The following is an interview I performed with Greg Kasavin on June 30^th.

Most gamers may know Greg Kasavin from his work as Editor-in-Chief at GameSpot, but that's about to change with the release of Supergiant Games' unique action-RPG Bastion on July 20th. After meeting the company's co-founders Amir Rao and Gavin Simon while working at EA, Kasavin joined them in 2009 to become the Writer on what he calls his dream project. I met with Kasavin to talk about Viva Pinata, Cormac McCarthy, Pixar, mobile games and how he got to where he is now. I also wrote a story based on this conversation, you can read it here. Thanks to Greg for taking time to speak with me.

Bastion is clearly influenced by classic 16-bit action RPG's but what are some of the other influences for the game?

Kasavin: This was one thing that turned out to be kind of a dream project for us so we dug pretty deep on an individual basis, drawing different inspiration from different games across eras. So not only do you see some Super Nintendo classic influences in there but it's also everything from Diablo to even games like Viva Pinata, which may be far less evident. In fact I think most traces of that are not very apparent in the final game but early on that was a game that we were thinking about. One of the things we were interested in early on was the American author Cormac McCarthy. We had the thought, 'what if, instead of being this great American author, he made video games? What would the tone of his games be like?' We were interested in a Cormac McCarthy version of fantasy. That was some of the early influence on the tone of the game. We went for that lyrical sound that his stories often have. His stories often deal with great evil at the heart of mankind, this really sinister stuff. We extricated a lot of that stuff and created a story that I think has a more optimistic tone to it. He'll have these amazing set piece scenes where you're filled with the grandeur and beauty of it all and that was the kind of feel that I wanted the story to have. As far as the actual content of the story, I grew up playing a lot of games and watching a lot of movies in the 80's and 90's and I wanted it to have a modern fairy tale feel. I think fairy tale has a weird connotation right now because people think of Disney movies such as Cinderella.

Or Pixar

Kasavin:Yeah, I'd rather it be suggestive of Pixar than Snow White. I don't even want to mention Pixar because I hold them on such a high perch. They do a fantastic job of making stories that are suitable to all ages. When you're an adult you don't feel like it's condescending to you. So that sort of approach, making it suitable for everyone, that's something that I wanted to achieve with the story. As much as I love ultra violent games, there's a lot of them. I just wanted to try and do something else. I love games as much as I do because of certain formative experiences that I had as a young player and I don't feel like there are games out there that are suitable for getting younger players into games. What are today's Marios and Zeldas?

It's Call Of Duty

Kasavin: Maybe I'm getting too old, but that seems weird to me.

What Motivated your departure from EA LA?

Kasavin: We left because we wanted to make games our own way. We realized that we as a small group of people had the capacity to create games that were more personal in nature and a higher quality, less diluted through too many people. The appeal was working for ourselves and being accountable only to each other and not having to worry about what someone in some corner office somewhere who we'd never met might do to our game through a wave of his magic wand. Amir, who I was roommates with at the time, we were playing these games like Plants Vs. Zombies and Braid and Castle Crashers and we felt envious of these games because they were so good and we were working with a hundred people making something that we weren't...it felt really different. When Amir was doing the heavy lifting of starting the company, he started to make it happen. He and Gavin quit their jobs, moved into a house and started working on Bastion on September 1st, 2009. I couldn't make the same sacrifices as them. I took a job at 2K Games where I worked for a year, then left that job and took a job at Supergiant Games full time at a point where they were ramping up in production a lot. When I parted ways with the guys the first time I didn't expect to work with them again but when the opportunity presented itself again I thought 'If I don't do this now, I may never have another shot at it. I had to convince my family to make some sacrifices to take a job like that because we only had savings to go off of. It's a scary thing to undertake but as soon as we announced Bastion the response was really good. There was a big sense of relief that we were indeed working on something special there.

The first time I heard about Bastion was at PAX East. I went to a panel that had Ken Levine on it and someone asked what his favorite games of the show were and I remember he instantly mentioned Bastion.

Kasavin: That's amazing. I hadn't heard that he gave us that shout out but he did come to play it which was an amazing moment for us.

How long have you had the idea to have the narrator in the game?

Kasavin: That wasn't there at the very beginning. The game didn't start with a giant design document. It formed with months of prototyping. The prototyping for the narration happened a few months into the process. It was as simple as Amir asking his friend Logan who is our narrator and a childhood friend of his, to record a few lines. The effect was noticeably good right away, it just so happened that the idea of the narrator was something that aligned with the tone we were interested in for the game and it aligned nicely with the ideas I had at the start of the project for some of the characters. The more that went in the better it got and whenever it wasn't part of the game, something felt missing. We wanted a game that had emotional weight to it, but we didn't want to interrupt the play experience for the sake of the story either. The narration became a nice solution to that problem.The narration provides an immediacy to the story telling where the narrator is adding context to things that are happening to you right in the moment. He's not bothering you about stuff that has nothing to do with the situation that you're in. Which I think is a problem with a lot of exposition in games, 'oh here's a big cut scene about what just happened.' And you're like 'I just want to play this game. I don't care what you think I'm supposed to know...game!' So the narration came about as a solution to something that we wanted to solve in the design.

When you started writing in the industry you were in your teens, but have you always had the plan of moving into game design?

Kasavin: When I was eight years old I was playing Ultima IV and I was filled with this feeling of I don't know how this was done but this is what I want to do. That game was mind boggling to me at the time. That was by no means the first game I played but it was the first truly profound game that I played. That was what I wanted to do at that point. Then I fell in love with writing about games and did that for longer than I could have imagined. But then it was this sense of getting into game development, it was like 'If I don't hurry up and do this I may run out of chances.'

Some of your contemporaries are now working on iOS. Does Supergiant Games have any interest in other platforms?

Kasavin: We have interest in all platforms. We play and keep tabs on everything. Decisions about which platforms we work on are some of the most important decisions we make because they have everything to do with our ability to stay in business. As nice as it would be where the quality of the game is the only thing that matters, the platform that it's on determines the threshold for how many people can buy that game. iOS is something we are well aware of but we are all about Bastion right now as a team of seven people. In the case of Chair, it was great seeing them go from Shadow Complex to Infinity Blade. Infinity Blade was the most impressive iOS game I had played up to that point. There's still a style of game on iOS that is different from what we are trying to create in Bastion. Bastion is a more involved experience. I believe in games as a primary pastime where people elect to spend their time with it and not as something that people use to just kill some time as they're waiting for the bus.

How has the process been working with Microsoft and Warner Bros. to get it on XBLA and as part of the Summer of Arcade?

Kasavin: It's gone really well since we got everything done right on the schedule that we intended. Discipline around scheduling is one of the best habits we inherited from working at EA. That often involves some pretty late nights but this is our baby and it was well worth whatever late nights we put into it. Warner Bros. Has been great to work with. They've been very supportive and allowed us to focus on the development. When Microsoft selected us for Summer Of Arcade, we were very, very happy about that. We just cross our fingers because there are so many deserving games that are all trying to get those five slots. They've made really good choices in the past and they picked our game so we're very happy.

You can follow Greg on twitter at @kasavin or Supergiant Games at @SupergiantGames or you can follow (the much less popular) me at @indiejones84