This Q&ERA was organized by Emily.
Q&ERA offers an opportunity for our community to learn more about the gaming industry from those that are part of it. This involves batches of questions, submitted by users and then selected by staff, which will then be given to industry members to answer. Our intent is to bridge the divide between the gaming community and the gaming industry. We want to encourage engagement between those who talk about games and those who make them. (Note: Questions will be curated as interviewees won't have time to answer every single one. Also, there may be certain topics that interviewees are not able or allowed to comment on.)
Introducing our first guests: LizardCube & DotEmu, the makers of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap!
Company Info:
Ben Fiquet (Co-founder) - Animation, Art
Omar Cornut (Co-Founder) - Coding, Direction
Sebastien Ronsse - Coding
Michael Geyre - Music
Romain Gauthier - Sound Design
Lizardcube was founded in late 2015 by Omar Cornut (Coding, Creative Director) and Ben Fiquet (Art Direction, Animation). They previously worked together on underdog hit DS title "Soul Bubbles", a physic based game about blowing bubbles and transporting spirits. Other team members involved with the development of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap include Michael Geyre (music), Romain Gauthier (sound design) and Sebastien Ronsse (development).
Omar worked in Kyoto with Q-Games on the "Pixeljunk Shooter" series. At Media Molecule in England, he laid his papery fingers on the original "Tearaway" (PS Vita) and early iterations of "Dreams". He freelanced with Wild Sheep Studios (new team led by Michel Ancel) in Montpellier on "WiLD". His passion for retro Sega games led him to create the emulator "MEKA" and the "SMS Power!" research and preservation community which is still active.
Ben graduated from Gobelins School in Paris 2006, co-directing Pyrats short. Since then, he has been working in videogames ("Soul Bubbles"), writing his own comics ("Powa", "Les Chevaliers de la Chouette") and freelanced in animation between London, Paris and LA (Dreamworks, Zodiac Kids and many more).
Cyrille Imbert (CEO of DotEmu)
Arnaud De Sousa (Communication)
Christian Cortez (Production)
DotEmu is a french video game company specializing in modern releases of beloved retro games. Founded in 2007, DotEmu leverages its considerable technological know-how to maintain the original spirit of classic games while giving them a second life as rediscovered gems for a new generation of gamers. Over the years, DotEmu has worked with many large companies, including Square Enix (Final Fantasy series), SNK (Metal Slug and Fatal Fury Series) and Ubisoft (Heroes of Might and Magic III HD).
Game Info:
Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap is a platformer/adventure game developed by Lizardcube and published by DotEMU. It was released earlier this year on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It's a remake of the 1989 game Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, which was originally developed by Westone Bit Entertainment and published by Sega.
The game features the following:
- Hand-drawn animated graphics.
- Switch from modern graphics and sound to 8-bit graphics/audio at any time - even during gameplay.
- A large interconnected world.
- 6 playable forms with different abilities.
- A soundtrack, based on Shinichi Sakamoto's originals, re-imagined and recorded with classical instruments.
- Play as the game's classic character, Hu-Man, or as his brand-new, long-awaited co-star Hu-Girl.
Screenshots