First, why did you decide to leave such a "safe" gig like working at Relic to launch your own company?

We think that the next few years will begin a new Golden Age of Interactive Entertainment. We built Smoking Gun Interactive in order to realize that vision of what gaming can be.

As far as risk or safety goes, really, it's all about following your passion. When we created COH, we were incredibly passionate about building something that could really inspire and engage gamers. Our success opened up doors to pursue that passion even further, and gave us the freedom to jump-start where we envision games are going.

What would you say makes Smoking Gun Interactive different than the normal game development company?

We don't really define ourselves by looking at what other studios are doing, so all that I can point you towards is what we think is important. At our heart, we are passionate about making Games, and interactive experiences. I would imagine most studios share similar core values.

Creating interactive entertainment that crosses boundaries, and creating compelling worlds that people can explore is an important vision we hold. We want to build games that will inspire a generation. People's expectations of what a game experience can be is changing. We want to help drive this change.

Did the idea for a game come about first or did the backstory come first?

Both came at the same time really. I'm always thinking about story, then going back to thinking about how can we make that interactive, how would that work in a game. The "X" universe came out of long discussions I've had with our lead narrative designer over the years. How we've thought about player interactions has evolved over the years, and it's only now that I really think we could properly make this game.

What made Smoking Gun want to work with an outside writer, Douglas Rushkoff, for the creation of the back story?

Graphic novels are an incredibly rigorous media to work in, if you want to do them at all well. It's a media that we, as a studio, have very limited expertise in. Once we decided to develop the graphic novel series as a window into this universe, we knew that we'd need to collaborate with somebody, and the perfect fit for us was Douglas Rushkoff. He understands the media well, and also really understands where we're going with how we want to incorporate story through different media.