Will Sony get away with it?
It might look as good as a movie, but a £5m blockbuster game set in London
still has plenty of bullets to dodge, writes Jack Schofield
Thursday September 12, 2002
The Guardian
It\'s the biggest videogame ever produced in the UK and, at a cost of well
over £5m, the most expensive in Europe. It\'s the closest thing yet to
something programmers have been attempting for a decade: a game that looks
and plays like a movie. It\'s full of 18-rated, F-word swearing and
violence, which will prevent millions of young PlayStation 2 owners from
(legally) buying it. And its programmers hope it will claim the coveted
number one spot in the Christmas videogames chart... if they finish it in
time. But if it flops, game protagonist Mark Hammond may not be the only
character who needs to make a quick getaway.
The one thing we know is that almost everyone who works in London, and many
of those who have visited the Great Wen, will want to try it. The Getaway,
Sony Computer Entertainment\'s next blockbuster, is not set in some mythical
game landscape, but in an amazingly detailed London. You can commandeer a
black cab and drive it down Farringdon Road from the Guardian to Sony\'s
offices on Great Marlborough Street, and it is recognisably a graphical
version of the real thing.
Indeed, in some ways it is "better". You can drive over pavements and the
wrong way up one-way streets, while treating bollards - and pedestrians -
like skittles. When the cab starts smoking, simply leap out, wave your
pistol in the air and commandeer a fast car. But even if you play the
law-abiding way, you still get there quicker.
Realistic graphics have been done before: modern motor racing games have
accurate tracks, for example. But Team Soho, the Sony studio responsible
for The Getaway, has modelled 21 square miles of central London. This
mammoth task has taken two years and more than 15,000 photos. The Getaway
does not have all the side streets, but you can turn whichever way you
like, and explore the city as a virtual tourist.
It is not completely accurate because London changes too quickly. Les
Miserables is still there, but some of the shows in the program\'s
theatreland have closed, for example. Brendan McNamara, the game\'s
producer, calls it "the Starbucks factor."
"We have our fair share of Starbucks," he says, "but I couldn\'t say we have
every single one."
When a demo version of The Getaway was unveiled recently at ECTS, the
European Computer Trade Show, almost everyone I watched played it as a
driving game. It isn\'t. Or at least, it is also a mission-based shooting
game with movie-style characters and plotting. Mark Hammond, ex-bank
robber, is the first character you play. The police think you have murdered
your wife and kidnapped your child; in fact, your kid has been nabbed by
Charlie Jolson, an East End gang boss. You have to do what he says to stand
any chance of seeing your offspring alive, and you start by torching a
restaurant on Frith Street, Soho. Hence all the violence and swearing.
McNamara, who comes from Australia, says the game was inspired by the great
tradition of British gangster movies. Influences included "Michael Caine in
Get Carter, and the Hoskins character in The Long Good Friday, and the
black humour in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," he says. You could
throw in The Sweeney and another popular movie, Mona Lisa. On the big
screen, all this might not attract much comment. In a videogame, it is
almost certain to outrage the more conservative newspapers, like its
precursor, Take 2 Interactive\'s Grand Theft Auto 3.
David Wilson, the Sony PR man who will have to deal with the brunt of the
attack, says The Getaway "is quite a bold statement for us, but we\'re
catering to the biggest part of our market. The average age of PlayStation
2 owners is 23." True, but the peak is more like 14. Although the game will
have an 18 certificate, many of them will want to play The Getaway, and
parents will have a hard time stopping them.
In The Getaway\'s defence, its language is the language of the streets,
albeit the rougher streets. "It deals with difficult issues, such as
racism," says McNamara, "and the reason we\'re doing it is because we think
it is true to the characters in the story." A filmmaker or novelist would
claim no less.
And while there is a lot of gangster-style mayhem, I did not see any of the
gratuitous gore that features in some other games. When Hammond takes a few
hits, for example, you notice the back of his jacket start to redden.
Leaning against a wall for a few minutes usually helps him recover enough
to carry on.
The reddening is a key to the way things are done in The Getaway. It avoids
having any kind of "health-meter" on the screen. Similarly, there is no
on-screen map to help you navigate London. However, if you need to turn
left to complete an assignment, your car\'s left indicator blinks. There are
no labels to show where your car is damaged, it just becomes increasingly
difficult to drive. The absence of such traditional game furniture is the
first thing that helps make The Getaway look more like a movie.
The second thing is the almost complete absence of loading screens. In many
games there is a pause when you go from, say, the street into a warehouse,
while the new scene data is loaded. The Getaway doesn\'t work like that. It
just streams data off the DVD all the time. It doesn\'t often stop to load
because loading never stops.
This applies to the cut-scenes that tell the story, too. In many games, the
cut-scenes are rendered separately, then run like videos. In The Getaway,
the cut-scenes are done using the game engine. It means the visual quality
is lower, but then, they have the same visual quality as the rest of the
game. It provides a more seamless experience.
Gavin Moore, the chief animator, says The Getaway has 34 cut-scenes with a
total running time of about 75 minutes. "That\'s the equivalent of an
animated feature, but whereas a feature would have 400 animators, we have
eight!" But the computer animation was not done from scratch. The team used
character actors, capturing the movement of up to five performers at once,
in real time, in a room-sized magnetic field. Each actor wore an Ascension
Technology MotionStar wireless tracker and, because of McNamara\'s
conviction that people "talk with their hands", a pair of 5DT data gloves.
Computers wirelessly captured each actor\'s movements, so the data could be
used to animate the graphical characters.
The developers went through the usual movie processes: writing a script,
casting, getting props and sets, rehearsals, performance. In this case, the
actors also got weapons training from the Metropolitan Police, who also
provided some police voices for the game. And while the actors were not
performing for cameras, Moore did capture the sound using directional radio
mics. "It meant we didn\'t have to get them back into a booth to do
voiceovers," he says, "and that makes a serious difference. If you just
listened to the sound, it sounded like a Radio 4 play. That got the team
really excited."
