|
Now that video game revenues
rival the movies, it seems they’re
developing artistic ambition to match
their earning power. Electronic Arts,
one of the major software developers,
is leading that push with The
Godfather: The Game.
EA’s challenge is ensuring the game (due out
in November) is a big enough hit
to justify the money it’s spent on
licensing and production. (The company
won’t divulge numbers.) The objective is to make
the Godfather game
a “killer app,” something that gets
people who’ve never played video
games to start; ideally, to make it so irresistible
that consumers will buy a Playstation
or Xbox for this title alone.
For EA, rendering the saga of the Corleone
crime family has meant rethinking interactive
entertainment.
“Other people’s approach might have been to
build a level-based game with 12
of the missions associated with the film,” says
EA senior Godfather game
producer David DeMartini. “Put
the logo on the box and you’re going
to sell millions of units. Our approach has been
to take a property that’s heavily revered, where
people doubt anybody in the interactive space
can possibly live up to the book and the film,
and take a chance and try and do something innovative.”
Paramount, the studio that produced Francis
Ford Coppola’s mafia trilogy, licensed The
Godfather because it admired EA’s work in
turning The Lord of the Rings movies
into a video game. EA has had to
recreate the streets of New York from the first
two Godfather movies as obsessively
as Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Psycho —
more so, in fact, because they’ve had to simulate
Coppola’s vision, Dean Tavoularis’s art direction
and Gordon Willis’s cinematography frame by frame,
pixel by pixel. They’ve also had to devise new
screenplays that contain all the ambition and agitas of
the original pictures, as well as dozens of plausible
narratives for new characters, narratives that
audience members can determine by playing the
game. Players must make choices: whether to solve
a problem with violence or through negotiation;
whom to make an ally, whom to oppose; which orders
from the Don to carry out and which to delegate
— or avoid.
Philip Campbell’s task as creative director
of content is to make all that come together.
The job draws more on Campbell’s pre-gaming experience
as an architect than his work as the author of
two volumes of what he calls “very bad poetry.”
The architectural background helps him think
spatially about the interconnected stories in
Mario Puzo’s novel and screenplays and Mark Winegardner’s
2004 sequel novel, The Godfather Returns.
“I always liken it to ‘bullet time’ in The
Matrix,” Campbell says. “They take a scene
and freeze it and they zoom around it. The
way I approach something like the scene where
the Don gets shot on Mott Street in Little
Italy is that I freeze it in my head and look
at it spatially, look at all the threads that
come into the scene. How can I have my characters
cross that scene and how do they impact it?
Where they bump in space is where you have
to have an interaction. It’s a very untraditional
way of writing a story, but the story develops
from that interaction.”
The narrative of the novel and the movies is
like a spine, Campbell says, and the story that
each player will write and “live” virtually as
he or she plays follows its own path, intersecting
with the established story at key points. Making
that varied and rich enough to encourage people
to play more than once means writing a number
of different possible courses of action. But
following that impulse too far could mean an
infinite proliferation of stories, and could
bog the narrative momentum down in tangential
dead ends.
“That’s the age-old design dilemma. Creating
a branching-path design, you never can satisfy
everybody; not only does it mean you’re making
all these bits of game that somebody may never
see, but it also means you’re always going to
end up making people unsatisfied if it branches
endlessly. We have a very strong story that we
need to tell — the story from the original Godfather movie
— and we have to get to the end of it and hit
all those points along the way.”
He invokes another film to clarify. “Groundhog
Day is inspiring for the way you can configure
a story over and over and over and over again
in different ways,” he says.
Moral ambiguity and grown-up drama are still
relatively new concepts in video
games, which raises the question: are the traditional
shoot-’em-up scenarios in video games what button-mashers
want, or the result of limited imagination?
James Lileks, a 40-ish blogger and columnist
for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has written
about his yearning for a truly immersive game
experience. But he’s realistic about the hurdles
the Godfather game will have to clear
to connect with his demographic.
“How are older people — folks in their
50s, who don’t read gaming magazines, who aren’t
gamers — going to find out about this title? How [is
EA] going to reach that demographic, and would
those people really be willing to buy a gaming
console for $200 to play one game?” he asks.
“But then, I bought a gaming console for one
reason, Halo 2, so it could happen.”
In addition to mimicking the trilogy’s palette
and art direction, EA got conductor Bill Conti
to record 100 minutes of new musical score, using
composer Nino Rota’s original melodies. Quite
miraculously, EA also got Marlon Brando to reprise
his role as Don Vito Corleone, recording new
dialogue six months before his death. Robert
Duvall and James Caan also reprised their roles
(as Tom Hagen and Sonny Corleone, respectively);
sadly, Al Pacino, who played scion Michael Corleone,
wasn’t intrigued enough by the prospect of a
game version to partake.
Capturing and digitizing those performances
was the responsibility of Dan Michelson and his
motion capture team at EA’s Vancouver studio.
“This really is a marriage of film, video games
and motion capture,” says Michelson. “You’re
focusing more on specific performances and trying
to get the emotion out of the character, not
just the movement.” Doing motion capture for
a sports title like EA’s Madden NFL series
can mean recording 200 moves a day; the Godfather work
was slower — about half that number in a productive
session. First, they recorded the voices of Brando,
Duvall and Caan. Next, they found body actors
who could match the facial and vocal performances.
(“Stage actors are generally better at that than
people with more film experience,” Michelson
says.) Often, it takes as many as three thespians
to create a single character; one actor does
the voice, another the facial expressions and
a third the body movements.
Back in April, Coppola made his feelings known
about EA’s endeavour. “I had absolutely nothing
to do with the game and I disapprove,” he said.
“I think it’s a misuse of film.” (Audiences who
endured The Godfather: Part III could
make the same charge.) EA’s DeMartini maintains
the game builders met with Coppola and that he
was “gracious”; while the director did not want
to be involved in creating the game, he did share
archival material. And his objections can only
help sell the game.
The Electronic Arts crew took on The Godfather because
of its enduring power as a work of art, its cultural
impact and the breadth of its appeal; there aren’t
many movies that resonate equally with hip-hop
stars, teens, people in their 50s, as well as
both genders.
The Godfather: The Game
has just
come through its first public test, a truncated
teaser version shown to select industry people
at this month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo
(E3) in Los Angeles. The reviews were positive.
Of course, because the members of the EA crew
are working on a classic mob story that embodies
some of the oldest dilemmas regarding ambition,
they’re aware of the potential pitfalls of hubris.
“One of the things we showed at E3
is how the player interacts with the famous scene
where the Don gets shot in Little Italy early in
the movie,” Philip Campbell says. “One of the choices
the player could take is not to get involved, to
walk away.” Shifting the discussion to the real
world, Campbell says, “But in our industry, in
our business, that [choice] has to be a failure
state.” |
