Around the room, smiles. Despite what their parents had said, here was somebody telling them that they could actually make money playing video games. But a question hung in the air. Finally, the beanpole kid in the red sweater voiced it. “Like, would I have to move to P.E.I.?” he asked. “Permanently?”

 

It’s a question that Ayre, 43, had asked himself two and a half years ago as he debated keeping his high-paying but increasingly unsatisfying job in California and starting a new games studio thousands of miles away from the rest of the industry. “Most video game companies are on the West Coast, so that’s where most of the talent is,” explains Ayre. “Attracting talent to P.E.I. was one of the biggest concerns.”

 

An ex-pat Newfoundlander, Ayre moved west during the tech boom of the early 1990s. With ambitions to create original new games, including one with an Atlantic Canadian angle, and lured by the P.E.I. government’s GamePlan portfolio of new media assistance, Ayre has risked his credibility and his own money on an unlikely venture in an even more unlikely place.

 

However, there was a surprise waiting for him on the so-called “gentle island”: Prince Edward Island is reinventing itself as a hotbed of video game design. “P.E.I. is ahead of the curve on video games and new media production in general,” says Gordon Whittaker, the director of the Atlantic region for Telefilm Canada, the federal agency that promotes the country’s audiovisual industry. When Telefilm put out the call to video game developers in 2006, offering millions of dollars to help them create a public-private partnership for Canadian video games, Whittaker was encouraged by the response from Atlantic Canada. “Most of the applications are coming from P.E.I.,” he says. “We knew about Collideascope and HB Studios in Nova Scotia, but it was clear by the numbers that P.E.I. is where most of Atlantic Canada’s new games companies are based.”

 

So when Other Ocean Interactive set up shop, Ayre’s recruitment worries proved unfounded. “It’s been surprising, but I realize now that recruiting is equally hard in the Bay area, or in Los Angeles and Seattle,” says Ayre. “People cross the street at the drop of the hat in those places. The talent base is huge, but retention is difficult.” In P.E.I., he doesn’t have to worry about constant churn. “We’ve got people who want to stick around,” says Ayre. “The company has grown to 29 employees in less than two years. I’d have a hard time growing a studio to this size this quickly in any of the major centres.”

Building a business is one thing; establishing it as a success, quite another. This fall Other Ocean Interactive frantically worked to meet a crucial November deadline: finishing a new version of classic hit game Mortal Kombat for Nintendo DS. If it’s a hit, Other Ocean Interactive gets some much-needed credibility. If it bombs, there are many other companies that would like to take a crack at it.

 

Ayre and his crew have been tweaking the game to find that delicate balance:it must be challenging enough that winning feels like an accomplishment, but not so tough that players will quit in frustration. It also must look good, sound great, and play smoothly. At the same time, it needs memorable characters, catchy animations, and an engaging plot. “I think it’s harder to make a successful video game than to make a successful movie,” says Ayre. “If a movie flops, you’ve still got DVD sales or broadcast sales. In video games, you’ve got no second chance to make your money back.” 

 

While Other Ocean Interactive is new to video games, Ayre is a veteran, but it was only by chance that that he broke into the business. A member of the well-knownSt. John’s merchant clan, in the early 1990s he founded a company specializing in Macintosh software. “We stumbled on a technology that allowed Macs to run old arcade games,” he recalls. “It was lucky.”

 

Lucky, perhaps, but Ayre seized on his good fortune and, in 1994, inked a deal as an independent developer with Williams, a giant in the arcade industry. Soon kids were playing such Williams classics as Defender, Joust, and Robotron on their parents’ computers. Prior to this, he had moved to California and founded a company in 1992 that is now called Foundation 9 Studios. “Williams hired us to design their titles for PCs and then for PlayStation, Xbox—every game platform since,” says Ayre. “It’s been a 15-year relationship and the key to my career.”

 

Ayre has helped build Foundation 9 into what he calls “the largest independent video game developer in the world.” With almost 1,000 employees, it designs and develops dozens of games every year. But the more Ayre concentrated on the corporate side of the company, the less he was able to focus on the fun stuff: the entrepreneurial side of business. So when he heard about the incentives being offered by P.E.I. and Telefilm, he took the plunge. “I wanted to work again with a small dynamic group of people,” he says. “And as a veteran of this industry, I think we’ve got a real chance of making it.”