Take three game development veterans, who have worked on classic games such as Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Time Splitters and Crysis at the likes of Rare and Free Radical Design, and you might expect them to be working on the next, greatest shooter.

Not so for Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley and Lee Musgrave.

Having had enough of big companies and big projects, the coding, design and art triumvirate are now operating as Crash Lab and working on games for iOS.

We caught up with Ellis to find out why, and what we should expect.

Pocket Gamer: Crash Lab is full of experienced console developers, so what's attracted you to iOS development?

Steve Ellis: Personally, there are several reasons. First and foremost, I think it's important to be doing something that you enjoy and making the kind of games that you would actually play.

If you're not doing that, you're probably going to make games that nobody wants to play. These days I don't spend much time playing first-person shooters, but I've probably spend hundreds of hours playing mobile games in the past year. I guess I've become a casual gamer.

But also, over the past couple of years, I spent a while playing about with various different platforms - Facebook, Android, Unity, Flash, even Kindle - looking for a platform that I would enjoy working on.

While they all have their advantages and reasons for existing, iOS is the best platform by a long way.

It's so well thought out, so easy to work with, it doesn't get in your way, the tools are great and it's possible to achieve a lot very quickly. It feels less like work so it's easier to get more done.

You speak on your website of throwing off the shackles of traditional console development. What's wrong with consoles?

Console games are getting bigger and bigger, costing more and more to make, which makes it impossible to make them without first convincing a publisher to spend a 7-figure or more commonly an 8-figure sum to fund development.

With such large sums of money involved, publishers' appetites for risk are reducing and games are becoming less creative. It's the reason why a game like TimeSplitters 4 will never get funded.

Mobile games, on the other hand, get worse as they get bigger and more complex. By their nature they are best when they are simple, short experiences that you can use to fill a few spare minutes here and there. They don't feel the need to justify their existence by telling stories. They live or die based on how enjoyable they are to play.

There is also the issue of personal contribution to a game. On a typical 100+ team making a triple-A console shooter, the average contribution that anyone makes to the game is 1 percent or less. That's no fun.

You don't have a sense of ownership of what you are working on because you are such a small part of the overall team. Mobile games can be made with just a few people, which is a much more enjoyable and productive way to work.

You've announced that your first release will be Twist Pilot, a mechanically simple puzzler. Isn't this something of a departure?

Absolutely, but that isn't a bad thing. I've always thought that it is a great shame when people are burdened with the expectation that they will continue to only do whatever they did in the past, and I think that the movie industry is better for Spielberg not having spent the past 30 years only churning out remakes and derivatives of E.T.

Over 15 years of making console games, we've accumulated a long list of things that we would like to do.

Some are big ideas and some are small, and they span many genres and platforms. Personally I've always liked side-scrolling shooters. I have an R-Type arcade machine at home and I've always wanted to make a game in that genre. Now I can.

I always felt that by joining the industry at the start of the 32/64-bit generation, I'd missed out on the golden age that was the 8- and 16-bit generation. The mobile games industry feels somewhat like to a return to those days.

Even at Free Radical we had a number of non-FPS concepts in development but we were never able to take them forward because of publishers' expectation that we would continue to only make shooters.

It's great now to not have that limitation, and I'm looking forward to pushing into other genres with our future games. Variety is a good thing - it keeps you from running out of inspiration.

Crash Lab is a small studio working on three games. Do you find that limits what you can produce?

Great games are made when the people making them are enjoying what they are doing. However, like any creative endeavour, there will always be ups and downs.

I've found it tremendously useful to be able to just switch to another project when I wasn't feeling inspired or didn't have an immediate solution to a problem. I think the games will be better as a result.

Having said all of that, though, as we're approaching completion of Twist Pilot, we're 100 percent focused on that now and will resume work on the other games after we're done.

Do you have plans to bring your games to other mobile platforms?

For the time being, our preference is to focus on the games themselves rather than the intricacies and complications of developing on multiple platforms, so we're going to launch on iOS only initially and then look at platforms such as Android later.

When can we expect to see Crash Lab titles on the App Store?

With the disclaimer that we're only going to release them when we're 100 percent happy, we ought to be ready to hand the first one (Twist Pilot) over to Apple in a couple of months - but after that we are entering the unknown.

Hopefully Apple's approval process will be no more complicated than what we've been used to with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, but time will tell.

Thanks to Steve for his time.

You can see what Crash Lab gets up to via its website.

Or check out what Twist Pilot looks like below.