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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