A Word With Brendan McNamara (Features)

Fennec Fox, GamePro

04/11/2003 13:42:20

If it wasn't for a little game called Grand Theft Auto III, The Getaway would've been instantly hailed as the most innovative game ever created. Unfortunately, Team Soho's epic project has been delayed since the beginning of the 21st century. Oh dear. Now Sony finds itself trying to convince gamers who've enjoyed firebombing street hookers for the past two years that free-roam driving games don't have to include cartoon stories or wacky radio stations. Or a map, even.

Despite the bold design moves The Getaway makes (there are no on-screen displays whatsoever), the game's become a smash in Europe, selling out its initial shipment of 400,000 copies in the U.K. alone. To celebrate the U.S. release, we had a chat with Brendan McNamara, director of the Getaway crew at Team Soho. His project's been through hell and back, but he's still a very personable guy, and he didn't even flinch when we told him that we couldn't really understand what anyone was saying in his game. Being a criminal in England must have terrible effects on one's accent.

Q: So around what time did the Getaway project begin in earnest?

Brendan McNamara: It would be about three and a half years ago. That was when we just switched over from messing around with the PS one to the PS2. We had a couple of devkits and we built Piccadilly Circus, basically, and then everyone said "Look at this," so... the question was whether we could make a whole game that way.

Q: Was that the hardest part of the project, the scale issues of building this whole city?

B: Yeah; you start building down one road and you start building down another road and you have to start wondering where to stop. If that bit's real, than this other bit has to be real. The art team brought a map to me and said "We're doing this," and to be honest I thought they were insane. I said to them "This is just ridiculous," because they had to make this in less than a year. And they couldn't. (laughs) We were almost a year late on that part of it, but it was still worth it.

Q: So if I went down to the bookstore and bought a London street map, would it give me an advantage in the game?

B: It would, definitely. We got a lot of people who asked us why there isn't just a map in the pause menu, and that was probably a good call; a lot of people asked for that. But whenever you develop for a console, there are always a lot of technical constraints. We had tons of animations, and [if we put in a map] it'd probably add half a megabyte to the [size of] the menus, which we could've used to preload the city as you're driving alone.

Q: Do you think The Getaway really pushes the limits of PS2 technology, then?

B: Even now we've looked at the game engine we had, and some of the things I asked for at the start but couldn't get are easy to do now because people simply know more about the system. Also, we're only just starting to use the Performance Analyzer [a PS2 development tool that helps programmers see how well their code is using the system]. You remember how it seemed like the PS2 had that first set of games, then it had Gran Turismo 3 and everyone said "Whoa," right? That's because they had access to the Analyzer. A lot of people are finally getting the boards this year and next year, so there's still a lot of power to be found in there. We saw with The Getaway that the code's pushing the Graphics Synthesizer as hard as possible, but we've still got some CPU time left, so we have some overhead on the machine. It's just a matter of being clever in how you use it.

Q: Could you tell us about the process of using real actors in the game?

B: Well, as I said, we built Piccadilly Circus and that looked hugely realistic. We already had the cars in by then, too; cars were something we already knew about, having done Porsche Challenge and a bunch of other games on the PS1. So we felt that we had the realism down pat, but we wanted to do something new, so we blended a couple of different genres—racing and on-foot action. The thing was, you can take a picture of Piccadilly Circus and make an incredibly realistic version of it in a game, but when we started rendering characters, they looked like high-end Quake models; kind of polygon-y and very standard looking. Putting characters like that in a very realistic environment looked weird, so our art designer started sketching a bunch of characters, outlining what he wanted Mark and Charlie to look like. Then we started casting actors; the basic philosophy was to take the actors who looked like the part and just scan them in. We found a sort of medical scanning process by which we could do this, and so the characters looked incredibly realistic. Now that we had good characters, the next problem was how to get a realistic performance out of them. That led us into about a year and a half's worth of research on motion capturing; how to get all the actors working in ensemble. With a lot of games, they get one actor in a booth and he says his lines, then they get another actor in the booth and he says his lines, and you get recognizable voices but really wooden performances. So in motion-capture one big goal was to capture their hands, since people talk with their hands a lot, and to capture the sound at the same time for full interaction. I think that really comes across in The Getaway; it does feel really natural and believable. I'm pleased with that; it was a matter of technology pushing us from one thing to the next.

Q: The most surprising part of The Getaway for beginners is the complete lack of status displays within the game.

B: Yeah, it was kind of a big design decision for us. It was really decided more by the character animation in the game, because we really didn't want to have a health bar; we wanted to show people getting hurt, instead, so...

Q: So you wanted the game to be as immersive as possible.

B: Definitely; to be cinematic was one of the goals of the game. One of the things the animation team wanted to do was, if someone got shot, they wanted to show people getting shot. Then one thing led to another and, eventually we started thinking of clean solutions to get rid of things like health bars and direction indicators. I think it asks a lot of the audience, but since we're trying to deal with an older audience anyway, most of them can make the leap fairly easily.

Q: How long would The Getaway last for the average gamer, by the way?

B: It will last about 24 hours. Most of the beta testers can get that down to 18 hours, but on average it's about 24 hours... which I think is about right, really. Any longer than that and that you're kind of stretching incredulity in terms of the story.

Q: Are you happy with the response The Getaway's received so far in Europe?

B: Oh, definitely. When we came out, we were the fastest-selling game Sony ever had in Europe. We've been out of stock for three weeks, actually, and we've just now gotten new stock into the store; it's really been amazing. It's nerve-wracking, in a way, because we know people wanted it. Some shop owners in the U.K. are saying that it's out of stores right now because it's been banned; there've been all sorts of rumors going around.

Q: Well, you had some problems with British Telecom.

B: Yeah, there's a mission where you have to run a BT van off the road because you need a disguise in order to break into this police station.

Q: Which is funny because, at the same time, there're FedEx trucks and things in the game, too.

B: Yeah. The way that works is "incidential use"; as long as you faithfully portray them then it's fine. Just like films do, actually.

Q: It's not something you see in games very much, though.

B: Right. A lot of games have phony cars, but we had to talk with Alfa Romero and Citroen and Porsche and explain what we wanted to do in the game. Of course, the game's realistic, so the cars have to get damaged and catch on fire, but most of them were fine with that. The BT thing got resolved pretty quickly, too. We didn't even have to pull any copies.

Q: Have you done anything extra for the U.S. release?

B: Yeah, we did a few things. We wanted to make the transition between the cutscenes and the game as smooth as possible, and on the European version you got these black loading screens. So what we did in the U.S. version was hold the last frame, so you get these nice camera transitions until the game starts up. I wish we had gotten that into the European version, but oh well. We also put an American muscle car in there, which is quite entertaining to drive around the streets of London. We have English subtitles for the American release, too, so everyone can understand what the people are saying. (laughs)

Q: I'm sure you're sick of this, but what's your view on Grand Theft Auto and other free-roam driving games?

B: Oh, no, we get compared all the time... (laughs)

Q: Especially considering both games are from U.K. developers; was there ever any rivalry between you and the folks at Rockstar North?

B: I think Grand Theft Auto's definitely been the marquee title of the last couple of years. If you're in that category then it's something to be happy about, but I think that if people go into The Getaway expecting GTA they'll be disappointed.

Q: The design aim is different.

B: Yeah, completely. I think The Getaway is compelling because you've got a story that gives you a reason to do what you do. It's not like I'd get bored of the game itself, so I'll just go get a sniper rifle and see how many people I can shoot. If you do that kind of stuff [in The Getaway], the police will come and you'll get arrested and your kid will be at the mercy of a bunch of gangsters. So the story gives it another element, and I think that works well.

Q: Was there any pressure within the design team to incorporate elements from GTA into the game?

B: There was the temptation. I remember when GTAIII first came out; the team was going on about how it's out and it's fantastic, and they were all depressed because we were still miles from being complete at that point. But people turned around, and once they saw everything coming together, they liked the story and the reasoning behind it. So we're very happy with what we achieved.

Q: What sort of games do you like in your spare time?

B: Well, last year I had no time at all for games. Most projects have a three- to six-month crunch time and ours was more like a year and a half (laughs). But I never had a chance to play Ico, so I played it over Christmas and I loved it. It's brilliant. I even got my wife on it and she loves it, too. As a classic piece of level design, I think it's amazing. I love the ambience of the thing, and the camera angles. The kind of game The Getaway is, I don't think you could really do that kind of camera, but it got me thinking about how to do different things. I kind of liked the length of it, too; it was only about 11 hours. (laughs)

Q: So what are you doing now?

B: Well, while I'm doing this press tour, the guys back at the office are working on some technology ideas for The Getaway, because one of the things we want to do... we know we're not going to have time to do a mission pack because we have to do the Japanese release, so we're just concentrating 100 percent on the sequel. And with the sequel, we want to push the PS2 as hard this time as we did the first time around. That's gonna be challenging, but I think that's the right thing to do.

Q: Would it still be for PS2?

B: Yeah, well... a lot of people have asked that. (laughs) The company wants it done for PS2, so that's what we're working on right now.

Q: From a design standpoint, what do you think of the other consoles available right now?

B: I've always been a huge fan of Nintendo games, and they've always been the gold standard for me, but with Zelda this time around, as much of a good game as it is... I'm 41, I don't want to play a four-year-old kid, you know? I loved Mario 64 and Zelda on the N64, but I'm a bit underwhelmed by what I've seen so far. With the Xbox, though, I’m even more underwhelmed in a way because I look at that thing and it seems like a lot of uncomplicated horsepower, and yet you don't really see it going miles ahead of the PS2. I don't really understand why, to be honest. People are pushing the PS2 more and more and more, and I've yet to really see that on the Xbox. Some things are really good; I haven't played Splinter Cell but it looks really good, but at the same time it doesn't really seem like it couldn't be done on the PS2. Which is surprising, considering the horsepower there is to work with.