In the first two pages or so he punches someone’s jaw off. So that’s something you could do in a video game pretty well.

JR: Yes, absolutely. It’s a little different than the last eight or nine years of my video game realm, but if you go back and think about Way of the Warrior, which is the game we did before Crash Bandicoot: that was mentioned on the floor of Congress as a game not to buy for children. Which, it was also not a game meant for children. But, we’ve done violent.

(Congress) forgot that it was possible to make games for “not children.”

JR: And these days, if you look at the statistics, mostly “not children” are buying them. So it’s not even that you “can” make them for non-children; that’s actually most of the market.

And a lot of it is, all of these kids playing GTA and stuff – that’s really parents buying it for their kids.

JR: There’s no question. I mean, there’s a responsibility the industry has not to market to children, but at the end of the day, it’s going to sit in a store, and somebody has to prevent the children from getting something that’s clearly marked with an “M” on it, and it’s not for them. And I’ve stood in line at Best Buy, behind a family, with two – they looked like a 9 and 11 year old – buying Grand Theft Auto, and you know, at the end of the day, there’s really not that much you can about that. They could be buying a lot of things that are unsuitable for the kids outside of videogames.

It’s interesting – I know a lot of game developers who have kids, and, for some reason, I would expect them to say, “ah, it’s alright, my kid’s mature. He can play this game”. But I’ve actually never met anyone that says that that works in game development. Theyall say, “no, they’re not playing this till they’re seventeen.”

JR: Right, and I think the same is true in movies. I have a lot of director friends that have children, and since they know what they’re putting in the movie, because they’re the writer or the director, and they know where they were going with it, they’re extra careful not to let their children see it. It’s great entertainment.

If you’re an adult, and you’re responsible, it’s great. But it’s definitely something that they don’t want their kids to see. And as responsible parents, they keep their kids often from their own work.

Yeah, I wish people would pay a little more attention to that. I feel like some of these congress people have the perception that “yes, these people are trying to wound our children. They hate kids. They want them all to shoot each other.” Which is insane. Nobody wants that.

JR: And interestingly enough, nobody plays more videogames than videogame developers, and, as a group, I’ve never met a more gentle, more kind, more benign group of individuals on the planet. And you know, I’ve been playing since I was about seven years old, which is about as old as games go, and I’ve played everything, and I’ve never been arrested.

Yeah. Well, they haven’t caught you yet.

JR: (laughs) Well that’s true. Okay. That’s a good point. “Arrested”’s not a good gauge.