Chief Executive Officer & Creative Director (Co-founder), Rebellion Developments Limited
283 Best of E3 2018 - Rebellion Games' Jason Kingsley
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About Jason Kingsley
Jason Kingsley, co-founder and CEO of Rebellion Developments, discussed the development of the studio's upcoming game *Atomfall* in a February 2025 interview. He described the game's inspirations as early British sci-fi, including *Day of the Triffids* and the TV show *Survivors*, and noted that the game's design rewards both combat and conversation, with non-player characters who may react rudely or back down if challenged. Kingsley also mentioned that the game includes a metal detector as a sub-game for finding secret caches, and that he continues to discover new things in the game despite having been involved from the beginning. In previous interviews, Kingsley has spoken about Rebellion's approach to independence, stating that the company has been approached many times to be acquired but has never felt it was a good fit for the staff or the company. He has described Rebellion as having a "protective view of being custodians" of its intellectual property, preferring to license rather than sell rights. Kingsley has also discussed the challenge of competing with larger publishers, saying the studio must be "clever" because it cannot match the marketing budgets of multinational corporations. He has emphasized the importance of making games that people enjoy and feel are worth their money, and has noted that the games market is larger than the film, TV, and music markets combined.
Transcript (22 segments)
M
Marcus Bronzy0:00
Are you serious? So, it's Marcus Bronzy here from How to Kill an Hour. Currently in E3, and I'm at the Rebellion area and I've played some amazing games. Not only that, I am here with the king of rebellion, Mr. Jason Kingsley. How are you doing, sir?
J
Jason Kingsley0:15
I'm doing very well, thank you for elevating me to king. I prefer the term Lord or Knight, though.
M
Marcus Bronzy0:20
Though if you want to hear the conversation about what Mr. Jason Kingsley gets up to in his spare time, I believe we have an episode which we'll put in the link show description that you can check out. But we haven't got much time with you today; you're very busy, so I'd like to get straight down to business. You have shown us two amazing games. The first of which I'd like to talk about is Strange Brigade. How do you feel about this title?
J
Jason Kingsley0:42
I'm very excited. It's a new intellectual property for us. Of course, we've got the Sniper Elite series and the Zombie Army series, and we've been working on those for a while now, so we kind of perfected them a bit. Strange Brigade is a bit different; we tried to do something that was a bit more family-friendly and a bit more action-adventure in the purest sense of the term. I think it's great. I kind of love my co-op multiplayer games as well. As I've got older, I kind of want to play games with my friends, not against them. It's sort of more fun, and we've got a very strong single-player narrative in there and a strong single-player component of the game, but it's also fun to play with a whole bunch of friends. We ramp the difficulty up as well if you're playing with more people. So yeah, I'm very proud of it. The team have put a lot of work into it, and it's always a bit nerve-wracking inventing something new. You hope that everybody understands what we're trying to do. It's a little bit tongue-in-cheek as well. We've got an unreliable narrator, a bloke that tells you you're not doing a very good job and that kind of stuff occasionally.
M
Marcus Bronzy1:44
How important is it for you to add those bits of detailing?
J
Jason Kingsley1:48
I think it's essential. I think it really adds to the atmosphere. It shows the game doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not a comedy game, but it's sort of light-hearted and fun, and it goes back to the old days of the Saturday matinee cinema where the business model was trying to get people to go back next Saturday, so you needed to leave people, which is where the term cliffhanger comes from. Literally, our hero is hanging off the cliff, come back next week to see what happens. In those environments, you often see a car hurtling over a cliff and smashing in a ball of flames at the bottom, and then next week you'd see the character jump out before it went over the cliff, and that's quite a famous one. So we've got an unreliable narrator: 'Oh, our hero hasn't survived, he's crushed to death,' and it's like, 'No, next week he survived, that's fine.' It's part of the business model for those Saturday matinee worlds, and we thought we'd try and emulate that. When you pause the game, it'll say, 'Two sugars for me, please,' because you're going off to make a cup of tea, and that kind of thing. It's really fun, and there are a couple of what we call jump scares where you're looking at something and something jumps up and surprises you, because that's all part of the ghost train ride. So I'm very excited about it. It's a bit different; it's a little less gory than most Rebellion games. Sniper Elite series is quite brutal, Zombie Army is quite gruesome. This one's kind of more PG-13, teen-rated.
M
Marcus Bronzy3:22
Yeah, that definitely comes across. You touched on this briefly a couple of minutes ago: multiplayer games. What kind of things do you think you brought to the table to make the co-op fun and play with my mates?
J
Jason Kingsley3:32
Yeah, well, that was the idea. The idea is to have fun with your friends, and that doesn't mean you have to all be super tactical. The game allows you to grief your friends sometimes just for a laugh. I mean, we've all played football with our friends, and sometimes tripping them up is actually quite funny—not when they do it too often, it'll piss them off, but sometimes it's funny in the right circumstances. Same with playing a game, as long as losing means you can restart fairly quickly and then have another go. So we've got quite a few puzzles in there that require cooperation, but you don't have to cooperate; you can actually just make the trap fall on your mate's head. We've had situations where people go, 'Don't pull the wrong lever, right? Seriously, we've got to get through this,' and then they pull the wrong lever, and it's like, 'You bastard, what are you doing?' That's part of it. So co-op gameplay should build and promote that kind of thing for four players because it adds to the fun. I can imagine a bunch of friends sitting around, maybe having a few drinks and just enjoying the experience of having a slightly tongue-in-cheek action-adventure game, and that's what I hope people get out of this. The game doesn't take itself too seriously; it's not supposed to. It's a serious game—it's not that easy sometimes, there are some hard levels—but I want people to be entertained. I want people to finish the game and go, 'That was bloody good fun!'
M
Marcus Bronzy5:01
When's the next one coming out? You've also got a very diverse range of characters to select from. Was that intentional?
J
Jason Kingsley5:07
We looked at a whole bunch of different characters. We always prototype a lot of characters, and we chose the four characters that we thought were the most interesting for players. It just happens that we've got the selection we've got. There's a whole bunch of DLC characters coming as well, but these were the ones that felt the best in terms of gameplay. Really, the game is all about exploring the world, so we wanted to be representative of different cultures and different tropes, and it comes from an earlier period, early to mid-20th century, and we kind of wanted to play around with that a little bit. I think we've done a pretty good job—I'll leave that for others to judge—but we tried to be interesting with fun and strong characters.
M
Marcus Bronzy5:53
Have you got a character favorite personally?
J
Jason Kingsley5:56
I like Nalangu. Why? I like Nalangu because she's quite a different character; she's very straight-talking, she's got great powers. There's a really funny sequence about were-leopards, which is part of her culture, and I really like it. I also have a soft spot for Frank as well. Frank Fairburn—you might recognize the last name. Is he from the same family as the Sniper Elite main guy, Karl Fairburn? Well, it's the same last name. I'll leave that for other people to work out. We've kind of played with all of that. Ideally, we want people who have played Sniper Elite to like playing this game as well; it's a little bit of an Easter egg. They all play quite well. Albert plays very well; he's quite fun. Then Gracie—we wanted a good, strong Northern British accent, which I've not really heard very often in games before, and I thought that was quite nice to see her with her regional accent coming through. I don't know what our American colleagues will make of her accent, but it was fun casting.
M
Marcus Bronzy7:04
Awesome. You must have spent quite a bit of time finding the right voice for your narrator because it's bang on. What was that process like?
J
Jason Kingsley7:12
That was an interesting one. Yes, our narrator is exceptionally good. He's got to be arch without being too arch. We used a lot of reference material; we tried to go a bit further or wind it back a little bit. I think, thank you for saying so, we got it about right. Different people will see different things in it, of course, but we also tried to emulate the presenter style of the commentators of the Saturday matinee. We want to do something a bit different, and I think we've achieved it. There's an awful lot of grimdark science fiction things around, but this isn't grimdark; this is the opposite of grimdark.
M
Marcus Bronzy8:01
Agreed. So that was Strange Brigade. I can't wait for it. Jason, I also had a first play of Arkus Path. Now this is an experience like no other in VR, and it's something that you obviously don't need any hands to use. How did this game come into existence, by the way? It's just so different.
J
Jason Kingsley8:18
The way I see Arkus Path is a bit of a visual poem. When I first played it, I just thought it was lovely; it was a really nice, relaxing, chill-out vibe. I found it so compelling. VR is an interesting area of gameplay because you're so immersed in it, and it's untraditional gameplay. This just worked really well; it seemed intuitive, and you could just sit there listening to the music, kind of playing the game but living the game. It appealed to me when they showed me the demo, and that's why we supported the guys in taking it to market for them. So yeah, very excited about that. VR, as you know, we did the Battlezone VR game that was very successful for us. We don't just do VR, but we do quite a bit of VR, and that's exciting and gives us scope to experiment with gameplay styles. A lot of our games are shooters, and I've said before some of them are quite gory, like Sniper Elite and Zombie Army series. Strange Brigade has gone a bit more family-friendly, and Arkus Path has gone in a totally different way; it's not action-oriented. You've got stuff to do, but it's a bit more of a relax and chill-out vibe. Like music, there are lots of different types of music; I don't see why there shouldn't be lots of different types of games.
M
Marcus Bronzy9:45
Did you intend to make it something that was easy to pick up, whatever your experience is with VR, whatever level of experience you have?
J
Jason Kingsley9:52
The team doing it are very good at that, and yes, obviously we've guided that. We've said, look, it's got to be accessible and it's got to play very quickly for people, and we did that with Battlezone. The onboarding process of Battlezone was important to us, and getting people used to the idea of VR, we wanted to do the same for Arkus Path. The team is obviously fully behind that and done a good job.
M
Marcus Bronzy10:13
Yeah. There's also a bit of a comic book touch to it as well with some of the cut scenes. Rebellion obviously has that background. Is that something to do with the conversations in the room with you?
J
Jason Kingsley10:24
Yes, well, you know I love my graphic novels and comic books, 2000 AD and Judge Dredd and all of that. So I quite like heightened graphic styles. The kind of graphic novel style of the game was very deliberate, and the pastel shades in places, the fact that it turns darker as the game goes on, I think works incredibly well. I think Tim done a great job on it.
M
Marcus Bronzy10:50
Well, thank you very much for giving us some time here at E3. I understand that you have an extremely busy day, like I said, so I'm going to have to shoot off now. But thank you very much, Jason, and I look forward to Arkus Path and Strange Brigade very much so. Thank you very much.
J
Jason Kingsley11:05
It's been fun. Yeah, I've got a busy schedule ahead and I'm jet-lagged, but I hope I came across okay and my voice wasn't too croaky. Thank you, cheers.