Activision Mixes 'Casino' With 'Quantum'
Team Xbox recently visited Treyarch headquarters and has posted an excellent interview with Garrett Young, executive producer of Activision’s Quantum of Solace.
Young said the game will involve roughly equal portions of story from the films Casino Royale and the upcoming Quantum of Solace. Intriguingly, Activision has taken a neat bit of creative licensing in adapting the two movies into a single video game.
“We are being a little creative with [the order of the missions],” Young said. “And the movie guys were fine with that.”
“We kick off the game with the same thing the movie [Quantum of Solace] does. And then we get to a certain point in our story when there’s a tie-in to a character – we had to actually bring the character forward from Casino Royale; he’s not in Quantum of Solace but we put him in and the movie guys were okay with it – and after you have an interaction with this character, it kicks off a flashback to a section of Casino Royale.”
Young continued: “From there you play through the Casino Royale story before flashing forward to Quantum of Solace. So we’re telling it that way instead rather than a linear path story because we wanted to make it a little more interesting and wanted to tie it in a little closer to what people have seen, even if it was two and a half years ago.”
Young also spoke at length about the process of working with Quantum of Solace‘s filmmakers. “It’s all about having a great relationship with the movie people and the fact that we’ve been on the set three or four times and they’ve given us thousands of photos and we got scripts and updates to the scripts and sometimes that causes problems for us because they keep updating the scripts and so we have to make changes.”
“But when we did get to show Daniel Craig (and the Broccoli family, the long time producers of the Bond movies) the game, we went to Pinewood Studios where they film the movies. So we’re setting up in their conference room and the production assistant on the movie is running around saying ‘He’s shooting a scene right now and I can let you come out and see the scene, but I don’t know if he can come look at the game yet and have you show it to him.’ So we watch them film the scene and then the assistant came back and said ‘OK, I got a hold of him in his trailer between scenes but he was playing some game with a plastic guitar.’ He was playing Guitar Hero! He’s between scenes in his trailer playing Guitar Hero? That’s crazy!”
“And then we came to see the game, and see himself depicted for the first time in a video game, I think he was a little bit nervous; a little bit anxious. He picked a controller right up and picked up on the first person controls almost immediately, though he was getting killed at lot at first until I explained the cover system to him. But when I first met him I think he was a little – I mean, he’s a big gamer. And he was asking us a lot of stuff about what’s in the game, the kind of stuff you would ask if you were a gamer. But I think he liked how he looked, and we’ve gotten more feedback from him after sending him screenshots. But he’d never been in a game before and I’m thinking ‘Dude, you’re in movies all the time, and video games are just another medium like a movie’. But I think because he’s a gamer he was a little apprehensive about whether he was going to look like crap. But thankfully he really liked it.”
“Getting to meet all the actors was cool, they’re really nice people. Daniel and Judi [Dench] and some of the other principles from both movies are really, really nice. And yes, those Bond girls really are that beautiful in real life. Not that many of them have been in video games before. Judi has of course and she was an old pro when it came to recording her voice-overs. She read it once and I was like ‘Oh, that’s M’.”
For the whole interview, including more information about the game’s cover system and enemy AI, visit Team Xbox.
Quantum of Solace is being developed by Eurocom, Treyarch, Beenox and Vicarious Visions and will be released on next-generation consoles, Windows PC and hand-held platforms.
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