Duty Bound

Sometimes you actually find things in performances with the actors as we're working with them. Sometimes they bring something to the performance that is actually even more tragic or more powerful than anything that we would have actually envisioned. By them bringing that to life, it really engages the player emotionally. Just by hearing the sound alone of hearing the people going through the different events of the game can sometimes provoke a more emotional response than we intended by the design of the game.

Absolutely. The first time I played it - when the team bought the idea to me I actually raised the point of how controversial this was going to be - and then playing through the game the first time, and actually seeing it put together, at least for me, I didn't engage any of the civilians. I was hanging back although I was forced through this level and to go through the experience. It's a difficult moral question for the player and directing the actors and hearing what the actors are saying in Russian is actually almost worse than seeing the action on screen, because these families are separated, fathers telling their wives to take the children and everything will be okay, and knowing that it's not... it was a difficult thing to work with a lot of the actors. Some of the actors were very tearful saying the lines because it was a pretty emotionally charged scene.

The first time I did not pull the trigger. There's a really great machinima piece called No Russian by a fan who now works at Treyarch put together, where he used the game engine to pull together the entire story from Modern Warfare including the No Russian scene and he did a brilliant job of directing that from the game engine.

I've been approached on a weekly basis on how to make this bridge between films. I think there's a real revolution in the games industry, the console industry. The development cycles between games and films are drastically different. Most films once green-lit, will go for 12-14 months. A game is minimum 24 months to get a decent execution. So unfortunately most film based game franchise have failed because the development cycles haven't coincided yet they've still released the game day and date with the film. No one has been inspired to work on a film-based franchise because they know the development cycle is not compatible, they don't relate.

I think what's happened recently with the console industry starting to downsize quite a bit and sales being down, even though the larger franchises like Call of Duty have been significantly up, what's that done is there's a tremendous amount of talent that has come out of the games industry who are still looking to work in games but have moved into smaller and short-form content for the iPad or downloadable games for PSN, Xbox Live, iPhone. This explosion of content has been built with smaller budgets, lower barriers of entry to develop a game whilst still keeping the quality very high. And it also reduces the development cycles which will allow them to coincide with the films much better. Within the next two to three years you're going to see a much stronger integration between films and short-form games. A film that normally wouldn't have had a game associated with it now will have an iPad or mobile game to coincide with it. It won't be the quality and length of game you'd see from Black Ops or Modern Warfare but you're going to see more integration between films and games now that barrier to entry has become much closer to what the film industry can relate to.

Most games are going to be 12-16 hours of content, but with a film the story and content is only designed for 90 minutes to two hours. Once you've found out Bruce Willis is a ghost the rest of the 14 hours for that game isn't exciting. Something 2-3 hours long can be a tenth of the cost and a fraction of the length in development. If that does well a sequel or second episode is more likely. And it also doesn't make sense to have a $40 million game based on a $15 million movie. Now we might see movie games with a budget of $5 million and they are much more creative endeavours because the content is much more accessible to the film and game industry.