n December of 2005 it was announced that Electronic Arts’ Worldwide Game Studio President Don Mattrick resigned from the company to “pursue other opportunities.” Even though he could have potentially become the CEO of the software juggernaut, he wasn’t interested in running a public company. After getting fit, and spending lots of time with his family, traveling the world and the World of Warcraft, Mattrick has finally landed at Microsoft. Game Informer’s EIC Andy McNamara today spoke with the former EA exec about his new position at Microsoft to find out exactly what he would be doing. Also, Andy prods Peter Moore about what’s on the horizon from Microsoft Games Studios.

Game Informer: Congratulations!

Don Mattrick: Thank you very much. I’m really excited to be here and to work with Robbie and Peter and the rest of the team. We wanted to call and we thought this would be a better way of doing it to dispel the rumors and get up front and getting a chance to speak with a small number of people.

GI: So you’ll work with Shane Kim?

Mattrick: Shane will be one of the people that I imagine I’ll be working with inside the team.

GI: Obviously, Microsoft has been making some great games lately, in my personal opinion. What will you change?

Mattrick: I think there’s great content. I’m not trying to come in and be a catalyst for change. What I’m actually hoping to do is get a chance to participate with the team. The areas I’m most interested in are sort of thinking about strategy as it relates to entertainment in general. When you think about Microsoft, obviously it’s about participating in the console space, the PC space, in hardware, music and other areas of entertainment—so that’s really exciting. I also love innovation, being able to brainstorm with someone like Shane about the process and what it takes to nurture new hits to market—that’s always fun. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the most enjoyable part of creating content, sort of thinking about the steps you go through to create hits. The other part, which I think consumers get and is another area of passion for me is the whole connected experience. Again, Microsoft has an amazing collection of assets inside that space, more so than any other company on the planet.

GI: Back when you were with EA, EA was one of the first to move forward and do a lot of worldwide work and share a lot of technology between all its pieces. Sony has also moved forward in that direction, too. Do you see this as one of the directions that Microsoft will head in?

Mattrick: Again, I don’t think at this stage I know the framework within Microsoft well enough to answer that question. What I know is a great engineering technology culture’s already inside the business, and what you look at what the company’s already accomplished within the entertainment space in such a short period of time, I imagine they’re going to keep learning new skills and keep coming up with new ideas in all parts of the business. So, technology development could be one, but for me it’s kind of one broader framework that the company has the potential to lean against.

GI: That’s exciting. You have Halo in the stable. What’s the next big thing from Microsoft Game Studios?

Peter Moore: Well, Crackdown just shipped—and by the way is doing phenomenally well. We’re getting calldowns—well, we’re 48 hours into it, but the numbers look very, very strong. Then we’re of course you’ve got Forza 2, you’ve got Mass Effect, you’ve got Too Human, Halo you mentioned. You’ve got Project Gotham Racing 4—there a tremendous slate of titles from MGS in there. And also exclusive to the platform this year will be Bioshock and the next Splinter Cell from Ubisoft. And of course, old news now, but GTA4 day and date was very important to us for this calendar year. All signs are Rockstar will be able to deliver in October, as per their commitment last year. So, I add it all up together, and I’m able to bring the thread that is Xbox Live across all these experiences and then add Shadowrun into the mix, which will be the first cross-platform game for us, that will also come from MGS—I’m feeling pretty good about the content lineup. I probably missed a title or two there, but those are the titles that spring to mind now that I think are going to continue to move the needle forward in calendar year ’07.

GI: So Don, did you travel the world, or did you just play a lot of WoW?

Mattrick: (Laughs) I did play a lot of WoW, and I saw the world. It was wonderful to take a year off. I really enjoyed the break, and I got a chance to spend time with family and friends and get my fitness level back and have a lot of fun and just recharge. It was a wonderful break, and I was excited to be able to craft a sort of opportunity with the team at Microsoft. It was a dream role in a sense for me, finding the right company, the right group of people—and most importantly, a shared passion for excellence. This group of people has that in spades.

GI: You worked up in Vancouver before, that’s where you were located, right?

Mattrick: I toggled between San Francisco and Vancouver, but I’m Canadian and Vancouver’s home. And this role allows me to continue to live in Vancouver, and it’s an easy commute to Redmond. The logistics work well.

GI: Definitely keep us in the loop as things move forward. Good luck with the fine studio you’ve got there. You two will cause a lot of trouble there, I’m sure.

Moore: There’s no doubt we’ll get into it a lot. We couldn’t be more excited to have Don on the team. It really rounds out what I think is one of the best teams in the industry at a time when we really need to drive forward into this next level. I think this holiday is going to be very, very important. It’s going to be fascinating to watch and see how things shape up between not only the three big console platform holders, but as third parties start to place their bets, which they’re doing. The Window’s platform is heading into a renaissance—we’re excited about where we’re going for Games for Windows. Bringing that together, as Don points out, we have a tremendous stable of assets that will allow us to provide a little bit of leverage in areas where our competitors can’t. We’re excited about that.

GI: I think you’ve had great success—especially with some of these first-party games. We were excited about Crackdown, no doubt. How do you plan to sell game to a broader audience outside the hardcore, which I think you’re fantastic at. Xbox Live screams to hardcore gamers. A lot of your titles from first party, save Viva Pinata, are definitely for the hardcore gamer crowd. What is Microsoft going to do to attract the larger, casual scene.

Moore: It’s a great question. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next month or two. We have always had the focus on what we called—I don’t know whether I’ve sat down and talked about the first two holiday campaigns with you, but when we started building the strategy back in 2003, early 2004, we realized that the first 15 months, knowing what our ship date was even back then, would be critical to continue to recapture what’s called the hardcore gamer, and we want to make sure that we continue to have that sort of person on our side, because they’re very important to the overall ecosystem.

Then, coming into this holiday, we realized we needed to build an approachability story that was going to be important as we were attracting a different consumer in holiday 2007 and on to 2008. This is even before the Wii—the Wii was still the Revolution, and nobody knew anything about it. We recognized that both our strengths with Xbox became our Achilles’ heel with Xbox 360 in that we had built a very legitimate gaming device that had been taken to heart by the hardcore guys who when Microsoft announced the Xbox were very skeptical about our ability to deliver real gaming experiences on the console. I think we put all of that to rest very, very effectively and repositioned the brand. We went from black to white—it’s brighter and more optimistic brand. We’ve done an incredible amount of work with the third-party development community to make sure we’re well positioned to have all of the right content, the E and T content that’s going to be important in the out years in our platform. From a first-party point of view, it’s not just about E-rated games, it’s going to be about the experience that, quite frankly, Nintendo has done a tremendous job in capturing, in bringing back fun—if you will—to the gaming platforms. But we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve as well to be able to do that. It’s not something that we’re going to be shy about, and it’s not something that we’re not painfully aware of that needs to be changed by this holiday. That has been the strategy all along, and we’ll be making some more announcements in the coming month or two. I think you’ll see how serious we are about that.

GI: I’m glad to hear you didn’t say Fuzion Frenzy 2.

Moore: I didn’t say Fuzion Frenzy 2, though I think it’s getting a bad rap. But anything that’s got 40 little minigames in it, as simple as they may be—it’s actually a fun multiplayer game. You know, it’s not Fuzion Frenzy 2. It’s actually not games. It’s more experiencial than that. And again, since the day I saw Iwata-san pull the nunchuck controller out from under his podium a few years ago at TGS, I’ve always realized that was the right thing for Nintendo to have to do for what they needed to do to be successful in this next generation. And it was always going to be a challenge for us. So, we have plans. This does not come as a surprise. Our strategy has been laid out for us years in advance, and you’re going to see some of that this next holiday and beyond.

Mattrick: One more thing before you hang up. Think about what Microsoft has accomplished in the console space in the last six years.

GI: It’s pretty impressive. There’s no doubt about that.

Mattrick: When you look about it and think about the length of time Nintendo’s participated—or other companies—nobody has had a faster, stronger start in a shorter period of time.

GI: You have been very quick about getting into the market and becoming a player—at least in the United States—I won’t bring up Japan. I think Europe is certainly a challenge in the long term, and certainly too, at the same time, you’re trying to change the way people are also playing games. There’s many reports about getting people just used to buying games in the digital download service in Xbox Live. That’s got to be quite a challenge.

Moore: It’s about choice. A lot of people don’t connect their Xbox—maybe as big as 40% of the Xboxes out there are still an offline experience. And that’s perfectly fine. People are comfortable with that, and that’s what they want to do. The people we think are the future are the people who do connect their Xbox and want to build a sense of community around that, and things like achievements, which I think are going to be a really big story this year, when the truly multiplatform games come out and gamers who may have two consoles in the home are going to have to make a choice. Achievements, and you see a lot of stories being built around achievements, are something I think has captured the imagination. They become a tie-breaker at times.

But digital distribution is coming. All three consoles have some form of it as you know. Xbox Live Arcade is, I think, the premiere way we’re looking at digital distribution, which is, if you will, more snack-sized games rather than full downloads of multi-gigabyte gaming experiences. Also, demos, I think you’re exactly right. People expect to get those in real time--and I don’t want to knock the magazine business--but not having to wait for a magazine with a disc attached, and the ability to connect to consumers delivers a great experience for them. Crackdown is a good example. In the last two or three weeks since the demo was available, we’ve seen preorders go through the roof, and it’s directly attributable to being able to deliver a demo to consumers in real time to their hard drives that they can play, and that diverted the sales back into the retail channel. So you’ve got this blend of digital distribution, but other things are benefiting from it.

GI: It’s one of those things where everyone has a different way they want to play their games, but I’m excited to see how Shivering Isles does and the episodes coming up. It’s going to be interesting to see how people handle it.

Moore: It’s the old episodic content thing that we’ve been talking about for about a decade. And you longer, Don. I was still in the shoe business and didn’t know what episodic content was. (Laughs)

GI: When are you going to make your Xbox Live Sims?

Moore: We’ve got a lot of tricks up our sleeves. While the Sims have always been on the Xbox platform from the get-go, we’ve got a lot of stuff we’re going to be doing with Don and we’re excited about that. There’s a bunch of stuff. Stay tuned.