NEWSWEEK: How did you score the Harry Potter license? MATTRICK: All of us inside the company are huge Harry Potter fans. At the core of this activity is the belief that this is probably the hottest new property that’s come to the consumer space in the past decade. It’s huge with kids; it’s huge with adults; it’s got broad gender reach; and it’s a really rich world of characters and activities that lends itself perfectly to an interactive experience.
The two constituencies that we had to convince that we were the best home for this were Warner Bros. and the creator of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling. We had lots of meetings and presentations dealing with our vision of the market; how it was going to grow; the things that make EA unique relative to other companies in this space. We showed some of the technical work and creative work that we have in design to support our dot-com effort. And we had really good synergy with Warner Bros. and with Rowling about our philosophy of creating a game and our ability as a company to create something that is of higher quality and more innovative than our competitors.
Was there a particular EA game that sold them on your company? What impressed them the most was some of the new stuff in our pipeline that we haven’t displayed to consumers. That’s why I’m being vague on this point. A company like ours has in excess of 50 different projects in development. We showed them some of the new things that will provide identity for consumers, some of the new products and technology that we have underway on PlayStation 2, and when they added that all up, they said, “You know what? You guys are light years ahead of the competitors.”
It’s clearly a win for Potter to get to the broadest audience it possibly can. That’s the reason why we’ve got the market share and leadership we have as a company, because we’re platform-agnostic. It’s also a real plus that we have substantial operations in Chertsey, England. We have a campus there, and those people will be able to work with the people who are creating the movie.
Does J.K. Rowling know a lot about video games? J.K. is not an avid gamer, but she’s surrounded by people who are. Both David Hayman and Chris Columbus are pretty hardcore gamers. They knew of our company and had played the Sims and other hit releases that we have on the market. They were really excited about the creative synergies that could exist between the linear and interactive productions, the sharing of computer-generated assets and the development of characters in our games that look identical or better to what you’ll see in the film. We got off on a great note right from the get-go, and as we moved through the process and showed more of our creative ideas of how we were going to develop the products on to different platforms, it just became more of a fit.
How important is it to have the games come out at the same time as the movie? We really think this property will be successful in multiple media. The first one, in which it’s shattered all records, is the print arena; the book sales have been astronomical, and the release of the books is not going to be tied directly to the release of the films. The first film will be in November 2001; clearly, we know that if we can get a couple of products in the market at that time, that would be great. But we’re really building this over a several-year period. We want to release products on multiple platforms, and some of them are just gonna have a longer development cycle, like persistent state worlds.
How much creative freedom will you have? And what kinds of games can we expect to see? That was one of the key issues that we spoke about early on: the issue of creative integrity in different spaces. A book has a certain experience and amount of time associated with reading it. A film is approximately two hours. For a great gaming experience, we’re looking at giving the consumer 40 hours-plus of great entertainment. We’re going to build off of the book assets, the movie assets, and with the help of J.K. Rowling, create some additional depth that will reward consumers for coming to experience Potter in the interactive space. Imagine that you’re interested in Hogwarts, and you want to go deeper into learning a certain set of spells than what’s outlined in the book, you could. What I found really encouraging is that a lot of that has been created already by Rowling, but she hasn’t had an opportunity to express it in print or in the movie format due to the time constraints associated with those media.
So we see tremendous possibilities to fill in the details in the Potter universe: to make characters that grow and get to do some of the fabulous experiences that are already in the book, like Quidditch, like learning about magic, like solving the mysteries that exist in that universe. That’s a tremendously rich fiction, and the cool thing about the industry at this point in time is we have the fidelity to create that world, to create those characters, and make it comparable to what you see in TV and film.
With that as a backdrop, we’re going into preproduction of Potter: on the PC; persistent state worlds; we’re looking at innovative online experiences that could be browser-based where you can download and develop a character; and we’re also looking at handheld possibilities. As our industry grows, that could be GameBoy or it could be broader, with some of these new PDAs and the developments in the handheld wireless space. We’re gonna take this property and build out an experience that consumers will say, “This is as legitimate as print or as movies, but I’m growing and learning and participating.” That’s the key thing. All our designs are going to let you participate and experience the wonder of the world, and through that participation, people will have even more of an affinity for what Harry Potter is about.
How big a factor was your relationship with AOL? In a discussion like this, it impresses people to understand that EA is responsible for [game] programming and content on AOL for the next five years. That we were able to structure a deal like that was a pretty huge endorsement for our company. It’s something that differentiates us from the competition.
Did Steve Case put in a good word with the studio? No idea [laughs]. I hope he did.
