Gaia's Shy-A About-A 'Rena

The folks at Gaia Industries are making the rounds to promote Street Trace NYC! Unscripted 360 conducted an interview with Gaia's Damon Branch and Jeff Cameron last week, and naturally Wing Commander Arena was touched on. We've put together a transcript of the brief mention below. The entire show is available in mp3 format from U360 here - the Gaia interview starts around the 31 minute mark. Note the game being discussed at the beginning of this text is Street Trace and not Arena:

Unscripted 360: So, I would assume that with a game, with a game like this, I mean it, it seems like it's just, it could be a retail game. When Microsoft increased the Xbox Live Arcade limit, did that help you guys at all?

Jeff Cameron: Well, it's still 50 megs, this one. We're, we're still catering to people that don't have hard drives so that they can download it too. So, it, it, yeah, when they raised the limit it didn't actually help us.

Damon Branch: Yeah, it will help us for future versions because the future versions we can put in a lot more levels and, you know, up the textures 'cause when we initially spoke with Microsoft they were like 'so, you know, you want to do this on Xbox Live Arcade or do you want to do it on the 360?', and we were like, well initially we thought of it as a box game, but then they introduced Live Arcade to us and we were, like, we could, like, down the graphics a little bit on the game and just make it as a XBLA game. The graphics wouldn't be as good, but for us it would be really cool to be in that new space. So we kind of came into this space really, most people coming from console game experience, and that's why, that's why kind of Street Trace and Wing Commander tend to look a little more like box games, 'cause the team is from that background and we're just trying to do as much as we can in those fifty megs and then next time around we'll be doing even more in a hundred and fifty.

...

Unscripted 360: Well, that's fantastic, now you just mentioned, and I know you guys are working with EA and their Wing Commander. So, what part of the team, is, is there a separate team doing that? Are you guys kind of like cross-developing between the two?

Jeff Cameron: Yeah, we, we, we cross develop between the two. I mean there is a focused Wing Commander team. Damon mentioned Street Trace, Street Trace was fundamentally finished towards the end of last year so the bulk of that team rolled on to Wing Commander. So you've got a lot of the same people working on both titles. But yes, there was a develop... a dedicated Wing Commander team for development there.

Unscripted 360: Now, how close are we to seeing this Wing Commander, 'cause I've been, I've been pretty interested in seeing that as well.

Jeff Cameron: That's, that's really close. We couldn't tell you a launch date on that, but that's really close.

Damon Branch: Yeah, we're not actually allowed to say anything about that because EA will come down and get us in a big lawsuit.

Unscripted 360: That's okay, we'll just, we'll just edit it out. That's okay.

Damon Branch: No, if we could tell you, we would...