Virgin Interactive Speaks Out

Over the last few weeks there's been a continuous stream of online rumors circulating about Virgin Interactive Entertainment and its properties.

GameSpot News went to Mark Skaggs, Virgin's executive producer of internal development, to set the record straight.

GameSpot News: There have been various rumors on the Net regarding Virgin Interactive's current status. What's the truth about the situation?Mark Skaggs: they were looking to get rid of Virgin out of their empire, and that has resulted in a number of other publishers looking into purchasing us. The rumors had started because of that. Now the exact status of all these things going on? I guess there was one the other day about Infogrames, interest by EA, and all these other people.

I can't really go into that, but I can say that one of the great things that I've seen firsthand since I've been here is that Virgin's management has been very, very proactive into making sure Virgin is as strong and capable a company as it can be. Rather than hanging around waiting and saying "Oh woe is us," everyone's really working hard to make sure we're a very profitable, efficient, and organized company.

GSN: What is Virgin doing toward that? Is it beefing up its PC and console efforts?MS: Lots and lots of things. Basically doing turnaround. Making sure all of our processes are very efficient and that we have the right set of people doing the right things. Virgin went through a period of very rapid growth a couple years before I got here, and that I think led to some inefficiencies.

Now on the internal side, which I can talk about in great detail, yes. Last year, we shed a bunch of projects internally and a large number of people, and now we're building up the right way, the smart way. We have three projects in various stages going on right now in internal development, and those are the people that report directly to me, and we're looking at adding another team by the end of the year.

GSN: What are the projects that are being worked on? Is there anything you can say?MS: I can tell you about a couple of things. We have Console Experience working on the N64. We have our SubSpace product that came out on the PC, which we're looking at going the next step with. We're also looking at Black Belt, Dural, Katana, or whatever they're calling it now. Those are the three general areas, but other than that I can't comment specifically because we've got some really cool things going on.

GSN: What are some of the titles you mentioned Virgin shed last year?MS: They were all gone before I got here, so I don't really know all the names of them. If I tried to state them, I'd probably get them wrong. I joined Virgin in August last year, so at that point most of the shedding and reorganization in terms of internal development had already occurred. But when I came in, my job was to start up some more console efforts and then it eventually turned where I had all the teams internally reporting to me.

GSN: Now you had been the head of Tetragon, which developed Nanotech Warrior. How did you come to work at Virgin?MS: It's kind of a long, sad story. Last year, there were two companies looking to buy us. The first was Westwood and the second was GT Interactive. We got to a point where we decided to go further with GT, it didn't work out, and the end result was that we had to go out of business. a great solid relationship with some of the people here, because they published Nanotech Warrior, having a good relationship with Brett Sperry and Keith Greer, who is a VP of external production here.

I decided to come here even though I'd seen what was going on with Virgin before, even back in August I could see the things turning around and getting very well organized. And with Brett managing all of the worldwide development, it's a good place to be.

GSN: So were you brought in by Brett Sperry?MS: Actually, it was a combination of Brett and Keith. I had contacted them at E3. They were looking for strong production management, as well as someone who had very strong engineering and business skills, and I happened to fit the bill. He was very involved in the hiring, but did he seek me out specifically? No, I kind of knew what was going on, so I came over, contacted them, and it worked out real well for us.

GSN: Were you able to bring people into Virgin that you'd worked with at Tetragon?MS: No. By that point, most of the Tetragon people had been spread to the wind, because after I had to shut Tetragon down, I had to go through a process of cleaning it all up, which took a few months, and by that time people had found jobs.

There's a significant number of people that went over to Paradigm Entertainment down in Dallas.

GSN: I remember talking to you a year ago, right before Nanotech Warrior came out. You'd mentioned plans for a PlayStation game. You hadn't mentioned anything specifically, but I'm wondering if that game is showing up over at Virgin.MS: (laughs) Yeah, one of the things that I had to do, in addition to hiring people and rebuilding things, was to start us up on some great projects, and of course one of them was one of the things we'd been working on. Not exactly the same, but very similar to it.

The great thing for me about coming here was both Keith and Brett said, "Hey, come here and do just what you did at Tetragon. And we'll stay out your way, and just do it." It's a lot of freedom. It's great for someone who had run their own show before to come in here. It could've been a little bit scary, but they're making it real nice, and it's a great place to be.

GSN: There's been a lot of talk about the status of Virgin's N64 title, Freakboy. What's the current status of that?MS: The official status is that it's on "active hold," because when I say just "hold," people think, "Oh, my god. That means it's been cancelled." But one of the things I had to make a decision on in the fall was what we actually were going to do with this project, because you know it's been going on for like three years or so. So in the process of making some changes here, I decided to not waste the concept or game by implementing it poorly or killing it by trying to push something through that just wasn't effective for us at that point.

So at that point, we kept it sort of alive and it was one of the things I had hoped to start up again later this year. But when article came out a few weeks ago saying that it had been cancelled, that kind of raised a whole new set of issues with the design firm that had originally come up with the idea a few years back. So now we're in the process of figuring out those issues.

GSN: So it might revert back to them?MS: Yeah, it might. We're figuring that out. It's one of those cases that whoever leaked that status to the press really kind of did a disservice to everyone, including the players, because now it had taken something that was a great concept - one of my all-time favorites - and raised sort of a cloud around it, that we have to fix.

GSN: What about rumors of layoffs over at Virgin?MS: The reality was that two people were let go. Well, one was fired for inadequate performance and the other just quit to do something on his own. And so there was no layoff. It's very frustrating because we're growing, and we've got great stuff coming.

The thing that I think is great is that that when we look at it internally, we can tell that the culture's changed, we can all feel a level of excitement going forward, which, god forbid, was not here six months ago. So it's actually turning around, and as outside people see that reality here, that's exciting. And we're attracting better and better people to come talk to us and talk about joining us.