Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Out of your body of work, "Target: Terror" reminds me the most of "NARC" in its topicality.
Exactly. It's similar to that concept, where "NARC" was you're going after the drug dealers in a very Reagan-esque way. The motto was: "Say no, or die!" That was a lot of fun. Here, you're defending America. It's funny, the marketing guys were saying, "Well, you know, we can't put the White House in there. That's just not going to work." And I go: "You know what? Do you have a problem defending your country? Maybe you need a new country." It's almost like we don't realize how lucky we are and what an easy life we have here in America and all the great things we have. Yet, it seems like we're not even willing to defend our country.
We're all a bunch of spoiled brats, if you get right down to it. You just want to buy the meat in the store, you don't want to see Bambi getting cut up [laughs]. You want to protest fur walking around in your leather shoes. You want to talk the environment as you drive around in your Hummer 2. We're a study in contradictions, I think. The ultimate spoiled brats of the world.
Did you catch any flak for "NARC" when it came out?
We got some publicity. It was the first game, I guess, where you exploded people into their parts. It was some extreme prejudice in the prosecution of the drug dealers. Another tag line was: "Protect the innocent and punish the guilty." That was controversial. I think people were a little put aback by some of the visual violence and so forth. It's amazing, when you look at today with games like "House of the Dead" and any number of titles. The "NARC" logo had this splash of red across it and Nintendo wouldn't do that, so they made it yellow. It looked like somebody urinated on the box. Couldn't do that, you know? Look at Nintendo [now]. A few years back they released "Conker's Bad Fur Day" -- adult-themed pornography.
Is there a family-friendly option on "Target: Terror"? I've been told there is an option to turn on green blood?
Yeah, there is an option to make it into paintball, so it's a kind of nonviolent version. There is that option for those areas where you have young kids and so forth.
Really, what it's about is the five people that actually send the 3 million letters to their congressman. There's five people and Senator Lieberman that are all upset about this stuff. It amazes me because you go on the Internet and anybody can access just horrendous, horrible shit. It's the most disgusting stuff you would ever see in the world and totally without censorship in your home. You look at cable TV. There's just an open sewer going into people's living rooms. It amazes me that video games are the whipping boy of society when there's I don't know how many other things out there, but they always come back to [video games].
You think of Columbine. Why did those guys kill their fellow students? Was it that they played video games? It had nothing to do with the fact that the guy had seven shotguns under his bed, he made bombs in his basement, and they were practicing with guns all the time. No, it was the fact that they played video games, which is the same as the other 20 million kids or 50 million kids playing video games. Video games aren't what were different about those guys. What was different was that the guy had seven shotguns under his bed. But we can't talk about guns. We can't talk about gun control -- we can't deal with that. Nobody ever got killed by a joystick.
Although more and more adults are starting to play, it's something that only kids do, so it's safe to ban it. If it's something an adult wanted to do, like pornography, then: "No, we can't ban that!" But if it's something that only kids do, then OK, let's regulate that. I remember there was a time when they were saying, "People are buying drugs in arcades! Let's shut 'em down because young people are there and sometimes they buy drugs!" If that was the criterion for shutting places down, we'd shut down every high school in the country [laughs]. There's always this cry like: "We've gotta do something!" So, you look for some whipping boy, something that you don't care about and the people that care about it don't vote and you go after that. And it continues onward.
You want to look at something that's screwing up kids' lives, drugs are a horrendously horrible, horrible problem. They're a very real problem that we haven't been able to deal with. You can go to a store and stop selling video games, so it's: "We did something! These kids aren't playing video games!" But now they're spending their money on drugs or something. We have these horrible, horrible problems in society that we just don't seem to be able to get traction on and so we look for other scapegoats.
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