Ignition talks Mercury 3

By Tom Bramwell Published 14 June, 2006

Next-gen possibilities.

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.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (6) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Steroyd #1 6 years ago

    *chants*

    Tilt, Tilt, Tilt.

    It's just screaming for a PS3/Wii tilt function next gen outing.

  • MadMirko #2 6 years ago

    25-dollar Blu-Ray disc

    Ok, you are officially old when you remember the discussion about how optical media are dirt cheap compared to traditional catridges.

    Now someone get me a blanket for my knees, or something...

  • SeesThroughAll #3 6 years ago

    OK, just wondering, can't devs release next-gen games in DVD as well? The PS3 can also read DVDs, after all.

  • Steroyd #4 6 years ago

    for "security" reasons Sony's making devs put their games on Blu-ray even if it doesn't fill a DVD5.
    Edited by 1 at 14/06/06 @ 15:40

  • HermitArcader #5 6 years ago

    Post deleted at 09:17:39 22-12-2011

  • Tomo #6 6 years ago

    I'm getting quite excited about Mercury Meltdown for some reason. The first one was good, but it wasn't really brilliant. Pleased to see these guys are doing well tho.