Sometime last year I read an article in PC Gamer about a little game called Masq. I went and downloaded the game and immediately fell in love with it for its extremely strong story and general brilliance. Earlier this year in my weekly PC column on 411 Mania I talked a little bit about Masq. Soon after that Javier Maldonado got in touch with me and we decided to do a little Q&A. What you read below is the result.

Javier talks about the beginning of Alteraction and Masq, the development of the game and his thoughts on the story in video games today.

Chris - How did Alteraction come into being and what is the company ethos?

Javier - A few years ago I was looking for way to participate/play in a movie-like story, meet exciting characters, etc. However, all that I found were games which seemed to be trying to stop me from living and enjoying the story, either with twitching challenges or difficult puzzles. And the story was not that good either. So I decide to make my own. I figured many others would enjoy playing these kinds of “games” so I decided this was an enterprise for the long term to trigger a new game category. I went to some friends and asked them to invest some money–and Masq and AlterAction were born.

Chris - Masq is brilliant, how did the game come into being?

Javier - It was inspired a little bit by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Latin-American Soap operas. Over many years I wrote and programmed Masq in Macromedia Director. My wife was my editor and main tester. I even drew the first three episodes, but soon we came to the conclusion that this was too much work and we needed some help, so we set up an office in Mexico where we hired local artists. In the US, well known game designers such as Ken Melville and Noah Falstein helped me to localize Masq in English and introduced me to everybody in the gaming industry. I must say that with a few exceptions, the industry was very dismissive.

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Thanks to my work on Half-Life2.net I have been able to get in touch with the guys behind the Half-Life Short Stories mod and have a chat with them. We covered a good few areas of interest, the genesis of the mod, talking about the different parts to the whole thing and much more. Interview after the jump

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In an ideal world I would have done this interview face to face, me and Frank one on one discussing anything and everything under the sun. As it is I was lucky enough to do this very nice, very good, very frank interview with Frank. (No pun intended!) We talk about everything from the G.A.N.G awards, the Universe at War soundtrack, working with Petroglyph, Red Alert 3 and much much more..read on my friends!

Chris ’Evo’ Evans -First off thanks for doing this interview with me Frank =]

Frank Klepacki - No Problem!

Chris - Congratulations on the nomination for the G.A.N.G awards, how do you feel about this nomination?

Frank - It’s really nice to know that enough people on the advisory board, who are all pros in their own right, believed that track should be among the nominations. So I’m very thankful for that.

Chris - What are your thoughts on the song that got you the nomination – ‘Divine Intervention’?

Frank - I’m very proud of the track, it’s something different I was able to do for a change, a sort of hybrid of epic meets contemporary sound. It’s the defining song for Universe At War, the rest of the team picked up on that as soon as I wrote it.

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Back in the day over on cncnation.net I did a couple of interviews. The first such interview is from 29th June 2007. This was with the Command and Conquer Community Manager Aaron Kauffman. We discussed a fair few topics ranging from Mods, to the 360 Marketplace and loads more. The interview follows in full.

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