Eurogamer Expo Sessions: Hello Games looks back at Joe Danger

We kind of published the game ourselves in the end. Sony helps us with things but they're not the publisher. It was really difficult looking for a publisher. Again, it probably makes us sound rubbish to talk about that, but we did struggle, and I think our game is relatively straightforward to understand - it has got depth but you can look at it and get what kind of game it is.

I think we talk about it because not a lot of people do, and there are probably other developers struggling to find a publisher and they can go, "Joe Danger didn't find a publisher either!" I hate to think what it would be like to go around with a really crazy off-the-wall game...

I think now that our game has come out, everything's changed, because Joe Danger has been pretty successful. One of the biggest things that we hit was that people didn't trust us...

But they didn't trust in the game either, which sounds crazy, but I think it's quite indicative of where people are. The biggest thing we hit was that our game is bright and colourful. The games I grew up with as a kid were too. But every publisher we met, pretty much, said, "Oh it's bright and colourful - it should be on Wii and should be for a five-year-old and it should be really simple and a party game." Which is crazy to me. And the other thing they said was, "It should have monkeys. Because kids would like monkeys."

Yeah. I think people say that that's different and refreshing. I think now there's probably a publisher out there who's thinking, "Joe Danger was successful! Let's have another game that's bright and colourful on XBLA!" I think it changes once a game comes out. Like, you would never have found a publisher for Minecraft, but you would now!

Hahaha. We set out to make this game so we could continue making games, and it's been successful enough that we can do that. We've got the community to thank for that. We do feel indebted and we feel like everything we get from Joe Danger we want to put back into the next game. That suits us, because we've got some crazy ideas for things to do with our next game.

At the moment we get loads of different requests, like "port the game to other platforms", and some people say we should go on and do something new, and some people say they would like DLC. In the short term we're trying to support them - we've brought out a patch, we're bringing out a trial version. We kind of asked people what they would like to see, and - maybe really naively - we try to do what they would like. So we're doing that at the moment, and then we're moving on to our next thing, which is something that we've been talking about non-stop for the last two years.

Haha, exactly - it's time!