MacRumor Interviews Gameloft CEO; Michel Guillemot

by Jody Mitoma on March 19, 2008 at 6:17 pm

MacWorld Interviews GameLoft

On March 13th, Peter Cohen; a MacWorld writer, had the opportunity to interview Michel Guillemot; President and CEO of Gameloft.

Here’s a snippit of the interview itself:

The mobile game industry got a shot in the arm last week with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). Game developers far and wide are clamoring to make games for the device — everything from classic arcade retreads to totally unique games designed from the ground up for the iPhone’s unique interface. Recently mobile game giant Gameloft’s president and CEO, Michel Guillemot, offered Macworld some insight about how the iPhone fits into his company’s plans going forward.

Macworld (MW): So what do you think of the iPhone SDK? Is it everything that Gameloft hoped for?

Michel Guillemot (MG): The SDK really opens the door to infinite opportunities for developers to create anything and everything they could possibly want, limited only by imagination. From the big developers with ample funds to the smaller home grown developers, Apple has really opened this up to allow anyone with a creative mind to contribute. That sort of open forum really encourages and inspires innovation, so I think you will see some really clever and fresh applications in the second half of the year.

As for the SDK itself, the features were everything we hoped it would be. The emulator allows you to debug quite easily, the performance tuning tools allow you to sharpen the game, the interface builder lets you create interfaces smoothly and the other features such as the touch screen, accelerometer and geolocalisation enables greater richness and creativity for the games.

MW: Gameloft is in a rare position as one of the few companies that creates games for the iPod — Apple hasn’t opened that platform as it has the iPhone. How will Gameloft’s experience developing iPod games come into play with iPhone development?

MG: We were one of the first mobile game companies on board with Apple for iPod games. To date, we have 6 games available for iPod. Five out of 6 which are all original home grown IPs. The games will be much richer than iPod games and even more so than the cell phones games on the market.

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To view the rest of the interview, check out the source link below.

(Source: MacWorld)