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How Heavy Rain strives to be the "best movie you've ever seen"

• By Patrick Shaw
• December 11, 2008 15:34 PM PST
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Watching one of Heavy Rain's central characters talk in real time is nothing short of draw-dropping.

GamePro: A female voice actor you've shown us looks exactly like the character in the game she provided the voice for. Do all the characters in Heavy Rain look like the voice actors who provided their voices?
David Cage: Yeah. With Heavy Rain we decided that we didn't want several actors for one character. Usually, in games, you have someone for the facial scan, like, "this is the way character will look," someone else for the voice, and someone else for their motion-captured movements.

We just believed that it was not right for what we were trying to achieve with Heavy Rain. We wanted to recreate one actor with his likeness, but also his performance, because we felt it would be much more consistent. It would be a part of the characterization. So, it totally changed the way we worked on this game because the casting became a very important component of what we were doing.

We had to find not only the right face and the right voice, but just the right actor for the character. So we spent about a year doing casting sessions, here in Paris and in London, to find the right people. That was a very interesting aspect of the game, definitely, for us.

GamePro: Is everything set in stone for Heavy Rain? Do you know exactly where the story's going to end up, or are there some changes yet to be made, things still lying around in Heavy Rain's story?
David Cage: There are two aspects in a production like Heavy Rain. First, it's very heavy production with really a lot of assets to be produced. That means you can't really change your mind about the story -- it has to be set in stone once you're happy with it because the full production is going to start, and it's a huge machine. So, you can't really go back and say, "Oh, this character is not 60 years old, he's now 20 years old because I've just changed my mind."

All the story aspects have to be set in stone so production can work. But at the same time, there are other areas of the game where you know you have more time to alter, and this is especially true regarding gameplay and regarding interface. The impact of production is not really significant there. So, we continue to reiterate, to try different things, to prototype, to see what people think of what we try -- to make the best decisions for the game.

That's an important part of the game. The first thing you implement is rarely the right one, so you need to try different things until you become comfortable with it.

GamePro: If there were three reasons for gamers to care about Heavy Rain, what are they?
David Cage: I see Heavy Rain as an emotional journey. We don't see the experience as a series of obstacles just to stop the player. There won't be any puzzle you have to solve; there won't be hordes of enemies you need to fight. Everything will be about decision-making. We really see it as a journey, and it's also an emotional simulator.

We would like to create something where the player will be in different situations and feel really involved in what's going on. We want him to care for the characters, care for the story, and really want to know what's coming next, what will happen to these characters.

The final reason to care is we want to put the player in the shoes of the hero and give him difficult choices to make. It's not, "Do you want to be good or bad?" It's going to be much more ambiguous than that. We would like to ask questions to the player as a human being and say, "What would you do if it was happening to you?"

We would like the answer not to be obvious. We would like people to think, "Yeah, what would I do if it was happening to me?" You'll have to make the decision in the game of course. We try to create a couple of moments that players will remember, that will leave an imprint in their minds, like the best movies you've seen or the best books you've read.

They change something in you, and that's our ultimate goal. It's really ambitious, of course, and challenging and difficult to make, but this is what we are meant for.

In a Heavy Rain tech demo shown, a female character narrowly escapes the clutches of a woman-skinning serial killer and rides off on her motorcycle.

GamePro: Being a game that's developed similarly to a film, what movies have influenced Heavy Rain?
David Cage: You know, it's always difficult to know where your inspiration comes from because it comes pretty much from everything -- from movies you like, from the books you read, from TV series, from comics, from paintings. Sometimes it comes from things that are really unrelated to what you're doing.

On the movie side, I really love all these dark films like "Silence of the Lambs," "Seven," or even "Fight Club." These types of movies were a huge influence.

I really enjoyed some lesser-known movies like "Memories of Murders", which is a South Korean movie, that was really interesting. There are many, many things that can influence your work. I think what is a little bit special for me on Heavy Rain is that it's maybe the first game I write in which I put some parts of my personal life or my personal experiences.

Very often when you write games, you write about things you never experienced. I've never been at war, I've never been a superhero saving the world, and most people write about these things they never experienced. On Heavy Rain, I tried to write about things that I felt, that I thought, that I experienced in my personal life. Hopefully, it's going to make the game more sincere, and hopefully people will feel it in the end.

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