Jim Simmons

By Randy Sluganski

Jim Simmons is the producer of Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin by SouthPeak Interactive.

Were you dismayed when the Wild Wild West movie was released to almost universally poor reviews and afraid that the consumer might associate the game with the movie, even though the game occurs after the events in the movie?

I was glad that we had decided to make the game a whole new story, a whole new mission for West and Gordon.

The game occurs in episodes, similar to the television series. Was this a conscious decision on your part, and if so, was it attributable to Lee Sheldon's television background?

We need to create game play modules that changed pace from West "action" missions to Gordon "adventure" missions. The changing from one character to another created the episodic nature more than anything else.

You have ignored some of the more outlandish gadgetry from the movie and kept the game more in the spirit of the television show, even though it uses the movie characterizations. What was your reasoning behind this?

We wanted to keep the focus on the central characters and their determination to solve the mystery.

Do you think retail sales of the game will be influenced by not having the actors from the movie do the voice-overs for their characters?

As if you could get Will Smith to do that! Would some hardcore Will Smith fans buy the game just because Smith is in it and not care if the game was any fun or not? Sure, a few would, but people really buy games for the play experience. Having the actual voice of the movie actor enhances the play experience but doesn't make or break the fun factor. The actors who did play the roles in the game are excellent Hollywood pros, and their interpretations of Jim West and Artemus Gordon are lots of fun in their own way.

Other developers have complained about the limitations of working with pre-established characters. Did you encounter these problems with the personas of West and Gordon?

These two characters are lots of fun and gave us a great head start for creating situations and challenges for them, not to mention a fun rivalry between the two of them.

Do you feel your creativity was limited by the boundaries of the historical era you had to work in?

Restrictions are great for the creative process. It's the ol' Venturi principle in effect: create a restriction, and velocity is increased. On the other hand, the wild imagination expressed in the movie gave us lots of free reign to be accurately historical.

Can you supply some specific examples of objects or scenes in the game that arose from your research?

All of the information regarding John Wilkes Booth's escape and capture is almost completely accurate. The pages from his diary are verbatim. The report by the arresting officer is verbatim. The information on Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and Plante Laboratories is historically and sociologically accurate (and fun to read about).

Your recreation of Ford's Theatre is excellent (I speak as one who has been there). To what extent did the Ford's Theatre staff co-operate?

We got the standard tour, plus lots of information off the Internet, such as floor plans from which our artists worked. Even more interesting was the field trip that Lee took to Surratt's Tavern, still standing today. It was closed on the day Lee visited, but the curator opened for him, made copies of the floor plans, and gave him a good bit of material for us to work from. His visit to the site of Garrett's Farm ended at the current site of a strip mall.

You went to great lengths to recreate the 1870s, yet an early scene involves a crossword puzzle, which was not invented until 1913. An anachronism?

And Artemus invented a flying machine in the late 1860s? Can we plead artistic license? Please?!

President Grant is the only real historical figure in the game. Were any of the other characters based on real people?

Surratt's Tavern, Garrett's Farm, both real places and real people. Grant's cabinet members and advisers are a mix of real and made-up people. As I said before, the Booth information is accurate. Gaston Plante did indeed invent the lead storage battery, and his laboratory supplied materials for making them.

What drove your innovative decision to allow the gamer to change the adventure/action degree of difficulty during gameplay?

Attempts to create hybrid action/adventure games in the past have usually failed because adventure gamers have rejected the action component and action gamers aren't interested in the slower adventure pace. We tried to make it so that each type of gamer could get through the "hard part" (for them anyway) relatively painlessly. We feel, however, that today's gamer isn't such a genre purist and will enjoy playing both elements in our game with equal satisfaction.

The movie makes it a point to constantly downplay James West's new ethnicity (a black cowboy in the predominately white west), yet it is never mentioned in the game. Is this not a black eye on games in that they are afraid to tackle, much less even mention, a subject that could be construed as controversial?

We felt the movie adequately explored this theme (perhaps even a little more than necessary at times) and that it was time to move on. Games should not be afraid to tackle any subject, and a theme from the movie that we did continue to explore was the problem of fighting violence with violence or finding another way.

If the game is a success, can we look forward to a sequel, even if there is not a movie sequel?

Nothing would tickle me more than to be faced with that precedent-setting dilemma!