The game was very much a liberal person's response to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. When I was entertaining lofty thoughts, the idea was to create an experience that would try to make the players--whom I mostly assumed would be of the Western world--feel what it must be like to have their own homeland occupied by another country. SCEA and I went back and forth over if we would ever say it was CHINA vs. AMERICA as they were a bit worried about being so literal, but that fight had not yet occurred when we pulled the plug.

As for Phil (Harrison, Sony president of worldwide studios), his biggest issue was thinking a game so epic should be on PS3. But I was always pushing for PSP, saying that Heartland should do for the PSP what Halo did for the Xbox. But as you know, Phil's a total supporter of innovation and games as art and so he was more than willing to see if I had anything worthy to say, as well as the talents to say it through the medium.

If the team would have been the right size, we would still be in production with Heartland today. That was the main reason we killed it, not enough folks to make the game. Granted, I would be 40 pounds overweight again, sad, depressed, and maybe even divorced, as it would have consumed me just like God of War did. But that aside, the main issue that made it clear that we could not continue was that WarHawk kept taking our team members as they were further along in production and were the top priority.