Josef Fares: "Hazelight is like a Formula One car today, it drives perfectly"

The often very frank and outspoken founder of Hazelight only has nice things to say about his studio.

Our Spanish editor David Caballero recently visited San Diego Comic-Con Malaga and met lots of entertainment personalities from the film and gaming industries, among others. One of them was Swedish Hazelight founder Josef Fares.

After three major successes with A Way Out, It Takes Two, and most recently Split Fiction, Fares has proven that he understands co-op better than anyone else. One of the reasons for this success, according to Fares, is the incredibly well-oiled Hazelight machine, and when we spoke to him, he compared its efficiency to an F1 car, his enthusiasm unmistakable:

"Hazelight is like a Formula One car today. It drives perfectly. It really is. It's impressive, after 10 years in the studio, how good everybody is feeling, how happy they are. We are like 83 developers, and I'm telling you, everybody's nice. Everybody. We don't have a single one that is weird or crazy. Everybody is nice, I'm telling you."

He goes on to say that it is passion that drives them to greatness:

"And I think that passion is what is showing in our games. People are really feeling that passion. And once you have that energy in the studio, you see it in the game. But also, from a perspective of how it becomes so effective, it's because we have done a lot of games, we know how to do it, we have built the right technology for it, we know how to approach it."

Of course, this doesn't mean there aren't challenges, but with the aforementioned passion and a clear vision, these can also be overcome, and he concludes his reasoning:

"But obviously you do have challenges, but we're just a very focused studio. And we also have a clear vision of what to do, even if we experiment a lot. We have a clear vision and we stick with it. And I think that's very important. That's what makes it more efficient."

Check out the entire interview below.