Technical director Marius Fahlbusch fills us in on the much-hyped, creativity-centric DS title.

Congratulations, first of all, on Scribblenauts’ reaction at E3. It emerged as a favourite of many people at the show – were you expecting that?

Definitely not, no. We were totally pumped about what happened at E3. We knew we had something special on our hands, but to get that kind of a reaction was really a surprise and really an honour for us.

When you go to these sorts of shows, people seem to gravitate towards consoles and remain cool towards the handhelds. Did you find more and more people flocked over as the show went on?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t there myself, but from what I heard, it was the secret tip at the show, so word of mouth spread.

So have your expectations changed completely, now, over how you expect the product to do both commercially and critically?

Yeah, critical reception is a great thing to have, we’re really hoping for the best and of course, sales-wise, it’s a really good indication, so we’re really excited about it.

Making games like Drawn To Life and Scribblenauts you’re creating a personality for yourselves – we’d call your games inspired, we guess. What actually inspires you as a studio?

Everything. We always try to make something new, we try to let the player create something, as you said. We always try to think, ‘why would anyone buy our games over somebody else’s games?’, because there are so many games out there and why would anyone buy a 5^th Cell game? That’s usually how we go about it and this falls into the same category. This is the thing you’ll continue to see from us, something creative that involves the player that’s new and innovative.

What drew you to the DS as a platform for developing on?

Especially for Scribblenauts, it’s a perfect match with the touch screen. It works perfectly.

The DS naturally encourages developers to be creative. With home consoles, people want to see the same thing again and again, but on DS, there’s a sense that they want to try something new. Is that how it feels to you, that people want to try new things?

Innovation, of course, is always a risk on a big platform, so with the DS, there’s not quite the same risk. The interface – touch screen, or traditional controls – provides quite a lot of freedom. It’s a great platform.

How did you arrive at the idea for Scribblenauts? It has common ground with Drawn To Life – was it a natural progression to get from one to the other?

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