Gray Matter’s new space is not as slick as you might expect. The urban location is hip (renovated space beside Toronto’s Union Station), the denizens are very young, and there’s not a suit in sight. It’s like a school with a relaxed policy about bringing drinks into computer labs. But one look at what’s on those screens will tell you these guys mean business.

Gray Matter is a large (75, and growing) contingent of talent focused on digital creation of fast action-adventure and sports game development for all the major players in the game business: Sega Saturn, Nintendo, Sony Playstation, and most of all, Windows 95 cd-rom. A big contingent of sgi workstations supply the modeling and rendering appetites of Gray Matter, running Alias and Softimage. Macs and pcs are used for 2D design, programming and debugging.

The story of Chris Gray is well known: he developed his first title at 17, started Gray Matter, and by the time he was in his early 20s was at the helm of one of the most successful game development enterprises in North America. Still not yet 30, Gray has proven his staying power, nicely anticipating several industry slumps and hairpin turns along the way.

Today the company is hard at work on the titles scheduled for Christmas ’96: scar and Perfect Weapon, the first full fighting game to employ 3D-rendered scenes, backgrounds and opponents. An early preview of Perfect Weapon was well received at last month’s E3 industry exposition

Gray’s company is faced with multiple challenges: as an experienced independent developer, its services are in demand among all the major players. Gray Matter’s expertise has to cover at least three different proprietary development environments, as well as the crucial pc cd-rom platform. Gray’s designers not only have to predict consumer needs and wants, but they need to be sure the technical ability to deliver the game they design will be there when the game ships. In some cases, that’s 18 months after a game is conceived and original design standards are set.

‘Multiple platforms are a curse and a blessing at the same time,’ Gray says. ‘It provides a number of different opportunities for different companies to develop software, but what they are missing is the standardization of ntsc television or vhs tape. There’s an ongoing war to establish a new standard, and we’re still looking at a market where price drives success.

‘Windows provides an excellent platform to develop for, and it’s more than up to delivering a great product, but it’s not going to dominate the market anytime soon. It has too much competition,’ Gray says. ‘The challenge is to support the most significant platforms, and to be prepared for and take advantage of the new platforms as they emerge.’

Those new platforms include the transition to electronic distribution. ‘It is going to totally change the industry,’ Gray says. ‘Multiplayer online has huge potential, but it doesn’t exist yet. There are too many technical issues there to keep it from being a success at this point in time, but it is clearly the direction we will ultimately go. I can’t think of a better situation to be in than to be playing games with 1,000, 10,000 or a million people playing at once. I think of that as the future of the game business.

‘The pc opened the game world up; we have gone from being an introverted, non-social experience to exactly the opposite. Through the Internet, you can be extremely social except it is not a physical experience. As you introduce digital video in realtime, and digital audio, you have an increasingly social experience.’

The advent of high-speed broadband Internet access, of the type planned for cable tv, is not a perfect interactive scenario. ‘That extra bandwidth will get filled up overnight with more information. This is what people keep forgetting; we’ve made a jump from 8 bit to 16 bit, then from 16- to 32-bit delivery systems, and every time, we’ve thought about all the great opportunities we would have, and the reality was we worked with the new technology for about a week, then we hit a wall. Then the hard work starts, figuring out how to get that incremental edge, how to really take advantage of it,’ Gray says. ‘We have to learn to outsmart the technology.’

As live action plays a part in some Gray Matter titles (Joe Flaherty will be featured in the opening sequence of scar, set for release this fall), the comparison with film is often made. But the convergence of the film and the game worlds is not a scenario Gray envisions.

‘Because film and games look the same, people tend to forget how different they are. Games have to be played for hundreds of hours; how many people watch a movie 50 times in a month? While it has elements of storytelling, it’s a different experience, a different medium, with different rules.’

The process, however, is very much like film production. ‘People with specific roles come in and out of a project as required, whether it’s animation, audio, development of technology, storywriting, concept art. On the distribution side, it’s more like a film studio/filmmaker relationship. But we’re not disbanding the company when we finish a project, we need more stability than that. You can’t walk away from the process very long; you need to be constantly working on new projects to keep up with what’s happening,’ Gray says.

‘There’s consolidation happening on the marketing and distribution side. So all these companies are effectively financing companies like ours. They will go where they find talented developers. The size of our company is limited by the talent we have; we’re always looking for talented artists and designers. That’s what governs how large the company will get.’