Joystiq interview: The Saboteur's Tom French & Chris Hunt

Yesterday afternoon Pandemic played host to an "Open House" event for The Saboteur here at our studio. In that Mike Schramm from Joystiq was able to sit down with Lead Designer Tom French & Art Director Chris Hunt for a 2 on 1 interview after Mike was able to get a pretty in-depth hands on with the game.

French did a quick presentation before our interview, where he told the story of William Grover-Williams – the racecar driver-turned-saboteur that the game's protagonist, Sean Devlin, is based on – as well as the cinematic influences on The Saboteur, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Third Man. Afterwards, we sat down with both designers to talk about why you'll find plenty of color, but no ghost guns (you'll see) or multiplayer in their upcoming game.

The first thing was just -- there was a mention in the presentation you just did that echoed what we've heard from readers online, and that is: "Not another World War II game."

Tom French: (Laughs)

And I think a lot of people have discovered since the game has broken out that it is not another World War II game. But what was the reaction of your staff when you said, "we're making a World War II game," and then how did you subvert that, do it a little bit differently?

TF: We kind of gravitated quickly to not making it about the war, and not inspired by war movies, but we're a very cinematically inspired team, and originally, we were looking a lot at like Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones had personal motivations to fight Nazis, and we thought wow, that's a great touchstone for us. So we really started with that, and from there it led to everything else. We watched a lot of cinema for reference more than watching documentaries. Though we definitely did our homework and legwork to learn about the resistance and the world, and went to Paris and did a lot of research in Paris about all that stuff. But originally, it was just going for that big cinematic over-the-top kind of thing, to really separate ourselves from World War II. A more kind of high-spirited pulp action adventure rather than storming the beaches of Normandy for a kind of gritty gunplay all the time.

Was there anywhere where you kind of bumped up against a trope from World War II and said, eh, let's turn around and go back the other way?

Chris Hunt: Yeah, there were certainly places where we thought of that. I think that one of the things is that when you're thinking World War II, you're thinking of all the things that make you think of World War II. And one of the questions we asked ourselves early on was ok, what was World War II? Was it this? Yes. Was it this? No. And there are many elements, like Tom mentioned, the pulp aspect, we didn't want to just make a factual recreation of World War II -- one, it's been done, and two, that wasn't part of the story we were trying to create. So we took a little creative liberty in certain places, to prolong the story to make it a little more interesting. Especially with the art design -- if you had a tank of some kind, there's a World War II tank that everyone knows about, you've seen it in every movie. But what else could they have done, what other technology could they have created? If they had a little more time, if they had six more months, what would the Germans have made of this tank? What would the French resistance have done if they had won these two victories, and decided you know what? We can do this. They're going to make a resistance corps, where they're going to be more active in fighting the Nazis.

So those are the kinds of liberties that were not only in service to the story, but it's very plausible. We wanted to go with what's plausible, not just stick with the World War II books.

TF: And that helps to keep everything kind of grounded, and for us it was just about how do we turn it up? We're making a sandbox game, it's about having a lot of cool tools and mechanics, and so yeah having zeppelins in a game is just cool, and it's big and it's over-the-top and we saw it in Indiana Jones, so it really becomes kind of part of that fantasy moment. It was really just what's fun, what's cool.

CH: It's also what's good. Because many things that you see in World War II games and whatnot, there's a kind of a predefined look that everyone starts to gravitate towards, and that's just what we didn't want to do. But there are also things, you think about World War II, or you think of movies of that time period, you think about black-and-white. Why not? It's a great game mechanic, it looks fantastic, and it's something we can incorporate to set you right back in that time period, and not only transport you there without having to explain a lot, it justifies it all.

Read The full article here: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/01/interview-the-saboteurs-tom-french-and-chris-hunt/

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