A.J: It's my pleasure! My name is Anders Jeppsson and I've been doing everything from programming parts of the game to managing the project and handling the business and publisher contacts. When you're a small team like SouthEnd (only 8 people) it is natural (and necessary :-) to take on many roles.

It started back in August 1998. My brother Daniel and I were working at IBM at the time, but we had for several years been spending all of our spare time programming computer games for fun at home hoping to finally get into the industry. Then 3 friends (Lenny, Peter and Magnus), who happened to be very skilled computer graphics artists, came over and asked if we knew anybody who needed artists for their game. Well, we did!

After about 6 months we all decided that it we were going to be able to get into the gaming industry we had to quit out day jobs, so in May 1999 we all started working full time on a new concept Daniel came up with. We were all big fans of Quake Arena (a mod for Quake 1) and Unreal tournament, but we were fed up with all games coming out being more or less the same. New graphics and new weapons don't really cut it in our book. Everyone were also fans of old Amiga classics like Speedball so Daniel suggested a combination of the fast and furious action of Quake/Unreal with elements from Speedball and fighting games like Tekken. All in a trailing first person view for maximum immersion and control. We really didn't have a thought about mass market and if the concept was too hardcore or not. We simply saw it as an awesome new way to play a team-based action fighting game!

As it turned out, it does require you to spend an hour or so before you really get into it, but to us that's a really positive thing. There's nothing I hate more than getting a new game and discovering after 5 minutes there's nothing more to learn… Back then we were all hardcore PC guys and several of us had never touched a console, but in the beginning of 2001 our publisher UBI Soft Entertainment asked us if we wanted to switch to the not yet released Xbox. To us the decision was easy: Kick ass PC technology without the hassles with drivers and low end systems! We could spend almost all available time on gameplay tweaking and adding details instead!

No, they are definitely not hard to implement. The Xbox development kit is very good (and it's getting better each month thanks to Microsoft's updates!) and since most games have a lot more people working on their games than for example we did, I can't see any reason to not have custom soundtracks, full-screen antialias (to remove those nasty jaggies) and other easily implemented Xbox features!

I really think people should boycott games that don't use full-screen antialias for example!! It's 1 line of code, and to not have it in a tennis game or racing game is just &”!%¤&!%¤”! It does require a little extra memory and sometimes some framerate optimization but that's no excuse. It's like they want their game to look as bad as on other consoles where most games flicker like a strobe… You can tell I'm upset! ;-)

System Link requires more work than those things of course but we wanted to make a game many people can enjoy together so we just had to include it! Especially since we didn't have the time to add Xbox Live which also was a feature we really wanted!

Everything from the graphics to the sound is really impressive to me! But the thing I'm most proud off is how well the game plays. At first glance and for the first hour Deathrow looks pretty shallow and simple, but the more you play the more you realize its depth and the skill involved to become good at it. Try it over LAN with 8 people and you'll have the most intense gaming experience ever. After a few matches like that I'm physically beat!

We haven't removed any moves, but we had a lot of ideas for cool moves our animator Rodrigo Cespedes simply didn't have time to make. All fighting moves are hand made (key framed) by Rodrigo! We only used motion capture for the intro animations and I have to say I'm extremely pleased with the quality of our animations. We're really happy we managed to get in over 800 base animations, but for a sequel you can expect even more dirty blows and varied fighting. :-)

Yes, 100% of Deathrow has been developed by SouthEnd Interactive (except the music, which was made by our publisher).

Time! Although it took 3.5 years to develop Deathrow, the first half was done with no funding at all (before we signed with our publisher UBI Soft Entertainment). Since May 1999 we have developed the Deathrow concept, built a 3D engine, built a prototype for the game, started SouthEnd, attracted publishers, negotiated the publishing deal, hired people, developed the game, switched from PC to the Xbox in July 2001 where most of the graphics and a lot of the code and major gameplay tweaks had to be redone/improved. Doing all this with 5 people for the first half of the project and the in last year climbing to a total of 9 people, has been really hard work and a huge learning experience, but getting so much positive feedback from people now makes it all worth while!!

Luckily all the people working at SouthEnd are very skilled and multi talented so we've been able to help each other out a lot!

To be honest, we never even considered this to be an issue. Several years ago, when we came up with the concept, we decided sound was going to be a big part of building a believable and immersive atmosphere. From the day we decided to quit our jobs and try and get into the game dev industry, we have had the goal of making games for ourselves, and if anybody else also liked them fine! Deathrow is the game we've always wanted to play and we made it as close to our dreams as we possibly could with the skill, money and time we had.

Now after the release I have come to understand that the swearing is a bit of a problem in some countries / cultures. To us Swedes, it came as a bit of a surprise though. Beating someone senseless with your hands and feet should be what's upsetting, not the use of words that any movie or book uses h*ll of a lot more that we do in Deathrow. About 5% of the 3500+ sentences in Deathrow actually have swear words and the game is rated M

If there's ever a Deathrow 2 we'll definitely add a sound option to remove swearing, because people with 2 year old kids might not want them running around imitating the sarcasm of the SeaCats! Although that would be really cool. Just kidding. ;-)

Until about a month ago we haven't really had any time at all to play games :-(. Right now I play MotoGP which is really awesome! Halo is also really good, but too repetitive and too much “cut and paste” levels for me. The best parts were awesome though! Running up the beach in formation and the dark night areas were soo cool! Amped is another really fun game. Gun Valkyre could have been really great but it suffers from bad controls. Hmmm, you can tell I'm a game developer. I'm too darn picky ;-)

We've received a few mail and read some comments from people (and some reviewers), especially in the US and UK that were offended personally by the swearing… To me that is really weird, because they never mentioned or reacted to the fact you kick and punch people senseless, but maybe they only watch movies made by Disney? This game is a mature game made for grown ups that love hardcore games! I agree we should have put in an option though, to disable swearing, so the game can be played with small children around, because the game is REALLY nice in 5.1 surround. For now you have to settle with headphones or disable sound effects if you want to screen out the insults and sarcasm! Many comments from the players in the game are soo funny, sarcastic and on the spot that I often have to pause the game from all my laughing! This is how it was meant, to be believable and FUNNY, not to get attention.

That will totally depend on how well Deathrow (1) sells. To our publisher (to all publishers really!) futuristic sports games are high risk, and there hasn't really been a successful one in many, many years. To Ubisoft's credit I can say that they have given us almost totally free reign over all the design and development of the game. They have really shown a lot of faith in a small beginner team like ours! We have a very long list of cool stuff that we didn't have time to add, so hopefully there will be a sequel!

Everyone that has suggestions to what they want to see in Deathrow 2 can mail those to us! (our homepage www.southend-interactive.com has all the mailing details..)

Right now we're relaxing a bit, doing some promotion work via our home page and on different Xbox forums. We are also working on different new game concepts and updating our 3D engine but we're starting to get restless and really want to start a new project soon!