Tell us about your company…when did it start? How many people were you then and how many are you now?
I actually started in the industry 7 years ago, when Andrew Wright and I started RealArcade for RealNetworks. After 3 years growing their distribution business, I left to become a game developer myself. I personally wrote our first 12 games including hits like Mahjong Towers, Top Ten Solitaire and Bursting Bubbles. We have since grown into a developer, publisher and distributor of casual games with over 100 employees.

How did you come up with your company name? (...we thought Paul was a big fisherman and were anticipating a fascinating story about catching a huge, big fish)
It was sort of a satirical joke at first. I was a one person company working out of my bedroom. The name Big Fish was somewhat ironic, especially when I had it superimposed over the earth. I was a big salt water aquarium keeper at the time and it just stuck. Fortunately, not as far off as it used to be now!

What inspired you to create Mystery Case Files: Huntsville and what did you hope to achieve with this casual game?
When we build games we focus on several aspects of a game. The most important and hardest is an addicting game play mechanic, the second most important is the theme. The theme must be fun and exciting but not childish (a mistake many casual game developers make). The noir detective theme in Mystery Case Files: Huntsville is perfect for casual gamers. The game play sort of evolved. We almost scrapped the project 3 times. Nathaniel Webb came up with the idea of finding clues hidden in a complex scene, Adrian Woods came up with the whole detective Noir theme and all the fun story lines.

How many months did it take to develop Mystery Case Files: Huntsville and was this above or below your original timeline?
The game took over 11 months to build, slightly longer than average, but that was largely due to reinventing the game three times after early prototypes failed our focus group ‘fun’ testing benchmark.

You recently launched Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects as a sequel to MCF Huntsville. How is Prime Suspects different from Huntsville?
Prime suspects takes what was great about Huntsville and focused on increasing the length, adding more replayability, and some head scratching puzzles to get through. Each time you play Prime suspects the clues will lead you to a different master criminal with different puzzles and clues along the way.

How do you think the casual games industry has changed over the last 18 months?
Actually the casual games industry has not changed that much in the past 18 months. Every time you think the industry is way beyond the “match three” gameplay, someone puts a new spin on it and the game sells like hotcakes. The quality bar has risen a bit but at the end of the day, gameplay is what sells a game, not glitz. A great example is Sandlot’s latest game, Cake Mania. The game’s artwork and features are quite simple, but the gameplay pulls people in and gets them hooked. It was the first game to displace Mystery Case Files: Huntsville on our site in the 5 months since Huntsville launched.

What new and innovative game mechanics do you see recently popping up in the casual games industry?
Aside from Mystery Case Files, not to much has really jumped out. The Zuma-style games still do well, match threes continue to perform well, and the Cake Mania style serving customer games are still hot, ever since Betty’s Beer Bar. One surprise recently was our launch of Legacy Interactive’s Law and Order game. The demo was over 100MB and the full version over 1.2GB. This game would have failed a few years ago, but the quality of gameplay was high enough for broadband users to embrace a one hour download.

Are there any Developers that you are particularly fond of in this space?
We work with almost 350 developers worldwide. There are some new entrants out there that show promise like Orbital’s casual Game Café brand, but the old guard continue to produce great games and Popcap, Reflexive, iWin, Hipsoft and Sandlot are a few of our favorites to work with.

What genre of games do you like to play in your spare time?
Ironically I am a big Real-time Strategy(RTS) fan, but that genre is pretty niche for casual gamers. We recently published a game called Master of Defense which was out of the norm for our casual games audience, but I personally fell in love with it and it sucked at least 100 weekend hours out of me that I will never get back ;-)

If you had to give up developing games in exchange for winning the MegaMillions Jackpot of $250 Million…what would you do?
I would consider $250MM a sell-out. This industry is growing like a weed and a lot of fun to be a part of. I mentioned earlier that I love Real-time Strategy games…well I consider this the casual games industry just such a giant real-life Real-time Strategy game. I ‘work’ 16 hour days, but fortunately only about 2-3 of those hours are what I would describe as work, the rest is all part of the game.