I discovered Nervous Brickdown last year. I made a leap of faith to pick it up based almost entirely on the really cool-looking screenshots that had come our way via the usual PR channels. Imagine my delight when I found that the game underneath was just as wildly creative and fun; it made for one of my most pleasant surprises of 2007.

This year, developer Arkedo is working with a new publisher and has an all-new title—Big Bang Mini—heading to Nintendo DS this coming January. Arkedo head and co-founder Camille Guermonprez gave us 110% for this infectiously enthusiastic interview, giving us a glimpse of the history of Nervous Brickdown, explaining what's so great about Big Bang Mini, and even giving us a hint of what's to come down the road.

It's an honor to talk to you guys. I was a big fan of Nervous
Brickdown last year and was thrilled to see at E3 that you had a new DS game coming out. Were you happy with how Nervous Brickdown did?
Camille Guermonprez, President, Arkedo:Thanks, it's an honor for us to have people interested in what we do! Concerning your question about us being happy with Nervous Brickdown... yes, we are!

First, we managed to release the game with a respected publisher, and second, we liked how it looked in the end; we kept creative control all the way, and it was important for us. It also meant a lot for us to see one of our games on a real, tangible box. We come from mobile phone gaming (1999-2005), so being able to buy our game in 10 years time in a garage sale, or seing it sold for really cheap on bargain bins so kids can buy it, was something we were really excited about (really!).

Nervous Brickdown
We believe the game was pirated a bit, but we managed to sell more than 100,000 units. Of course this does not compete with big licenses, but we know that our former publisher did not lose money on it (far from it), and that it allowed a 4-person studio to live on for another 18 months. (smile)

Most of the people who played the game on an R4 would not have bought it in the first place, from our view, so we will not cry about "lost" sales that would have never happened anyway. We do our best to make cool games, and sell them as cheap as possible, so our karma is clear on this one. (smile) We were kids during the ZX/CPC/Atari (for Eric and I) and the Japanese consoles era (for Aurélien); buying a specific game was a very hard choice for us then, as it costed a lot of money. We are trying today to sell game to the kids we were then—only 25 years later.

To wrap it up, it was a great project to work on, we had a lot of fun doing it, and it did not kill us eventually, so I think it will always have a special place in our heart.

Thank you, Nervous Brickdown!

Tell us about how Big Bang Mini came about. Where the idea came from, stories about its development, that sort of thing.
Guermonprez:We made many, many designs and protos. Put a lot to the trash. It was crap.

While doing this, we also started a postmortem on NB, trying to find what was most interesting in terms of gameplay: things that could only be done on the DS, or gameplay which could feel fresh again thanks to the DS' very specific interface. The boss of the Shoot world came out of this (remember, the one with the big ship and the Propellerheads-inspired theme?) We felt using the stylus for a shmup was both rather new and really fun and precise.

NB's Shoot world
Then Aurélien (graphics guy on paper, but so much more in reality) had this idea of shooting anywhere with the stylus, and the 3-second-payback thing: you can shoot as much as you want, but if you miss, you have to deal with the additional debris created by your missed shots.

So we made yet another prototype. It "clicked" immediately. We decided to do it. There you go: it's simple to make games! Ahem.

Well, being the boss, I was the last to know we were going to make a shmup next. They all knew it from the start, but I was not OK because I feared it would bomb commercially. But the fireworks thing—and the real cool proto—made it for me. Dammit, they knew it from the start, and they all pretended I took the decision. Rats.

One other thing about Yubaba, the music guys. Last year, Nervous Brickdown won the Best Game for Portable Console award in France, and they only got nominated for Best Soundtrack. For Big Bang Mini, it was the opposite: they won the music award, and BBM was only nominated for best game. So they bragged a bit about it during our Friday lunches, and we had to explain to them that they were starting to grow white hair and that one day eventually they would die.