NEW YORK – Developer Team Bondi is further blurring the line between video games and Hollywood with its first collaboration with Rockstar Games. LA Noire is not only set in 1940s Hollywood, the game also employs a cast of 400 actors and uses performance capture technology similar to what James Cameron employed for Avatar. But perhaps most importantly, the game seamlessly blends a 2,200 page script within the interactive story.
“One of the things we wanted to do was move away from exposition cinematics,” said Rob Nelson, art director at Rockstar Games. “We incorporated the exposition into the gameplay, which blurs the lines between story and game. There’s a lot of dialogue and exposition while you’re playing the game. This was a pivotal focus for us and I think we’ve done it reasonably successfully.”
Hollywood, after all, was the inspiration for the new game on many levels. The game recreates an eight square mile section of Los Angeles for players to explore. There are 20 ripped-from-the-headlines (from the 1940s) murders and crimes featured in the game. And players can explore every nook and cranny of LA Noire in a free roaming mode that offers up random crime to combat and an intimate look at Hollywood’s underbelly.
Brandon McNamara, game director at Team Bondi, said that The Naked City, both the 1948 film noir and the 1950s TV series, served as the inspiration for this five-years-in-the-making game.
“’The Naked City’ invented the police procedural and we’re following those guidelines with LA Noire,” said McNamara. “Anyone who watches a ‘Law & Order’ show today will understand the format. You turn up at a crime scene, you meet a patrolman, he gives you a heads up, you speak to some witnesses and then your case breaks out into leads.”
The Oscar-winning film, Chinatown, also played an inspirational role for McNamara, who wrote the equivalent of two seasons of a TV series for this game.
“Chinatown, which is one of my favorite films, is interesting because, while it’s set in a slightly earlier period in Los Angeles’ history; it does a good job of showing you this burgeoning, growing LA,” said McNamara. “But then you see the underbelly of what was actually taking place to make that growth happen. As a writer, I wanted to explore what post-World War II LA was like in this game.”
The LA in this game is much more reminiscent of the London McNamara explored in two Getaway games. There’s the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but the players will explore the seedier side of the city as they track down suspects and clues for each of the missions. A central part of bringing this open world to life was getting a cast of believable characters. Using the next generation of technology that McNamara and his Team Soho London studio created at Sony, every character a player interacts with in LA Noire is a real actor.
“Certain actors that had worked on video games five years ago came onto the set (in Culver City, CA) and were surprised by the technology,” said Michael McGrady (“Southland”), who brings LAPD Homicide Detective Rusty Galloway to life in the game. “I used to do games before and it was just sitting in a booth and reading lines. With LA Noire, we had a giant motion capture stage and we had to act with other actors. Then for the Motion Scan portion, which we did later, there’s a camera on your face that’s recording the facial performance and there’s a microphone for your voice.”
The end result is that every actor’s voice, movement and face has been captured in the game. So behind every waitress, patrolman and bookie, there’s a real actor who spent significant time undergoing two complex processes to bring this game to life.
“The technology is advancing pretty rapidly,” admitted Nelson. “We used to only be able to do motion capture on a platform that was three feet high. Now we’re building giant rigs with lights to the roof and big staircases.”
Nelson explained that if someone walked into the Culver Studio studio that Rockstar built for this game (and future projects), it would be very familiar to anyone who’s been on a film or television set.
“We’ve gone from having a really scaled-down spare crew of two or three people to having dozens of people running around on set dealing with gear, and wires from all the headsets the actors are wearing, and actually building and tearing down sets. The spandex suits and crude environment is a bit abstract, but films like Avatar used the same approach. So actors are getting used to this.”
At the end of the day, all of the technology and acting and scriptwriting should be transparent to the player, just as a good movie transports audiences into its characters and story. The one area where the Hollywood connection doesn’t interfere is in the gameplay. Rockstar has spent decades fine-tuning and expanding its gameplay. And LA Noire was developed over five years because it was essential to get the gameplay to work right.
“There are the requisite car chases, shootouts, and things in this game, but even better, there’s some intellectual involvement,” said McGrady. “It really is interactive. You have to solve the crime. You have to follow the clues and avoid the red herrings. There’s a cerebral aspect to it that I really enjoyed. I thought it pretty fascinating in that respect.”
Looking ahead, McNamara is already pushing this technology forward. He envisions a day very soon where the lines between traditional linear and interactive entertainment will completely blur.
"People focus on transmedia but I think they’re slightly missing the point in thinking that you have to make a film and a game all from the same story, but with different productions,” said McNamara. “What I’m saying is it will be possible to make the same things from the same production.”
So perhaps LA Noire 2 will be released with a Hollywood movie or television show.
