The Game File chain interview: Featuring Riot, Blizzard, Shuhei Yoshida and more…

Six interviewees, each asking a question for the next person. Ready to see how they all connected?

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, developed by Insomniac Games. The studio’s co-founder, Ted Price, was part of Game File’s chain interview.

Way back in the mid-2000s, I got the idea of connecting all the interviews I’d booked for Game Developers Conference into one linked interview.

As I’d later write:

I traipsed through the Game Developers conference stitching together an interview that began with Boyd Multerer of Microsoft's XNA group, wound its way through Brutal Legend's Tim Schafer, Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime, and ended shortly after Fable's Peter Molyneux answered PixelJunk's Dylan Cuthbert's question about what color underwear he was wearing.

In 2009, I did it again, this time for Kotaku, while I was at E3. That chain, which had more of an executive focus, linked Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo) to Yoshio Sakamoto (Nintendo) to John Schappert (Xbox) to Peter Dille (PlayStation) to Scott Rohde (PlayStation) to Shane Kim (Xbox) to Peter Moore (EA) to John Riccitiello (EA) to Reggie Fils-Aimé (Nintendo) to Kotaku’s readership.

Each person asked a question for the next person to answer.

The best part of that was probably Miyamoto asking Metroid developer Sakamoto: “When does he want me to retire?”

Sakamoto: “I want him to be there forever. [pause] That's quite a question!"

Today, I’ve got a new chain interview for you, connecting a group of interviews I did back at the DICE Summit in February. As I wound down each interview, I invited each person to ask a question for my next interviewee. I jotted each question down, and then I asked it at the end of the next interview.

I think it turned out pretty well, though I cringe at this being the third of these I’ve done, yet none have included women. That’s no good.

On with the 2025 chain, which linked the following folks:

• Marc Merrill, Riot Games

• Rod Fergusson, Blizzard

• Alex Torvenius, MachineGames

• Ted Price, (formerly) Insomniac Games

• Gilles Langourieux, Virtuos

• Shuhei Yoshida, (formerly) PlayStation

• Shawn Kittelsen, Skydance Interactive

Question 1: From Marc Merrill, co-founder of Riot games, to Rod Fergusson, general manager of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard:

“How are you thinking about the next big inflection point and installment for Diablo? Because that’s a storied franchise that has legs.”

Fergusson: “We're here for the long haul. We've been doing long-range planning recently. And I've created a roadmap—a 10-year roadmap…it was actually a 12-year [roadmap]—I can see this, this, this and this and all these different things that we can do, [which] is really inspiring. And it's really exciting. We’re focused on what players want…I can’t tell you much more than that.”

Question 2: From Blizzard’s Rod Fergusson to Axel Torvenius, creative director for MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle:

“Did it take [actor] Troy Baker long to find the Harrison Ford voice [for Indiana Jones]? I know Troy. I was kind of curious about, like, how much refinement and how much work goes int it? Would he lose the accent or lose the stylization [quickly]?”