AS:       How do you hope to garner interest in these games with the public? Will you market them to Transformers fans primarily, or to the game review sites like gamespot.com?

DS: This game will appeal to a wide audience.  The movie is the quintessential summer movie for all ages and will have something for everyone, and the game will be similar. We are focusing some of our attention on making the die-hard fans happy and are also doing things specifically for the gamer community because Transformers is important for them too. 

AS:    What plans for the future do you have if these games are popular enough to greenlight a sequel?

DS: Activision is committed to making Transformers: The Game and at this time we are concentrating our efforts on creating the best game we can. 

AS:   What resources from the movie production were made available to you in making these games?

DS: We were very fortunate to get an early introduction to the creative design process on Transformers being headed up by Production Designer Jeff Mann and his creative crew.  Working with Aaron Archer at Hasbro and Ian Bryce, producer on the film, we were able to get an all-access pass to the early storyboards, vehicle designs and inspiration for the film.

The producers were really instrumental in ensuring that we had access to the things we needed and the biggest breakthrough came when we were given access to the ILM character models used in the film. We were able to translate these film assets to the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game and seeing them implemented for the first time was jaw dropping.

Lastly, we’ve been working directly with the film composer, Steve Jablonsky to develop our film score.  Steve has created some great music for our game that has tremendous intensity and action in its tone.

AS:   Tell us about your excitement at rumors that Hasbro is interested in making toys of characters created for these games.

DS: From the onset of the project we had to create a variety of Autobot and Decepticon soldier characters beyond the core characters from the film and franchise.  They were needed to fill out the game world as adversaries.  We began work with a very talented concept artist named Ken Christiansen who, in collaboration with Aaron Archer, designed the look and style of these characters.  The thought of having some of these characters made into toys is exciting.

AS:    Do you have any plans to utilize the rapidly-expanding market for cell-phone games?

DS: Glu Mobile is publishing the cell-phone games based on the upcoming Transformers movie.  You’ll have to ask them that one.

AS:   How much creative license did Hasbro and the movie producers give you in creating the game and the characters?

DS: We were fortunate very early on in the process to be able to establish great relationships with all the key groups associated with Transformers: The Hasbro creative team (Aaron Archer and Richard Zambrano), the film makers (Michael Bay, Ian Bryce, Mark Vahradian, Erik Howsam) and the production team at ILM.  They’ve given us tremendous support and we’ve worked closely with Hasbro and movie producers to ensure we get things right.