A portion of a GameZone interview with Prizefighter’s Matthew Seymour…
GameZone: Give us some history on Don King’s connection with the game. How much has he been involved with the development process?
Matthew Seymour: Don’s been massively involved. From the start, we met with Don a number of days – the writers and I and designers – spent three days with him straight, hours and hours. Don works crazy hours, he’s just like us and the press. He burns the midnight oil. It kind of began with hearing a lot of stories from Don. And not only Don but the people that work with Don. Surprisingly enough, most of his vice presidents of broadcasting and operations are women, so that’s always nice.
There was that element, and then there was the element of Don being in this mockumentary, if you will. Don was one of the stars of this mockumentary, or sports documentary. He did tons of voice-over work. And we were always showing him stuff throughout the development cycle. Not only of himself but of what we were doing with the boxers. And he threw in ideas for what we should do with the game with his boxers and others that we had. It was a lot of back and forth and give and take.
Don has a massive, massive [boxing] library, probably one of the biggest in the world, and looked at what we could use to tell the story and also as unlockable as you progress in the game and in the career mode. I can’t count how many times I’ve been on the phone [with Don] or how many times I’ve been at his office in Florida working with him. It was really fantastic and a lot of fun ‘cause he’s an extremely funny man. A great time to be had.
[The hardest part was implementing] all the stories, all the stuff. Don’s been promoting for over 30 years now. How do you implement all these fantastic stories? Some are too funny or too crazy. I mean, he told us loads of stories about dealing with the boxers’ wives or girlfriends, and some are a bit salacious and could never be put in unless we were an M-rated or even an AO game. But that was probably the hardest part – just not having enough time and people in our development cycle to put everything in that we would have loved to have.
