FiringSquad: First, how did the idea for Red Steel come about and did it come up before the Nintendo Wii controller was revealed or after the plans for the controller were released?

Marie-Sol Beaudry: The first contact between Ubisoft & Nintendo was at E3 2005. At that time Nintendo wanted a third party team to work on a first person view game for the Wii. We only got basic info about the concept of the pad, the capture device & the relative power of the console. No real technical data were supplied at that stage.

Then we spent about 2 to 3 months just to imagine how you can use & play with the controller & the buttons. We had no deadline, no pressure and no constraint, but to try & move with a remote control & see what they could do with it. We listed all the moves they liked and the first ruff ideas of gameplay linked to those moves. Two teams began to work on the project at first: the engineers & the designers. They worked as you can play “ping pong” > at first designers got ideas and in a second step, engineers tried to see if this was possible vs. the hardware.

The goal was to explore all the kind of move/use you can imagine with a remote control in hand that would represent a device. They made a first list of interactions: cut, shoot, slash, smash, dick, use it as a rackets, lasso, spoon, flashlight… They wanted to focus on the moves that are possible to do in reality.

We did it with real remote controls as we hadn't received any Wii controler so far. So no technology at first only ideas and this was a very fresh & new development process!

They decided to go for a gun gameplay at first as it was very intuitive as you just point and shoot & then they found out that the contact weapons were an interesting track to explore, such as knife, sword, saber...