Roadhouse announces Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast

all right morning everybody uh thanks very much for coming um obviously with that start and the big 13-foot Eddie up in the lobby and uh various other things that are going on I think some of you or maybe all of you will have tweaked as to what we're going to be doing what we're talking about this morning um so I'd like to try and skip over the kind of normal introduction conferencing type bits as quickly as we can um we're roading house uh started in Vancouver in 2009 we've been building mobile games uh exclusively since around 2013. a number of different game projects and partners here that you can see so doing a lot of work with Red Bull uh on some action sports titles uh most recently bike Unchained we have a partnership with Publishers Clearinghouse and Shoal games uh working on some social casino and then also we have a focus on role-playing games did a project with Smosh which is a YouTube guys last year

been working on a Warhammer title as well and actually role playing is one of those areas that we've decided to start investing for ourselves as well and uh what we're talking about today is one of the first groups of that transition a little bit about me um been in the games industry for about 15 years now I guess a bit more I started back in Tokyo actually uh in 2000 and uh used to work with Nexon first off so really my entire career has been about games as a service initially on the PC and then transitioning to web and then as I said from 2013 exclusively on mobile uh so really kind of a Global Experience there and a lot about what Roadhouse is doing now and obviously we we are looking to Asia we continue to look there for um you know game design Innovations and also Innovations around business model um and so you know obviously Vancouver is a great place to do that being you know right in the middle between Asia

and Western markets as I said Roadhouse has been around for about uh six years now surprisingly I still think it was as a little scrappy startup but we've grown to about 160 people working on multiple projects both on the development side and then also we do user acquisition and Publishing Services as well for third parties so working with some quite large companies and large games there I'm also on the board of ddbc uh which is the industry body for the interactive digital media industry in British Columbia spending a lot of time working with the government on things like tax credit and the environment to build games in Vancouver and if you're around tomorrow there's a panel on the Vancouver games industry which uh will be interesting as well but interestingly if you've known me for more than I don't know 20 seconds I suppose but at least 20 minutes it's pretty hard to stop me talking about Metal I've been a metal fan for many years that picture is not my sister that tells you finally how many uh years I've been

in America and why it is that you shouldn't drink too much beer over your the course of your career in the games industry but anyway yeah so that's me back when I think 30 years ago probably and part of that sort of love and Mel has really been centered around Iron Maiden so you can see here that there's a few uh of my Trinkets and trophies that I managed to collect over the years um managed to be lucky enough back in 2008 to fly on Bruce there which was 757 and force well I guess it wasn't Air Force One it was uh Flight 666 actually had the flight number 666 there you can see I managed to fly with Bruce 7 to his 50th birthday bash in Prague and Warsaw so a couple of great gigs uh but really you know Matt has been part of my life for many years and uh particularly made and you know it's interesting you look at this picture here so my dad actually um I had to twist his arm a little bit but you know my dad was always great he was uh willing to take

us to the Geeks and that's actually the t-shirt from uh Peace of Mind Nottingham Royal Center 1983. I don't know if anybody else was on that I wanted to see that tour you went down yeah Peace of Mind awesome um so actually that's my son now uh obviously that t-shirt's a bit too small for me uh but uh when Maiden rolls through Vancouver in April uh it's obviously going to be great to be able to take my son along to see Maiden as well and he is actually a fan so you know in this case I had to twist my dad's arm but it's not like you know which is good um you know I think yeah and part of that's obviously you know let's talk a little bit about my dad um you know he said to me around that time as long as you you know do what you're interested in in life fundamentally things will tend to work out you know there's been a few times in my career where I'm really because I've been interested in everything that I've done for the last 20 years um and then one day back in April I guess of uh 2014. uh I got a phone call

which kind of proved the point really because I had a friend been in the industry for a long time um started working at this company 50cc so we got this phone call one day in Vancouver and uh this guy says hey you know um I've got some friends here at this 50cc company and they're wondering maybe if you guys would be interested in making a game with I made it and I was like 10.87654. well you know it depends on the deal too for me you know obviously yeah not really true so I was half Terror in half excitement that we got that phone call um but you know we said okay well we've got to embrace these opportunities and uh so we decided to restart a joint venture uh with 50cc a couple of things 50cc guys are here in the audience so we did and uh started this company nodding frog and uh basically we decided that we would uh move forward and see whether or not we could call off this deal so that

was April 2014 obviously you know I think probably even prior to that 50cc had been talking with maiden and uh the results of I guess now close on two years of collaboration and you know a lot of uh great opportunities and and things like that is the result here thank you thank you yeah so it's with great pleasure that we introduce Iron Maiden Legacy of the Beast uh which is the name of a new mobile RPG that we are planning to release in the summer obviously we're announcing a few months in advance of that we'll go into a little bit more detail as to why that is obviously it's a great opportunity and we're going to talk a little bit more about it this morning but we've before we talk about the game too much obviously it'd be great just to touch on Iron Maiden a little bit I know there are some fans here uh as I said who've tweaked as to what we're doing

um but you know the band's really uh for me the most uh inspirational most sort of um performance in heavy metal band of all time really um 16 Studio albums closed on 100 million albums sold um and you know obviously any as a character has really been front and center of the whole history of the band way back from the earliest days you know he's been uh in East London he's been a mummy he's been through outer space and so obviously you know both 80 years of character and the stories and the worlds that have been created over the last 40 years a very uh you know right for this kind of adaptation into other forms of media foreign Heyday in the 80s but if you think it was all about the 80s then what I wanted to do was to show this next video uh which is all taken from the 2013 tour um and actually that tour was one of the highest grossing tours of 2013. so let

me just show the video um and then uh we'll come back after that [Applause] all right foreign foreign

awesome so yeah I said that's 2013 just to sort of update the story a little bit uh in 2015 uh September I think book of

souls came out um as you can see there there are a number of very fine reviews um talking about a band at the peak of its powers still innovating right it's not you know a band that goes out just as Greatest Hits sets all the time um book of souls really fabulous album um you know and you can see there a couple of interesting quotes actually the times was already talking about how you know there's a room for this kind of very bombastic kind of uh mental I guess and how you know there are similarities between properties like Game of Thrones things like that it's obviously that's something that we were fully aware of as we started to to look at this project also the tour back in August uh Another World Tour was announced a book of sold World Tour uh gonna play to roughly a million and a half people uh over the next six months um and you know I said that I managed to travel on the 757 well hopefully uh 747 now so um I think Bruce is in simulator training probably about this week but

anyway um yeah so the 747's there as well and also uh just announced the first two dates of the band's career in China so if you happen to be in Beijing or Shanghai around the end of April then um there may be some gentlemen at the back that could help us out with some guest passes I don't know about that but anyway we'll see uh one thing that you'll find me obviously is a fan uh you know you kind of get this sense of what makes me special and for me it's you know the fans always come first and as we started to work with Maiden as a band as an organization the fans really do come first but also whenever they do anything they don't do it by Hearts right this is a key thing so if you look at Trooper for example which is Megan's beer it's actually really great beer you know it's not a question of taking a beer and slapping the logo on it that really is not what maidens and organizations about so you know Troopers of beer was the result of months and months of effort and research uh into creating a really great product and the results speak for themselves so Trooper actually sold well over 10

million pints in its first couple of years of launch um regardless I think the most successful British Beer launch of the last 20 years uh and it's interesting because you know making fans like me and making fans like beer so the I mean beer should as it as it's been proven goes very well uh hopefully that same thing will turn out to be the case with the game as well oops wrong button sorry and obviously you know Maiden I think has sort of transcended its limited or the boundaries of uh of being this heavy metal band um you know this slides an interesting one we're not necessarily saying that all these people um you know are into the band uh or into metal but clearly you know there's an affinity with this iconic image both the Betty and as Iron Maiden obviously there are some celebs up there that are big Iron Maiden fans as well but it's interesting as we came in obviously there's the Big Eddy up in the lobby um I think you know some people were looking at going oh that's really cool even though they don't necessarily recognize it so you know there's definitely this this idea that a whole

new bunch of people would find this imagery uh very cool very interesting and want to come to this product as I mentioned when I'm talking about Trooper um you know maintenance not an organization that does things by halves and we've actually asked yesterday in an interview you know what makes this project different I think one of the things is you know as a band how many bands would you know that actually hire a creative director or you know head of interactive in some cases as well uh but Maiden did that a couple of years ago and uh I'd like to bring Lexi Leon up to the stage as a special guest from Phantom music management who who look after Iron Maiden and uh Lexi's going to talk a little bit about some of the things that he's been doing uh how the game fits into this overall plan of extending and expanding um you know what making is thank you so um before we dive in further I'd like to talk a bit about our fans and we have incredibly diverse and creative and

loyal fan base and I think for them you know any as a character you know he lives in their hearts and minds and he's kind of transcended being this image on a shirt or an album cover and we see so many Fantastic interpretations of this character from the fans the sort of community creative content I want to share a couple of things with you from that so here we have every single Iron Maiden album cover has been recreated with the minions from Despicable Me and I refer to this as the iron minion phenomenon um and it's one great example of you know the fans who are running away with the imagery and this desire to see Eddie recreated in new mediums different forms crossovers with other ideas that kind of thing and um another great one possibly my favorite on the subject of small brightly colored people is uh one particularly dedicated fan has has recreated a live set entirely in Lego stop motion so so here we go

[Applause] so I mean personally I don't know I think that's fantastic and you know for me my my goal is to try and really engage with this audience and sort of give the people what they want which is more ready more Maiden in uniforms new mediums but without compromising the values of agent you know obviously this is all about fans come first but there's also about the integrity and the quality of everything in which we do um and you know Eddie is a character he just has immense potential as a protagonist there's this kind of heroic anti-hero character he's

incredibly powerful possibly Immortal and yet he's quite vulnerable we've seen him be lobotomized we've seen him die and live again and you know burst up from the grave you know there's a lot there to work with and as James mentioned you know he's been in ancient civilizations he's been in the four regions of space I mean this is a very rich mythology to dive into um so for me it's all about basically wreaking havoc on popular culture with Ed how do we bring Eddie to the Forefront and uh as someone who's worked in complex industry previously is what games are very kind of types of media uh I go to Comic Con every year and uh it's fascinating that Comic-Con in the San Diego Comic-Con vloggers were pop culture event in the world about 250 000 people to send on the San Diego City Center uh every year for that for the past for 30 years and until very recently we've never had a president and nonetheless despite the fact you see huge you know 80-foot Optimus Primes and

huge uh you know Effigy and Superman and whatever else you see a tremendous number of people wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts and I think this is because for me as well and for these fans Eddie belongs up there with the Batmans and Supermans of the world with the robocops and the Terminators he is an extremely cool highly original and Innovative character and um you know so the first thing I did was I said about reaching out a number of fantastically tanned artists that I've worked with in the past and we did various interpretations of Eddie that we brought to come upon a few of them up here now uh one is by a very talented uh anime illustrator one is quite a fantastic poster British illustrator called Dan Monfort who recently did all the IMAX posters actually for Star Wars the Force awakens and the last one here over on the right is bye-bye called Richard friend who is a DC Comics Inca for Batman Wonder Woman all that good stuff and these were very well received most of them sold out now and this was the first Ferrari into the world of sort of popular culture for art and we hope to do a lot more of that in future and

bring Eddie to a Comic-Con this year in the Years thereafter but I mean really this is all about World building expanding the character and new iterations of the character um and working with incredibly talented creative folks to do that and make sure we maintain this quality part um one thing that makes a lot of sense when you're World building and you're building a Newcastle characters and you want the fans to be able to interact with that character and engage with him is of course uh video games what better way to bring the fans into the world and allow them to engage with the character directly and perhaps even control the character and sort of explore his immortality and test the limits of his his power um video games isn't actually something new for Iron Maiden uh so in my youth I played a game called Headhunter which was an on-rails shooter that was actually packaged essentially free uh with a greatest hits double CD so it's a double CD equal airtime through its greatest hits compilation and it came with a third disc that was a video game application PC app of Ed Hunter so a 3D on rail shooter

um perhaps an overly ambitious project at the time given the technological limitations of PC gaming and the just Rich amazing detailed imagery of mine made very hard for that to translate into games at the time uh but on the flip side massively prescient um the banners you know never shied away from doing something new always want to innovate um Rod who's here today the band's manager uh since the beginning you know very Innovative team uh the boss put together have always been behind the back and this is a great example uh for me where you look now and you think oh yeah releasing the game app to promote a you know album movie whatever it is hold on please everyone does that back then on Hurdle and yet you know they did it and it's really you know quite an audacious thing to do and now we're talking about our return to video games and we wait a long time because we wanted to get it right and we wanted to not be held back by technical restrictions and limitations and at the same time we wanted to be able to do it essentially much like this as a giveaway

for free to reach as many fans as possible back then the way we engaged with fans was by the fans buying the discs not so much the case anymore there's new ways to engage with fans and some work one makes perfect sense one of the projects I'm most proud of that I worked on recently and this was all going on while we're working with Roadhouse uh is a music video for the single speed of light which basically was a giant teaser for our return to video games so I'm going to roll a clip and then I'm going to hand back to James thank you very much oh all right

all right I know we're getting a bit short of time so um I'm just going to cut that one there just talk a little bit about you know how the fan reaction to that video then helped contribute to the you know ongoing projects around the game obviously you know you can see from some of the comments and also from the fact that that video is now closing in on 10 million views you know there's a huge amount of interesting games from the Iron Maiden fan base um but it's not only anecdotal just as a subset of data uh obviously you know we've done a lot of research as well as as obviously just from that sense of knowing that this is going to work uh this is Facebook back in October I think the 23rd you can see there that I made an s13 point something it's up to 13.6 million likes right now um you know as a band which puts it somewhere close to Star Wars probably slightly higher than um League of Legends but there's other a lot of other IP down there and again I don't think people necessarily understand that this is the sort of potency that the band continues to have um so uh what are we doing it's Legacy

of the Beast um obviously the word legacy in no way implies that this is done and dusted it's all about expanding and extending the Legacy that we've all come to you know know and love over the last 30 years interested in new areas and let people come to this thing through new channels um very quickly we're not doing too much of uh talking about the game today but we'll just let you know a few things about it so first of all you know what is it it is an RTG obviously a lot of people thought you know maybe we'd do a music game but really Eddie and the worlds and the stories and the law is so rich for adaptations from RPG but that's what we wanted to do uh cast of characters drawn from Maiden law um you know there's a there's a bunch The Nomad the Mariner The Clairvoyant they're all going to be there in the game and we wanted to make an Innovative RPG experience which actually had a broad appeal again you know Troopers are great beer irrespective of the fact that it's an Iron Maiden beer and we wanted to make this a great game um irrespective of the fact that it has iron made and obviously for me and I made music and the characters just icing

on the cake but fundamentally it's a great game and obviously the team at Roadhouse you know there are a lot of Maiden fans there but we're not all needing fans and so I think that's great in a sense in that really we are approaching it from the game development side first and foremost which was actually something that you know the band and the organization Phantom wanted to make sure was was there right from the beginning and obviously it's great for ongoing update special events you know there are hundreds of eddies lots of different countries on the tour that we can integrate with uh it's been a real collaboration you know I've been over probably once every month a lot of the game team have been to London many times um you know Rob Smallwood as Lacey said you know been around from the very beginning of the band uh visited Vancouver in November uh Tony Newton live sound engineer came over and worked for a few days with our sound guys to make sure that the music was you know how Steve Harris wanted it to be or needed it to be or we all needed it to be to be you know necessary equality so why did we do it I mean really the

fact is that these stories and these characters and these worlds demand uh to be turned into this kind of experience uh and as Lexi said it's really about engaging with the fans in different ways um around you know everything that Maiden is and obviously personally I had a huge amount of interest in doing this and one of the key things for me or one of the most exciting things has really just been able to to bring eggs that everybody knows but then you know there are a lot of additional Eddies coming into the game uh based on you know some of the slightly more obscure characters or whatever but so this opportunity to uh to bring Eddie to life in this way has really been personally very gratifying if you're at the party tonight uh there's a lot more uh examples of some of this key art concept that we've done so hopefully you can make it down to the basement of The Gables and take a look at some of the other stuff that's come out for example here's the clever wind now as far as the game's concerned uh interestingly we decided that not all of

the characters need to be any uh in this case the clairvoyants become female very strong female character within the game so this light's about the key learning and I again I want to go through it really quickly I think the key thing is that as you look at the license you know we've been so lucky in finding an organization that really wanted to meet us halfway in terms of this being a real partnership in collaboration um you know it's obviously not the case that you can take a license and just tack it onto an existing framework and hope for it to work and so you know hopefully this is an example of how you know the IP holder and the band and the music can all work together so that we can create a really compelling uh top-notch game experience um I mean passion projects is an interesting obviously there are dangers around passion projects um you know in terms of sort of going too far with the IP or whatever but again I think you know this has really been a great experience since the team has come together uh not all of them made in fans and so you know from my perspective I've sometimes had to take a

little bit of a backseat to make sure that the game is a great game first and foremost and obviously having Lexi on the on the Phantom side has been really great from that perspective as well all right well so there's lots of opportunities for integration with the tour and lots of opportunities to take part go and have a photo taken with Eddie come to the party and check out uh Ironman legacy.com for more information thank you very much