Rare talks about Viva Pinata and Perfect Dark Zero selling millions on Xbox 360

15 October 2007

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Posted by:Ferry

In a recent interview at Comic-Con with Rare software engineer James Thomas (TJ) and designer Justin Cook (JC), who are both key figures in the Viva Pinata franchise, they talked about Viva Pinata being overshadowed by Gears of War back in the winter of 2005. Did you know Viva Pinata has so far sold half a million copies? Not bad at all.

Question: So Viva Piñata itself didn’t, sales-wise, take the world by storm as much as everyone had hoped. Why do you think that was? How do you feel about that?
JC: I suppose we knew from the start that we were going out to the limit there, because we were going to do something different to the usual game for the Xbox 360, obviously. I don’t know if it worked out badly for us — we’ve got close to half a million sales now, so that isn’t a terrible debut for a game.

Question: Is that worldwide?
JC: Yeah, that’s worldwide. I think it’s about that number. And we seem to keep creeping along — it doesn’t just stop. We keep selling a few copies, a few copies… it might work out okay.

JT: I think from our point of view, it was interesting to see how the marketing budget was split last Christmas, because obviously everyone knew that Microsoft were publishing Gears of War and Viva Piñata. Yet, so much of the money went towards Gears of War, which is going to sell millions anyway. It was a bit of like, “What about the other franchise?” I think we got left in the wake somewhat. Hopefully with the PC version this Christmas, it might get something of a second wind.

Question: It struck me as a bit of putting the cart before the horse, because there wasn’t quite the casual market there yet.
JT: I think it was always stated that we were going to be the trailblazers. A lot of the preproduction on Viva Piñata was basically going, “We are going to take this round to third party publishers and show that Microsoft and Rare are committed to trying to expand the market themselves. Come join the party.” Obviously, that flood of titles hasn’t hit just yet. I suppose someone’s going to go first, and we were them.

JC: We always knew it was going to be tough, but you have to start somewhere, and we always thought that we had got a kick-ass way to start that off. We thought we could set a standard. We weren’t just a tie-in game, or one of those usual kids’ games that nobody really likes but it sells really well because it’s got the license. We thought we’d do a really good quality game and hopefully spin it out from there. So start on a good foot and expand from there.

Question: It was also kind of a multimedia launch, right? The show was coming on at the same time.
JC: Yeah, that was brand new to Microsoft and Rare, but obviously not for 4Kids. It was new to us on our side. That’s a whole kind of learning process in the making.

Near the end of the Gamasutra interview the Rare employees mention that so far Perfect Dark Zero has over 1.5 million sales on Xbox 360!