Remember that Windows Phone Summit that took place in San Francisco last month? It centered around Windows Phone 8, aka Apollo. Microsoft chose to reveal a new Apollo-specific Xbox Live game on-stage during the event: Fairway Solitaire from Big Fish Games. Big Fish is a major producer of casual games on PC and other mobile platforms, so the developer’s signing on to support Windows Phone is a great thing.
As it happens, Big Fish was on-hand at Casual Connect Seattle last week to reveal their new cloud gaming service, Big Fish Unlimited. Of course we took advantage of their presence to set up an exclusive interview with Patrick Wylie, VP of Big Fish Games Studios. Head past the break to learn just what Patrick’s team has in store for Windows Phone and Windows 8!
As you can tell from the video, my penchant for extremely lengthy and detailed text interviews applies to on-camera interviews as well. In fact, the interview actually ran so long that we had to break it up into two parts! Thankfully Patrick was extremely knowledgeable about his game, making for a fascinating conversation.
Topics discussed in part one include:
- A brief history of Big Fish Games
- What is Fairway Solitaire?
- Fairway Solitaire comes to Windows 8 too
- Why Big Fish chose Fairway Solitaire as its first Windows Phone game
- Differences between Fairway Solitaire on tablets and phones
- Experienced and inexperienced solitaire players’ reactions to Fairway Solitaire
- Windows Phone development details
- Fairway Solitaire update and downloadable content plans
- And more, baby!
Fairway Solitaire is actually quite a large and addictive game. Whether or not you care for vanilla Solitaire games, you’ll likely find Fairway’s puzzle mechanics quite addictive.
The Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 versions of Fairway Solitaire are expected to release near the launch of both operating systems. If you’d like to sample the game right now, try this free Flash version or pick up the Windows 7 version from the official Fairway website.
Check out part two of our Fairway Solitaire interview!
