Darren Tuckey from Relentless Software, talks about the quiz phenomenon on PlayStation 2, designing buzzers and Buzz!: The Hollywood Quiz at Games Convention.
Can you explain Buzz! to someone new to the games?
Buzz! is a multiple choice quiz game, it comes with the buzzer peripheral which has a big red button and four colour buttons. It contains 5,000 questions, covering eight rounds, each featuring different types of gameplay. Generally you're asked a question and you try to pick the correct answer, but in some rounds it is the fastest player who gets the most points, while in other rounds whoever gets it correct gets to steal points from someone else.
So it is a format that people will be used to from quiz games on TV and we've put it onto PlayStation 2 with a peripheral that everyone can understand.
Talking about the peripheral, what is the idea behind the controller? Did you go through many different prototypes before settling on the final design?
Yeah, we initially were looking at doing a quiz game and hadn't really thought of a peripheral. We started with the D-pad potentially, but we realised, pretty early on, that the type of people we were going to be aiming at maybe wouldn't be used to playing with others on PlayStation before.
If you give a D-pad to my parents or grandparents they just look at it as if it was a complete alien piece of technology. So once we came up with the idea of the buzzer, we soon realised that actually this would be a big feature for the game.
People just understand how to use it instantly, and it's not something scary. People who weren't playing PlayStation 2 titles can just play this and get on with it.
Can you tell us more about Buzz!: The Hollywood Quiz?
It is the movie version of the quiz game, which we've wanted to do for some time. We have got three new rounds and six new characters, there are 5,000 questions, as I said, and 1,000 assets, such as red carpet shots, movie stills and clips, which are used throughout the game.
We cover all kinds of genres and ages of film, so we've got films for youngsters like Shrek, Madagascar and Night at the Museum. We've got recent stuff like the Bourne series, Charlie's Angels, American Beauty, all the classics from the last few years. We've got older ones like E.T. and Ghostbusters; it's really good content that hopefully kids, parents and grandparents will be able to have a go at.
We've got two modes as well. We have a general question mode, which is for questions like "which movie?", "which actor?", and we have a film fanatic mode, with questions like "how many nominations did this get?" for those who are a bit more into their movie quizzes.
Are there more spin-off shows planned for Buzz! on PlayStation 2?
Yes, we plan to continue with Buzz! for the next couple of years.
Buzz!: The Hollywood Quiz will be available September 19, 2007. Please check out the official website, Buzzthegame.com for more information.
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