Interviews
INTERVIEW WITH POST
MORTEM DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Post Mortem is the newest
release from The Adventure
Company. Already a success in Europe,
Post Mortem is a new breed of adventure
game that offers unlimited opportunities of exploration for the adventurous
gamer. There are truly no two games alike in the world of Post
Mortem.
(Caution: if you have not played Post
Mortem, this interview does
contain spoilers and could ruin your gaming experience!)
Post Mortem has
been available for a few months in parts of Europe & Canada.
What kind of feedback have you received so far?
The feedback has been really good so far and I believe that the
sales have pretty much followed. The strange thing is that some people
seemed surprised that this was a traditional adventure game.Some seemed to believe
that it was a shooter…
If there is a sequel to Post
Mortem, are there any improvements
you would like to incorporate?
There are a few things that the next adventure game will improve
upon, mostly centering around the dialog engine and the amount of
dialog used in the game.One
thing is sure; you should be able to skip the spoken dialog…Also,
the technology of the next game should be closer to what is being
used for Syberia,
meaning mostly no more 360º environments.
At the beginning of the game, it is hinted at that Gus
MacPherson has a mysterious and possibly shady background in law
enforcement,
yet this subject is never again broached. Can you elaborate more
on Mac’s previous life, or is this to be a plot thread for
a sequel?
Actually, this is referring to an adventure game project that was
never done. Who knows, with the success of Post Mortem, it might
be possible that it will come to be.The game was to be called A
New York Ghost Story and revolved around
MacPherson, who was then working for the Pinkerton Agency. He was
investigating a case involving the theft of many ancient artifacts
in and around various New York City museums. One of the interesting
twists was that you started the game as a different character and
then, when he was killed by one of the baddies, played Gus as he
interacted with the ghost of the first character.It was quite an ambitious
proposal and we opted to go for a slightly more conservative approach,
but who knows, maybe one day…
About a third of the way through the game, the gamer suddenly has
to play as a different character. Where did the inspiration for
this ingenious character switch originate?
Partly from the above-mentioned game idea and mostly from movies
like To Live and Die in LA and The Usual Suspects, partly from literature.
There are a lot of books which switch back and forth between characters
and was wondering how this would play out in a game.At one point, we were
thinking of making Hellouin the bad guy, instead of Kaufner. De
Allepin would have taken over his body when he hired
him, and everything Hellouin tells Mac (the whole second act) would
have been a lie. In the end, we decided against it, simply because
we weren’t sure how people would perceive this switch. We though
it was important to keep the protagonists sympathetic, instead of
making one of them a villain. Still…
Post Mortem obviously shows the influence of both Chandler and Lovecraft.
Are there any movies that inspired the structure of the game?
As I stated above, yes. The whole detective story genre, with movies
like Memento, The Usual Suspects and some of the more recent horror
films like The Other, play on narrative structure and expectations.
I find that fascinating and I personally like to play with narrative
structure a lot. Why keep things linear simply because you are in
a game?
Post Mortem can be played many different ways and I think each player
comes away with a different experience. What experience do you
hope the gamer comes away with?
A fun filled one!
Honestly, we tried as
much as possible to have a game where the starting point and the
ending would be the same for every one, but
the road taken would vary. We really wanted to have gamers talking
to each other and say “What? I never saw that!” Post
Mortem was a step in the right direction, and hopefully the next
game will be a bigger step…
Would you rather the gamer replay portions of the game in order
to undergo the various endings or be satisfied with the ending they
receive as a result of their choices?
That’s a tough one.
Hopefully the ending they get the first time is satisfying in and
of itself. On the other hand, if they can
experience more of the game, that would also be great…
Classic detective
film noir is historically noted as beginning in the 1930’s with Fritz Lang’s
classic M and in the French sound films of that era. Post Mortem is
set in 1920’s Paris
yet one of the main characters, Nicolas the bartender, claims that
he is a big fan of the detective movies. Is this a bit of foreshadowing
on your part or was there a period of silent film detective movies
in the 1920’s?
That
was a bit of foreshadowing… meaning
we screwed up :-)… What
we should have said was that he was a big fan of adventure novels,
which were pretty well established by then…
Post Mortem does
an excellent job of providing alternate storylines, based on
the gamer’s
choices, that dovetail towards the end until the gamer is then
faced with multiple endings. Considering
that most adventure games are usually linear in nature, how difficult
was it to write what is essentially a new type of adventure game?
It wasn’t actually
that hard. There were a number of people on the team that had a
lot of experience with traditional (face-to-face)
roleplaying game and having to think on the spot.We just came up with a very linear scenario at first and then added
the elements that could be done differently, based on how we would
have reacted to the problem if we had played the game as a traditional
roleplaying game. Of course, we had to keep things in check, since
we could have easily gone crazy.Yes, that means that the
parts where you sneak in the police station at night to steal the
files or where you beat up Petit had to be
cut out… 🙂
Almost every obstacle in Post
Mortem has two solutions (i.e. choosing
how to open a locked door, the manner in which Mac can get to the
second floor of the hotel, etc.). Can you describe some of the difficulties
this presented when you were scripting the game?
Most of the difficulties stemmed from making sure that the player
could always do something, that he was never stuck. Take the traveling
safebox key for example: that key could have been in four different
places, depending on what the player had done before.Depending on whether or not the player went into the murder scene
before finding Hellouin, the key could have been present at the murder
scene or not. We had to constantly look at whether or not there were
holes and make sure that we caught them all.The fact that there is no dead-end in the game right now is a testament
to how good the Integrators and the Testers were. Yes, they made
me swear and bitch many times, but heck, they did a really good job.
There are two schools of thought on the Head of Baphomet. Those
who believe it was first found by the Knights Templar and those who
believe that possession of the Head of Baphomet was actually a trumped-up
charge against the Knights Templar by King Philip IV of France in
order to discredit them. To which school of thought do you subscribe?
Ah… the eternal question on whether the Templars were heretics
or not. I personally think that Philip set them up to take their
treasures and get rid of his debts, but on the other hand, it makes
for a rather dry reading of history, does it not? Of course, there
are others in the team that don’t agree with me. Made for some
lively discussions and some really interesting reading.BTW, for a really cool
look at the Templars and more precisely De Molay, I encourage you
to read The Second Messiah by Christopher
Knight and Robert Lomas. Neat stuff…
Why have the Knights Templar been the subject of so many adventure
games?
If you take a look at
the web or at your local bookstore, you’ll
quickly notice that there is a huge interest in the Templars. I honestly
believe that there is at least 5 to 10 new books being published
each and every year on the subject! Why? Because they are shrouded
in so much mystery, there are so many interesting, crazy, juicy legends
about them that it just sends the brain running. I think the first
time I came across the Templars was when I was about 12, and it was
in a bad Italian horror film (I’m not really sure, but I believe
that it was the second movie in the Blind Dead series). It affected
me pretty deeply and because of that movie, I must have read about
10 books that year alone about their history. You know, even if it
is a “serious” historical text about the Templars, there
will always be a little bit of texts that hints at something and
if you look carefully enough, there will be 10 different theories
about what that little bit is all about.But, to sort of answer
your question, apart from Broken Sword and Gabriel
Knight III,
I can’t really recall any other adventure
game that has explored that territory. At the same time, the game
is not really about the Templars, but rather about someone who exploited
the Templars to gain power.
Are there any practicing Freemasons or Illuminati in your group
of developers?
That
would be telling…
