The Godfather: The Game - Interview

Detailed discussion with the Creative Director of EA's Godfather game on interactive cut-scenes and being locked in a room with Marlon Brando. Plus videos.

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A trilogy that needs no introduction, The Godfather is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated works of written fiction and filmmarking of all time, and also one of the latest heavyweight brands to fall into the hands of Electronic Arts for the massive project that is The Godfather: The Game.

And, as development speeds ahead, the game's creative director, Phil Campbell explains to Kikizo that fans can expect much more than just 'the game of the film', and reveals new details about the game that's sure to be a big hit when it's released on March 24 this year.

One of the two creative directors working on the game, Phil is responsible for all content in the game, all of the new stuff that has been produced exclusively for this interactive edition, written dialogue, characters and missions - plus overseeing how the whole thing comes together. So, just the right man to tell us all about it...

Kikizo: Thanks for your time today - firstly why did EA choose to revisit The Godfather for a videogame after all this time?

Campbell: I know, it's a good question because it is thirty years old, and even inside EA there was a lot of deliberation about should we really do this, because most games are made up of new licenses. But we felt that the story of The Godfather is timeless - the story of these men of honour. They're all criminals, but the story of respect and honour is something that we felt was timeless, and the opportunity arose where we could get some of the characters for the game.

We thought that rather than doing something traditional - that people would just expect us to make 'the game of the movie' - we thought that we could make a living world - a Godfather world - which is a genre that everyone loves. You know, playing a bad guy is just fun... it's good to be a gangster at times, and I think that was the appeal of the movie as well, to a certain extent, it was one of the first movies to challenge the notion of the hero; your hero's not always a shining knight. So that certainly appealed to us, it's just a classic license all around.

Kikizo: What was really behind the delay to this year?

Campbell: The delay was that we just wanted to make sure we get it done. It's a living world, and it's a bigger game than we probably first imagined; not only were we finding that we were creating missions, like in your average level-based game (although our missions were part to the living world), we also found that, in making a whole living world game like this, we didn't want to release it until it was done. So regardless of how it impacts on sales or whatever, EA decided on quality over quantity. This is the start of an important franchise, so let's get it right before we get it out there. Really it's as simple as that.

Phil Campbell, Creative Director, The Godfather game

Kikizo: Comparisons are inevitable, but what really differentiates the game from similar hits like GTA?

Campbell: Well obviously we were heavily inspired by Mafia on the PC, which is an awesome game; Grand Theft Auto - those guys have made so many of those games now that they're experts and they know what they're doing. But the first main difference you're going to notice is that it's very, very controllable - the control method itself and the physical nature of playing. There's much more detail than in, say Grand Theft Auto, in terms of shooting mechanics, fighting mechanics, your grabbing and talking mechanics; there's much more depth to really make the game feel more physical. It's much less at that kind of grain, you know, where people do keep a distance; we wanted something that was really in your face, up close and personal.

Also we wanted to create a more structured world, where it felt like you weren't just aimlessly wandering around this living world, or that it was living for the sake of it. We wanted to make sure that you could follow trails, that you could follow a racket to its conclusion or start taking over a survivors' web of the map. And it will mean that it feels almost like you're constructing a game, rather than just messing around in it - which is a huge, huge difference for us in this game.

But obviously we have learnt a lot from Mafia and GTA; there are ways of doing things that those guys pioneered, but then again EA has all these other different expertise, like The Sims - we've got guys from The Sims, we've got guys from developing the Fight Night punching system, we've got Bond, and we've got guys that have been joined together from all over EA, to create the overall impression of this game, lending their expertise and giving it a different slant.

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