WT :You wrote in your blog that adventures are a niche. So you don't think they can become really popular again?

SI :Yes and no. I think that they can. I think that is potential there. But I also believe that all games are niche. Even first person shooters are a niche market. It’s simply that this niche is much bigger than most others. When you actually look at the number of consoles and PCs that exist in the world, we are talking of hundreds of millions of potential gamers. Yet no game sells more than a few million, so each game is only reaching a very small fraction of the huge audience. So no game is ever mass market. That's one thing that people need to accept that all games have probably a limit on the number of people they reach. And I think part of the problem within the industry is that people try to put things into their games to appeal to a mass market that doesn't exist. And so there are compromises and a lot of these games are so filled with compromises that they do not satisfy their core audience.
And I feel that adventures only go beyond the niche when they are really very good. I think that a game like Myst went beyond because it was so unique, a lot of people could latch onto very easily. And I think the same happened with Broken Sword to a certain extent. It wasn't just the fact that it was a good game. It was the fact that people could connect with it easily. We simplified the interface compared to a lot of adventures of that particular time. We took away the text choices and made the conversations run by icons. Things like this which help people into the actual game. And I think with something like Fahrenheit as well incorporating things which are maybe outside of a traditional adventure game.