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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Personally, I am very content focused, so I want to make sure that it's true and loyal to the story, but that you really allow the player to make his own way in the world and make his own story. No doubt the journalists wanted to believe that we would just make the game of the movie, but I think making you the star of the world in this Godfather civilisation has been liberating for the story. And there's a new generation of Godfather fans now, but this isn't a movie, it's an interactive game - an entertainment - and you can't really compare it to the film in that sense.

Kikizo: So specifically, how linear or open-ended is your approach to the gameplay?

Campbell: If you consider that we have a Godfather world here, with five neighbourhoods in New York and five families fighting for that territory, you'll find that if you want to play the story of the movie, you can pretty much follow the progression of the movie, and by the time you kill the dons of the other families, you might very well feel that you've played the game and finished it; you will have a satisfactory ending at that point. But for the strategy player, the hardcore gamer that wants to play the whole world, wants to play the risk game, you can be playing it for forty hours, you know, for a long time, because there's a big world.

And the thing is, you choose your own approach - so every building, and every part of the world that you go into, like a fishmongers, a hotel or brothel, or a gambling club or gun-running warehouse, each one is like a playground; you choose how you're going to enter and exit that building, how you're going to fight in there, are you going to win by talking first, or are you gonna go in blasting?

I compare it to a golf course, where you have holes that are formally laid out and each hole as it were has a destiny - an ending - you can see where it's going - every good story has an ending - but you're allowed to choose what kind of club you want to use, and how you want to approach the path you wish to take. And I think there's more potential in that kind of gameplay than in trying to create these 'branching path' stories, that are ultimately always unrewarding.

Kikizo: Things will obviously be quite violent - we're guessing an M rating - but with all the fuss about mature themes in games, might this affect development?

Campbell: Yes, it will be an M rated title and an 18 in Europe. Of course you have to worry in terms of violence, people often want to censor stuff. But I think our attitude on it is firstly, it will have the right rating, but also EA always goes above and beyond that, with the demographics and the people that play the game. They have lots of extra checks to make sure that kids aren't getting the game, and that the right people are playing it. I think that the movie was brutal - for its time it was violent and brutal - and the game is equally so, there's no doubt about that. But I think if we'd shilly-shallied around and not done it justice, then that would have been worse.

But what we've tried to prove, and what I think you will get out of playing it, when you saw me extorting that butcher in the game earlier, if I killed him, I get nothing; I could have gone in there and blasted him in the head or been as violent as I choose to be, but it won't improve my game. So what we're trying to get people to do is use control, so that it's not gratuitous. The last thing we want to do is encourage success through gratuitous violence; you use whatever force is necessary to achieve your goals.

If you want to get out in the streets and blast everyone, go ahead - some people love playing like that - but the police will come down very hard on you. So we're sort of saying no, that might not be the way of playing the Godfather game. But that's not to say you don't need to do a little bit of intimidation from time to time!

Kikizo: What parts of the story from the films would you say are most significant in the game? Are you using any of the vast extra material from the book?

Campbell: For this current game, it's only based on the events of Godfather Part I. It's the period of time from Connie's wedding in 1945 to the assassination of all the other dons of the other families in 1955. We have taken that story as a spine, it's a strong centre backbone of the game, and we've woven the player story in that world. So you meet the movie story, as it were, at all the really good moments; you're in the restaurant when [Michael has that mission], you're the guy that has to get the horse's head, by various methods [to that bedroom]. You're the guy that actually ends up assassinating the other dons.

So you play a very cool part in every major scene in the movie, but then also we start to fill it in with scenes from the book, and also stories of our own creation, that actually just increase and develop that world. But the Godfather 1 is the spine of this product - that's the classic story that's one of the many stories that can be told in this game.

Kikizo: How heavily do cinematics feature and how are they integrated with gameplay, has anything original been done in this regard?

Campbell: I think that we have got a very interesting angle on cinematics. I was inspired by the sheer brilliance, I felt, of the storytelling of Mafia on the PC, and the cinematic approach to the gaming there. But we wanted to again go a step further. So the nice thing, for a start, is that all the cinematics - even if they're famous scenes from the movie - they all feature the player in them. So whatever character you've created, he's in those cinematics, and it's a very strong identification.

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