Tuesday, May 13, 2008
You've had a, to put it mildly, pretty good run of success in the arcade and you're working on a new game right now called "Target: Terror." Is that right?
That's correct. When you're doing a title, I think you want to do something that people care about, that creates some controversy, that has an impact on the marketplace. The biggest problem today is everybody is just so deluged with crap. There's 3,000 channels of everything out there and there's just a million games where you're running around in tights with a sword and you're playing in 1542. After awhile, people are like: "Who gives a shit what happened in 1542?" Or some fantasy of what should have happened in 1542. You want to do something that people can relate to more, and I think the whole terrorism thing is really, really scary stuff. We are probably more gravely threatened as a world today than in many, many years -- certainly since the darkest hours of the Cold War -- with the whole nuclear genie coming out of the bottle. It's funny, we're all just sitting around waiting for the bomb to go off [laughs]. It's so scary and so horrible, we don't even want to contemplate it. I think we're almost in denial about this whole thing.
It's interesting that no one really has made a game -- particularly an arcade-based game -- like this before. You'd think it'd be a natural topic for a lot of games. There are many games that do deal with terrorism, but they're sort of veiled in a military perspective like "Rainbow Six" or "Splinter Cell" or those types of games. From what perspective does "Target: Terror" unfold?
It's inspired, of course, by the whole Sept. 11 thing. And it's like: "OK, what's the next attack?" There's a mission where terrorists are sabotaging the Golden Gate Bridge so you've got to get out there and retake the Golden Gate Bridge. When the initial Sept. 11 thing came out there was a lot of "Oh my God! They're going to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge!" And then there were mayors of suburban towns who were going, "I need security! They're going to come after Mayor Franks of Goodville!"
It is, in some ways, a paranoid vision, but there are such vulnerabilities. It's interesting, we were out doing some video for the game in San Francisco, filming parts of the bridge and so forth, and I guess a citizen actually reported our license plate number to the FBI. We got a call from the FBI wondering what we were doing there and we told them what we were doing and I said, you know, it probably is pretty vulnerable. You look at this bundle of cables 3 or 4 feet thick and if somebody got a big enough bomb, you could take down the whole bridge pretty easily.
Our whole society is based on a peaceful world. We have such a fragile system and we are very, very vulnerable. We were worried about people poisoning the water and doing this and that. There's any number of things that could happen if you had a foe who was completely merciless and would stop at nothing -- there's just any number of heinous acts that could be done.
The whole "Target: Terror" thing is: "Oh my God, they're striking the Golden Gate Bridge!" There's another mission where they're taking over the Los Alamos Nuclear Test Facility and there's a third mission where they're invading an airport. The final mission is inspired by the Sept. 11 hijacking where there was a flight that went down in Pennsylvania and we really don't know what happened. There was obviously some heroic action and it never made its target. There's always the speculation: Where was that going? Was it going to the White House or to the Capitol? The final mission is a hijacking very similar to that where the plane is headed for the White House and you've got to stop it. That's the game in a nutshell.
Were you worried about getting so close to reality?
I think the team was all for it. Some of the marketing guys and stuff [laughs] were like: "Well, should we do this? Is this kind of too much out there?" But I think it's something people care about and something that is the real deal. Somehow we just live in denial of the whole thing. Sept. 11 almost reminds me of a bad software programmer. You're working with this guy and he's doing the software for your game and the thing crashes and the guy goes: "It didn't crash." "Yeah, it did. I was just playing the game and it crashed." He's like: "No, no it didn't." You're like: "Yes, it did!" And he goes: "No, you hit the wrong button. It was your fault! Try it again. It's working fine now. Look at that ..." and starts it up again.
It's almost like Sept. 11 is a software glitch where you go: "Yeah, you know, that never happened! Ah, nah, forget it." Some of the thoughts are just so unspeakable and so scary that you don't want to spend your life worried about all this stuff.
I think a lot of people have probably been secretly wanting a game like this, but would be too afraid to say so.
Yeah, and it's kind of a Rambo-esque way of striking back at the terrorists. The sad thing is we still haven't caught Osama bin Laden. I don't know if we're any closer to addressing the problem than we were before because the threat is so dispersed and so amorphous. All the terrorists aren't just lining up and saying, "Here I am, come get me." It's the type of threat that is going to be there forever ... for a long time. It's sad. It brings up almost the inherent -- I don't want to get religious on you -- the inherent evil part of man. Computer viruses are a very similar thing. Why would anybody create a virus whose only aim is to make people suffer? It just shows the existence of evil and that it's a part of mankind. I think if you get enough people in the world, a certain percentage of them are going to be evil. It's almost a numbers game. To me, the scariest thing about this whole terrorist thing is as technology advances it gives one person the ability to do greater and greater damage.
Are you worried about a backlash or a controversy of some sort surrounding the game? It is such a sensitive issue ...
We certainly tried to avoid any kind -- we probably should have done this to create more publicity -- but we avoided any kind of ethnic stereotype and anything like that and decided to take a little bit of the high road there. I don't know if it's really going to be all that controversial. Who knows? It's just dealing with the evil nature of terrorism, but not putting it specifically in the context of nationalities or causes or things like that.
How realistic is the game?
We took the latest 3-D rendering techniques -- shading, lighting and all that good stuff -- and then we added to that a photo-realistic motion-capture technology so that people appear photo-realistically in the game. They're not polygons. It is pretty amazing. It's scary when you see the reality of the whole thing. We felt that it's just an insult to the players to have these polygon puppets that everybody knows are fake [laughs]. We wanted to do something that was more interesting and more real. I'm tired of -- and everybody is -- tired of these polygon rag-doll people that just don't seem to have any reality.
You've been market-testing "Target: Terror." How's that been going? Are people into the game?
I think people are intrigued by the game. Obviously, the eye candy is an attraction. You have all these fantasies about how people are going to play your game and all the depth you put in there and your great moral story and everything and it seems like actually what people really do is they just enjoy shooting guys in the nuts [laughs]. It's certainly a great frustration to me, but people will play the game in the way they want to play the game. As a game designer, you have to be willing to step back. It is an interactive medium and the players take it over. It's not like a movie where you can call all of the shots ahead of time. It's an interactive medium and the player is the other half of the equation.
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