Infinity Blade's Chair: "we're in the golden age of gaming"

Forget the past and stop predicting the future - the "golden age" of gaming is now, believes Infinity Blade and Shadow Complex developer Chair.

"I honestly think we're in the golden age of gaming at the moment," declared creative director Donald Mustard to the freshly formed Hookshot Inc.

"There are games for zero dollars that are really worth playing, and then there are these games for sixty dollars which are just incredible experiences. And there's everything in between. It's just an awesome time to be a gamer.

"Everywhere I look I have really fun games that I can play, and I love it."

Well hot dog, Mustard, you would say that - the Infinity Blade iPad and iPhone games have been runaway successes, amassing some $30 million buckaroos (£19 million) for owner and publisher Epic Games.

"We're approaching 400 million iOS devices that can play these sort of games ... that's so much more than the number of Xboxes that are out there."

Donald Mustard

"We're approaching 400 million iOS devices that can play these sort of games," Mustard explained. "We'll soon be passing half a billion - and that's so much more than the number of Xboxes that are out there.

"There's just a huge number of people with these devices, with these powerful gaming machines in their pockets.

"The market is there, and good games, good apps will rise to the top."

Chair's got heritage on Xbox Live Arcade with Undertow and, more famously, Shadow Complex. The idea for Infinity Blade actually came when brainstorming what Chair could possibly make for motion sensing devices PlayStation Move and Kinect.

But then a few things happened at once that changed Chair's mind: iOS device sales hit the roof; Chair's engine team at Epic got Unreal Engine 3 running on iOS; and Chair realised that the swordplay mechanic fit better on touch-screen devices.

But Chair "had really no idea" how Infinity Blade would do, despite its high profile.

"It was weird," Mustard said (surely he's nicknamed The Colonel?).

"With Shadow Complex, I knew people were going to love it, and it was going to be great. But with Infinity Blade, I knew that I thought it was awesome and that people would think it was awesome, but nothing like it had ever been released, so we had nothing to go by.

"Man, when it took off, though..." Mustard recalled.

"We launched on December 9th, and within 24 hours, you could look at the charts and see that we were number one on every charts. I couldn't believe it. We started to get reports back and we were selling hundreds of thousands of units a day, and we were told it was the fasted grossing app of all time and all this stuff.

"I was just blown away by this success. We were so tired, we'd been working so hard for five months, but the minute we saw it we were like, okay, no time for Christmas - we've got to get back to work."

The future's bright for Chair, then, and for Infinity Blade. And while a third Infinity Blade game hasn't been announced, Chair has "more plans for revealing stuff in this universe", Mustard teased.