Ignition talks Mercury 3 News

Ignition Studio Manager Edward Bradley reckons that Mercury could end up on next-gen game consoles as well as its current PSP home - and hasn't ruled out the possibility of it turning up on Xbox Live Arcade either.

"Certainly the next thing out of here will be Mercury 3. What platform or platforms it ends up on is still to be decided," Bradley said on Tuesday, speaking exclusively to Eurogamer. "We still haven't used up all the ideas we had from the first one, never mind all the things we came up for this one."

"I think if this does end up being on any of the next-gen platforms, it will be probably along [the Xbox Live Arcade] kind of delivery vector rather than a 25-dollar Blu-Ray disc," said Bradley. "How are we going to fill 50 gigabytes? How's anyone?" he joked.

With Nintendo and Sony both offering tilt control options, and Microsoft's Live Arcade structure offering a place for smaller projects on next-gen, Ignition's not ruling anything out. "Finally the games industry catches up with technology we had working in here two years ago," he said, grinning a bit.

"Everyone in the industry wants to go next-gen at some point. The thing about Mercury is that the technology should scale up quite nicely, and we've got to work out if we want to keep the same amount of mercury and render it prettier with 20,000 polygons or whatever, or should we just keep it simple but have two litres instead of five millilitres."

That said, there's nothing to confirm at this point, with Ignition's Banbury team firmly at work on Meltdown, the PSP sequel to the UK launch title.

"There's always been more than one platform build of Mercury at any given time. It originally started as a PS2 demo. All our in-house tools and libraries are cross-platform. Whether any of them will ever see commercial light of day or not is a decision that I don't get to make," he concluded.

For the time being then, it's all about Mercury Meltdown, which is what we were there to see. You can find out what we made of it by checking out our extensive preview elsewhere on the site today and the video on EG TV.