Aaron Conners and Chris Jones on Getting Big Finish Started

Three Cards to Midnight, released in May 09, was the first game from Big Finish Games. I wanted to know what Big Finish founders Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were most thrilled by about with their new studio’s first game. Chris begins:

“We’ve had a lot of aborted attempts to try and pull something together. Aaron and I worked together at, obviously Access, then at Microsoft. There were a couple of opportunities where we thought we would be able to pull some adventure games together under that model, and that didn’t quite work… A couple times we’ve felt like we’re really really close, we’re totally on the same page as far as what we want to do but things didn’t quite come together.

“Even on this smaller scale to get to sit down, work this out, and make it happen is probably the most thrilling part for me. It’s fun to design with someone that you feel like you’re in perfect sync with. That’s the thing that I missed over the years was not having the ability to just sit down and have that creative outlet in a way that’s exciting for both of us.”

“I would second that.” adds Aaron “Obviously, Chris is great to work with and that’s why we’ve continued to pursue opportunities to continue to work together, but also the fact that we had complete creative control. It’s not so much an ego thing as it is just, we went from Microsoft, and I worked with some other big companies like Ubisoft and EA and Take 2.

“There’s always this huge, you know, mothership hovering over you, watching all of the creative content, wanting to put their two cents in. It was just really fun and liberating to be able to do whatever the hell we felt like, and that was really, really important.”

The Chris Jones and Aaron Conners collaboration is celebrated and long-lived, though oft-delayed. Aaron on working with Chris again:

“We’ve been good friends for a long time so it wasn’t like we really fell out of touch with each other and then came back together for this project. And like Chris was referring to, even though Overseer came out in ’98 we had worked together at Microsoft…”

Chris goes on, with interjections from Aaron, about canceled projects while at Microsoft: Black Pearl, with Mark Hammil, and a great deal of work for games based on a movie called A.I. by some guy you’ve probably never heard of called Steven Spielberg. Listen to the whole interview here (this part is about 16 minutes in).

“The big difference about this one wasn’t working together after all this time as it was knowing we were actually going to make a game, and it was actually going to get done and published.”

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“They probably would have wanted the game to be more straight-down-the-line in terms of what a hidden object game is. They probably would have been a little uncomfortable in terms of the main game mechanic being like a hidden object game, but not being exactly like a hidden object game. I think that’s the difference you find in more of a straight corporate culture is they’re a little more afraid to experiment.”

Aaron sums up finally getting a game done after so many canceled projects:

“We’ve gotten so excruciatingly close, so many times. I’m a Red Sox fan: ‘till 2004, that’s what my life was like. This close, but never ever jinxed it by saying anything until it was absolutely a done deal, and it was just like that. We’d get right to the point where someone would say ‘Hey, it’s gonna happen,’ and everyone would be like ‘Shut up!’ and sure enough, it would all fall through. But this was nice, and since then, it’s been like the Red Sox: it’s like all of a sudden we broke the curse.”