It's the difference between an icon and an actor: One-dimensional characters like Sonic are being left behind as "cinematic" becomes the buzzword-du-jour in the gaming industry and developers create games designed to evoke emotional responses, not just trigger-twitch reaction times. These highly-rendered and ambient-heavy games, such as the upcoming Apocalypse, Enemy Zero, and Bladerunner, are driving videogames into a realm previously occupied only by film, by creating digital personalities. The games companies are tapping celebrities to make sure the process is done right.
"There aren't any incredible characters right now," says John Spinale, director of Activision's Apocalypse. "Lara Croft is a digital character, but she's not representative of a human being; she's just a character. You're seeing characters and stories, but they're not real deep. That's what we're trying to do."
The appeal of using a star in a videogame is obvious, and actors like Mark Hamill or sports stars have been lending their voices, faces, or endorsements to games for several years now. But this upcoming group of games is looking to go beyond simple celebrity endorsement and one-dimensional characters by attempting to create actual digital personalities with meaty roles to be played by actors.
The November release of Enemy Zero, an Aliens-inspired adventure game created by Japanese artist Kenji Eno for Sega, revolves around what they are terming the first "digital actress." Laura Lewis, the last remaining survivor on a spacecraft who must use her ears to escape the invisible alien, also starred in Eno's previous game, D. Lewis' persona in this game is supposed to invoke a "digital sadness," similar to the emotional response of a film audience.
"Instead of creating a new character, Eno likes putting this same character in each game," says Angela Edwards, a spokeswoman for Sega. "It's less of a sequel than a new role."
To embody Laura Lewis's character, Sega wanted to have a voice that would be recognizable and rich with emotion, but not necessarily identifiable. After brainstorming various actors and singers, they landed on the idea of using hip-hop chanteuse Jill Cuniff of Luscious Jackson - a woman with both a strong melodic voice and a youth culture cach&eacture;. Explains Edwards: "There's something familiar there [in the voice] but you don't know who it is."
Apocalypse has a similar premise - but an even bigger star. Trey Kincaid, the hero, is a renegade nano-technologist fighting the Four Horsemen in a grim world nearing doomsday, as well as a highly-developed character, asserts Spinale, that serves as the player's "virtual buddy." The role was meaty enough to catch the eye of Bruce Willis, who has lent his face, voice, movements, and background to the role of Kincaid, playing "the quintessential action hero."
"If you're trying to tell a story, there's no better way to do it than have a character," says Spinale. "As the artificial intelligence required to run the game gets better, you'll see even more." Not only was the entire game done with motion capture - in contrast to the limiting and expensive full motion video process - but the character runs off a complex AI engine that enables him to smoothly run and react alongside you as your partner.
Motion capture also played a large part in creating more cinematic characters in Westwood Studios' soon-to-be-released Bladerunner, based on the movie and set in LA circa 2019. Donny Blank, senior producer of the game along with Erin Powell, says that with motion capture "you'll see more and more of these virtual characters working out for the filmmaker. Each time you don't have to recapture the performance - you can just use different camera angles to reinterpret the scene."
Westwood intended to blur the lines between the film and the game, making it as "cinematic and realistic as possible" with virtual actors and photo-realistic sets. Several of the key actors from the original movie contributed their voices to lend realism and depth to their digital counterparts in the game (Sean Young also offered herself up for motion-capture). Other characters, including the noirish arch-nemesis and femme fatale Crystal Steele, were entirely generated from scratch and had an entire feature-length screenplay written as blueprints for their characters.
Activision's Spinale asserts that while the "stars" who participated in games in the past have primarily been B-list celebrities, these new games are now getting attention from A-list names. For people like Willis or Cuniff or Young, participating in a game project has several benefits - not only is it a nice change from acting in a feature film, but the time investment is dramatically less, and the indie cred is great.
Of course, real stars don't come cheap - it's estimated that Bruce Willis cost Activision US$1 million to $3 million, and it certainly didn't speed up game production (each screen has to be approved by Willis and his agents, a 15-day process). The slower pace, of course, drives up production values and pushes the cinematic expectations even higher.
Stars and sympathetic characters will only sell so many copies of a game, however - which is, bottom line, still a game. As Activision spokesman Frank Alizaga puts it, "You can have all the marketing in the world, but if the game play isn't good, it's not going to sell."
