember that 80% of the marketing, sales, PR people working for publishers NEVER play games, so how can they market correctly a product they don’t know?

Then come the journalists, on The Silver Earring we got around 50 reviews so far in various languages, around 40% of these reviews clearly demonstrate that the reviewer hadn’t played the game or not beyond the demo version (I must say that the main adventures web sites, played the game completely: JA, GB, AG, Quandary Land, and the major web sites, IGN, Gamespot). So how accurate is the judgment of the whole journalist community, what can be their influence except in the case of the specialist web sites or the most well known and the most serious?

That leaves the gamers who pay for the product and play it to the end, their opinion is the wisest and it is where success or failure happens. Beyond the marketing and specialist opinion, gamer opinions relay the essential: the game quality. If we want to increase our success, we need to do better games, maybe more adapted to the north American culture.

We are in the adventure field where potentials players are not easy to be marketed to, many women would enjoy a good movie or a good game, but if they know what movie they would like to see (because they already saw some) they simply don’t know what game is good for them, so they buy the Sims. I’m not speaking about the hardcore playing women, but those who simply have a slight knowledge of video games (chain saw beheading or a plumber running after magic mushrooms) and know mainly the Sims.

As a conclusion, developers should make better games, we should sign with publishers believing in our product and I guess the marketing should be done wisely, in our case, to relay more on Adventure web sites, advertise on them and propose contests to the adventure players in a larger way than today.

JA - Dialogue is a key component of Silver Earring. Did you enlist any outside help to script the character’s dialogue more to American sensibilities?

As some already know, Laura Mac Donald, who is an active member of the adventure community, proof read the dialogs; I’m not sure she did it according to American sensibilities. As she is shy and modest and that she doesn’t want anybody to know about that, you are not forced to read this answer and congratulate her (she really doesn’t like it of course).

JA - The UK release of Silver Earring was greeted with giveaways, a free Holmes dvd with purchase of the game and even a press party, while the North American release has had little or no fanfare at all. What accounts for this difference?

This interview is really business-oriented!!! The two publishers have a different size, different priorities, you know also that 2004 is the 150th birthday of Sherlock Holmes, it is also the 100th birthday of the “entente cordiale” between French and English (and we are French and Digital Jesters are English). Sherlock Holmes is England’s popular literature figure of the Victorian era, when the British were ruling the world and their wealth reached the highest level, I think this series of event played a role in our collaboration, DJ and Frogwares have almost the same size, there is a strong relationship between us.

Ubisoft treats the game differently, selling the game together with Myst 4 in a promo bundle (which is quite flattering for Myst :) ), and putting it on every shelf they can. They paid the money they owe us, which is not the case of the supposed to be major publisher in the adventure genre.

Digital Jesters and Ubisoft are the best possible partners for their respective territory, without a doubt.

JA - While your games are treated warmly by the adventure community, sales have been respectable, but not spectacular. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to improve sales of Frogware’s adventure games in North America?

We received great support from the adventure community but web sites such as Gamespot and IGN also gave us very good reviews and better than some adventure web sites.

We would need to do better games, in any case, to increase our success, and maybe to do games more in accordance with the American culture, it would mean to use an author from North America, a Jane Jensen for example, but would she be interested?

I believe that wider coverage from the US publishers among the adventure community would help, as we are targeting casual gamers, the usual press or ladies magazine would bring more result than placing advertisement in “PC action death” or “Blood gamers”.

JA - Silver Earring does something unique in that, while each chapter of the game is non-linear, the chapter cannot be completed until you have correctly answered a series of questions which then gives you closure to that chapter. Can you explain your thought process behind this decision?

There are two explanations, one is linked to the way of Holmes investigates and the other is connected to the quiz.

Sherlock Holmes is the best detective ever, and it wasn’t logical that he will go back and forth researching the clues, once again we consider that if the player play as Holmes in the game, he/she is not Sherlock Holmes, consequently, a player couldn’t leave a place without getting all the necessary clues for the rest of the investigation. As some elements are optional it is optional to pick all the items or clues to continue the game.

As soon as we picked up the idea of the quiz which purpose was to guide the player in his conclusion, we considered that it will be extremely complex to answer the quiz if you do not have all the elements in the inventory at the time you have to answer it; or it would increase greatly the difficulty or we would have had to lower the difficulty of the questions and by then reduce the interest of the quiz. We made the decision to keep the quiz and arrange the gameplay that the player has to pick everything before leaving a place.

JA - Among the Frogware’s staff, what are some of your favorite adventure games?

The Eye of the Kraken, Under a Killing Moon, the Myst series, Gabriel Knight series.

JA - What can we look forward to next from Frogwares? Are there any other classic novels you would like to design into games.

We are now developing Around the World in 80 Days and it is so funny that I hesitate to release it in such a way, people will laugh more than playing, but at least they will get satisfaction. We have currently three titles in preparation, but shhhh!

Many thanks to Just Adventure for your time and your interest.

Frogwares Staff