Post-Mortem: Gun

TotalPlayStation: We’ll get the ball rolling with a concern a few more vocal people have expressed: the length and difficulty of the game. There’s always an option to tweak things to make them more skewed towards the hardcore gamer, but would you mind going into a little detail about how it affects the gameplay? Do you take more damage? Deal less?

Scott Pease: We purposefully balanced the “Normal” setting to challenge a casual game player, so on that setting the AI outs up a fight, but is beatable by your average adventure game player.

Then we reserved “Hard” and “Insane” for hardcore shooter players. As the difficulty increase, our AI opponents get more accurate, deadly, and more intelligent. On Insane, if you go running out in the open ala Young Guns you’ll soon be pissing lead with your boots pointed skyward… The harder difficulties push players to use cover, duck and weave, and play a cagey, more tactical battle with the AI. For boss battles, you better hit the side missions often to increase your stats, if you want to stand toe to toe with them on Insane. We tried to cover it all - there’s a deep challenging experience for every kind of player in Gun.


TPS: Mind talking a bit about some of the influences that went into making the game? Having Randall Jahnson on board to do the script helped, but there seems like quite a bit of homage in place to stuff like Louis L’Amour and Sergio Leone as much as anything else. Were there any lesser known influences that contributed to things?

SP: We did a lot of research – even read a few books – before we dove into Gun. Once you digest a few novels you come to realize that the West wasn’t spiffy cowboys in white hats riding off into the sunset... At times it was a brutal, dirty, violent landscape where the worst aspects of human nature were often unchecked by law or government. That’s an ethic also present in films of Sam Peckinpah, and his visual style definitely influenced our slow motion quickdraw mode. If you haven’t seen The Wild Bunch or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (the latter starring Kris Kristofferson) – you need to.


TPS: Why a Western? Plenty will agree that the genre hasn’t had many good game birthed from it, but was there a specific reason why you wanted to make this kind of game?

SP: When we pick projects for Neversoft, we start by looking for a subject that has great source material but really hasn’t been represented with a great video game. I think that’s what skateboarding and Westerns have in common – incredible settings for innovative gameplay, but (until now) no great games that both capture and respect the material. The West was a place of almost unlimited vice – you had gunfights, whores, booze, gambling, massacres, greed, horseback battles, cultures at way, bizarre home-brew weaponry – how could you NOT get into making a game about that?


TPS: What kind of research did you guys do for the project? The game world covers a pretty huge swatch of the US, but what went into narrowing it down to places like Montana and Arizona? Did you get a chance to find and fire off some of the weapons used in the game, and did it help with their effect in-game?

SP: Again, it’s all about immersing yourself in your subject. Our artists fanned out over the west taking reference photos from Arizona to Montana. Our President, Joel, bought a pack of horses and learned how to ride, wear chaps (don’t ask), and herd cattle. We worked with Apache and Blackfoot translators to provide authentic dialogue for our Native American characters. And our sound designers fired large caliber vintage weaponry - and a small cannon - to get both the sound and the feel of what it was like to hold a firearm that could misfire and explode at any moment.


TPS: We’d love to hear the process that went into casting the various roles. Some of them, like Tom Jane and Kris Kristofferson seemed like they born to play these characters. Was there anyone that you wanted that didn’t end up taking the parts?

SP: We were extremely lucky to get everyone we wanted - Tom Jane, Lance Henriksen, Tom Skerritt, Brad Dourif, and Kris Kristofferson. We were fans of their work and lucky to find that these guys were also big fans of the Western genre. They loved the material and the characters we brought to them, and almost ever guy who came in wished that he was making more Westerns in Hollywood. It’s a great mythic landscape. They gave great performances and transformed our good material into something far superior. Tom Jane was like, “When are we making the movie?”


TPS: How do Hollywood types react to being cast in a game? Do you get a sense that actors and actresses are starting to see the medium as another way to branch out, or is it still more of a novelty for them?

SP: We were fortunate to work with great actors who take their craft, and performances, very seriously. During one session we were running late and nearing the end of our tightly scheduled four hours with Tom Jane, so we told him we needed to move quickly and get through what was left. He was like, “No way. We’re going to take our time and get something we’re both happy with, because my name’s on it too.” He stayed late to give us the best possible performance, and treated each line as if it was the most important one. Maybe next time we’ll be able to work it so these guys can perform the motion capture acting as well – it would be great to get their physical performances along with their vocal one.