A few weeks ago Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment gave us the opportunity to interview Dave Matthews about F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Pete Wanat about Wanted: Weapons of Fate. Because of the fact that we were Pete Wanat's last interview of the day, we spent a whole hour instead of the standard ten minutes talking about the Wanted videogame and more.

Pete Wanat: o look at you get the mic and all, huh? look at that! it's just like a duster!

GameParty: I can do other things with it,
Pete Wanat: Yeah i'm sure, just not to me!

GameParty: Okay, what are we doing?
Pete: Euh… Okay, would you like to play it?

Yeah I do, but... Whenever we do play movie licensed games, they turned out to be crap.
Ouch!

I know, it's a little harsh, but I had high expectations of The Bourne Conspiracy and even that one sucked.
Yeah, well... Are there any good moviegames then?

GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64.
GoldenEye, that's the only one?

Yeah, guess so. I don't want to say on forehand that Wanted sucks, but you need to sell it.
Well, I've worked on a few movie licensed games over the years. A long time ago I worked for Acclaim, they were the champions in making crap. I worked there with a developer in the UK, called Probe, on the Alien Trilogy for the PSone. I thought that was a pretty decent game actually. I was pretty proud, thought it was a lot of fun to play.

Pete's colleague: An Alien-probe game?! Sounds fun!
Alright, you wanna go back to Los Angeles?

GameParty: But Acclaim's South Park games were cool. Peeing on snowballs, that kind of stuff was really funny.
Well, I also worked on South Park for the Nintendo 64. We made that game in about five months on the Turok engine. That was one of my first movie licensed products, altough South Park is ofcourse a TV show. In 2001 I went to Universal and worked on a game called 'The Thing'. After that I worked on The Chronicles of Riddick, and then most recently on Scarface. You may think those games sucks all as well, I was actually really pleased with the experiences. I also thought the stories we told were really cool.

Maybe it's because players expect the same thing that they experience in the movie, and most of the time they get disappointed.
I would argue with you that unless you are seven, and playing Finding Nemo over and over again... Honestly, I don't think players want to see the same thing. I saw the fucking movie, I spent ten fucking dollars on it, why would I want that same fucking experience again? Show me something else, show me some other story in this wonderful universe, but don't give me the same experience from the film, I don't want that experience! I want something new. You know, as soon as your fucking balls drop you want something a little more hardy from your content. I think you want to see a prequel, sequel or side story then, instead of the same experience. And that's what we've done with all those games I just listed that I did with Universal over the years. All those games do that.

What is the Wanted videogame about then?
Scarface is a 'what if'. What if Tony didn't die in that mansion, what would his life be like? Or with Riddick. How did he get his eyes? How did he escape from that first prison? You know he did that, but you didn't know the whole back story. That's what we wanted to do with Wanted as well. Wesley's relationship with his dad is explained in the movie. In the comics he has a story with his mother too, and that's the thing we want to tell in the game. Wesley is an anti-hero, with a 'go fuck yourself'-attitude like Eminem has. Mark Millar I think does a brilliant job in the graphic novel communicating that. In the context of the game Wesley's still an anti-hero, but he doesn't really know who he is. If you were just tricked and killed your own father, your world would be really fucked up. So at the beginning of the game, Wesley's head is a mess and he is on a mission to self discovery, because he is not really sure what's making him 'him'. For us it's about using that story and telling that story to expand stuff from the film. If you want to play the movie, shot for shot, scene by scene, this isn't your game. You will be disappointed then.

Maybe we don't want the exact same things as in the movie, only the same experience.
There is a sequence on a train in the movie. A lot of action, a lot of curve bullets. We mirror that in the game. We've got an action sequence on a plane. Instead of fighting on a fast moving train, we like to amp it up to a plane. We also used the color pallet from the train for the plane. It's identical. We like to match color pallets in different scenes from the movie. People will be like 'wow, this feels a lot like the movie but I'm not sure what it is!', as intended. We brought the guys from GRIN, the development studio, in to watch eight, nine, ten key sequences from the film. This so they could match them in the game. Looks and feels like the movie, even though it's not the same story. A lot of movie licensed games don't go in that much details, because they don't have to. They're not interested in making a good game, they're just interested in license slapping, trying to match the movie. Our intentions are pure. Whether we deliver or don't deliver in your eyes? Like I know we're coming at it from the right place. I know we have a good heart about it. We may succeed sometimes, we may fail sometimes, but at the end of the day, our intentions are done the right way. We never think like "how do I sucker you in buying my fucking game?". We're not interested in that. We like to give you an enjoyable gameplay experience so you will come back, so that we will sell enough copies to make a sequel.

I pay like sixty Euros for the game. Will I play it till the end? Won't it get boring half-way? Like Uncharted, it was a great game, but it was most of the same over and over again.
Was it fun?

It was fun, but mostly because of the story.
We have a lot of variety of Core mechanics that you can do. The fact that you have to play the first four levels before you get all those mechanics says that you're almost half-way through the game before you have all those core mechanics. Then you will be able to use them the way you like, combined. You use curving bullets in the chain cover in the assassin time instead of using only one of those mechanics. The bosses in the game also offers a lot of variety. It will not feel like crap, you will not do the same things over and over again. But even IF that was the case, you still have an amazing story. Who is your mom? Where did you come from? And last, it's not your everyday game. Wesley's mind is really fucked up after he killed his own father. There is an emotional reaction between you and Wesley, which is great.

There are so many games without a good story, although it's very important. With a good story, you play till the end, even if the gameplay might suck.
I agree, although I disagree with the intension... I don't think our gameplay sucks! I have to deal with skeptics all the time. It's simple: we make movie based games, but we make them with the stuff that non-movie based games do. It's not a marketing experiment. We never had the intention to make a crappy game to release with the DVD of the movie. We saw the curving bullet mechanic and thought it was a great idea for a game. And well, I think our gameplay is innovative and does things that hasn't been seen before.

That's good to hear, and it's nice that you do what most movie based games developers don't.
If you want to build a good game, you have to start with the foundation and the foundation for good games are always your core mechanics. Go look at what Miyamoto does, he's very smart. He gets his core mechanics down and make sure they're fun. I mean, does games become repetitious? Yeah, games become repetitious. Grand Theft Auto IV is a fucking awesome game, but every single person I know tells me that by the time you're three quarters through the game, those mechanics become to feel repetitious. Are you fucking kidding me?! An open world game, you can go anywhere, do anything you fucking want... If you're telling me that's repetitious, then EVERY game becomes repetitious. The bottom-line is: is the game fun to play? Do you have a good story?

Maybe a multiplayer mode?
I disagree with the statement that you need a multiplayer in the game. There are so much shitty multiplayer games out there. You don't obtain an infinite level of replayability just by putting in a crappy uninspired multiplayer. Even if you have a cool multiplayer, people will just play it one or two times and then get right on with the singleplayer. Nobody buys fucking Grand Theft Auto IV for the multiplayer. They don't care about that! They want the story, the additional missions. For us, that's the priority, not trying to make a multiplayer game. "Hey look, we have this multiplayer that nobody fucking cares about!" No, that's not for us. You go online and guess what? There's nobody there but crickets! The biggest problem are you guys, the press. You communicate that a game doesn't have multiplayer and then people think it sucks. In fact, most times if games have multiplayer it doesn't have extra quality, just an attached piece of shit. You should call thát out and say that more games should NOT have multiplayer. What I'm going to say now is totally true: if a game developer does a shitty multiplayer, it means they pulled out quality for the singleplayer. Please, focus more on the singleplayer! If I want to play multiplayer, I play Counterstrike. I play that for over ten years now!

I like co-op though.
Yeah! Co-op is awesome. If you're doing multiplayer, do co-op! Remember Kane & Lynch? That was fucking great! Actually more enjoyable then playing it in singleplayer, though.

One of the Warner Brothers PR ladies informs us that Monolith's Dave Matthews has to use the cinema room we're in. So after a playful fight between Pete and Dave, Pete insist that we go to another room to continue our conversation.

Sorry, I wish you guys had the chance to try out the game. Didn't know they were going to kick us out of that room.

It's okay. Maybe a demo on the PS Network or Xbox Marketplace?
Yeah maybe. We hope to release it soon.

A demo or the full game?
Well, hopefully both! I don't want to release a demo until a week before the release. To be honest, I also think that demo's suck. I'm not a fan of demo's. I hate them. The demo for The Chronicles of Riddick was one of the biggest pieces of crap ever. Damn, that demo sucked. But it's an awesome game. The demo for Wanted will most likely feature the airplane level, because it's shows immediately how great our AI is. The enemies will talk about how they flank Wesley from both sides et cetera. Also, if the enemy is stupid, it isn't rewarding when you trick them. The enemies in Wanted aren't stupid.

Will the AI respond to different actions? Call of Duty for example is very scripted.
I think it depends on the levels. Not every single moment of the game is scripted. If I use the curving bullets, you use the assassin time and you use the chaining cover, all three of us will get a different reaction from the enemies. But if I use curving bullets over and over again, enemies will respond similar. You can predict them then, sort of. At the end of the first level, you have to fight a boss with a shield. At first you can curve your bullets around him, but then he gets smarter and maneuvers his shield around. So you have to use quick movements, you have to use chaining cover to quickly move around him. You also can't be a one trick pony. You can't beat the game with only using curving bullets.

How long will it take to finish the game?
I think that you can finish it in ten to fourteen hours on the Pussy setting, the easy mode. But the hard mode is really so... fucking... hard!

If people can only buy four games a year, do they have to buy this one?
If they like shooters, yeah. I think you have to be mature. The game is really cool, it has unlockable stuff, replayability, unlockable characters. We're certainly not Max Payne, but there isn't a Max Payne for the current gen consoles. If you're a fan of Gears of War or Max Payne, then I think you might like this too. You tell me, what are the four games you're going to buy next year?

If I have to name only four... Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, Resident Evil 5 and Borderlands. But I'm going to play a lot more of course.
Well, Jesus, then why do you ask me that question? You're going to play a ton of games but I only get four?!

The game is a sequel to the movie, but has flashbacks that takes players to locations before the movie...
The flashbacks in the game are made to tell the story about Wesley and his mom. The only thing to make the story clear is to flash back to when they first talked to each other. To find out why Cross wasn't around to see his baby-boy Wesley grow up. What was the reason why Wesley's mom didn't raise him herself? At the moment you think you know everything, we will mindfuck you like the movie does. We will fuck with you head like the movie fucked with your head. For us, that's very important to do! The writer of the story also wrote the story for the The Chronicles of Riddick videogame. He is an excellent game storywriter. We had the approval of Mark Millar himself.

What are you going to work on after Wanted?
I hope Wanted 2, but only if this game is a success. We definitely have a thick notebook of stuff we didn't do in this game. The notebook is called Wanted 2, but I'm not announcing the game now! Maybe we do the features from this notebooks in other games though. At Universal we do a lot of stuff. We are going to go back and do a lot of old movies, making them as games. Like Ghostbusters. I actually left Vivendi before the merger was announced. But I was really pleased to see that my last Vivendi projects, Riddick and Ghostbusters, were picked up by Atari so nicely. I have really high hopes for both games. Everyone loves Ghostbusters, I never met anyone who said "Ghostbusters? I fucking hate that!".

Well Pete, thanks for this very interesting interview.
No worries, thanks guys!

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