With actors on board, games shoot for realism

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 10/22/2003

When Chris Archer went to work on True Crime: Streets of LA, a new computer game about a case-hardened detective going up against Russian and Chinese crime gangs, he imagined the game as a movie and wondered which actors he'd like to see in it.

It wasn't hard to make a list. Archer wanted veteran tough guys such as Christopher Walken, costar of "The Rundown"; Gary Oldman, the lead terrorist in "Air Force One"; and Michael Madsen, of the cinematic bloodbath "Kill Bill Vol 1." So he hired them, along with a host of other character actors whose faces and voices are familiar from countless cop flicks.

"What we were going after was great acting or great recognizability, and in some cases both," Archer says.

There's nothing like hiring well-known actors to give a computer game some extra realism. After all, successful actors earn their bread by coaxing us into their realm of fantasy and making it real to us. When the actor is someone we think we know, because we've seen him dozens of times on screen, the illusion seems that much more real.

Which is why so many video games these days feature the voices, and sometimes the faces, of big-time actors. To be sure, TV and movie stars have been popping up in computer games for years. But now that Americans spend more on digital games than on first-run movie tickets, it's getting easier for game producers to bring in top-notch talent.

Pierce Brosnan, the current Agent 007, will be at the gamer's side throughout the upcoming James Bond game, Everything or Nothing, due later this year from Electronic Arts. So will Dame Judi Dench as his boss, M, and John Cleese as gadgetmaster Q, with another veteran bad guy, Willem Dafoe, as the villain. "We went to great lengths to make sure that this was going to be the best Bond game ever," says producer Joel Wade.

But it's a game, not a movie, and that imposes some crucial limitations. In a game, the player -- not some invisible screenwriter -- controls what happens. When Bond faces a deadly trap or a brutal thug, the player may respond in dozens of ways, and the result of his choice could be success or an early death for 007.

So Wade can't just display moving pictures of Brosnan and the rest of the cast. Instead, the game must draw the characters on the screen in real time, showing the outcome of every decision Bond might make. Alas, home computers are nowhere near powerful enough to render human faces with photographic accuracy. Still, Wade says Everything or Nothing will get as close as possible, with the help of "cyberscanning," a technique that uses laser light to draw a digital representation of the actors faces.

"A laser spins around their heads," Wade says. "It's scanning one vertical line at a time. . . . It maps the entire surface of their heads." The result, he says, will be unusually accurate representations of the actors.

Still, the limits on graphical accuracy mean that movie stars do most of their gaming work in a sound booth, recording lines of dialogue that play at crucial points in the game. Often the words will be accompanied by a short computer-rendered video, known in the gaming trade as a "cinematic cutscene." The Bond game will feature dialogue written by Bruce Feirstein, scriptwriter for three Bond films, backed by music from Sean Callery, whose score for the TV series "24" won him an Emmy.

TV performers are also getting into the act. Elisabeth Rohm is entering her third season as assistant district attorney Serena Southerlyn on the NBC drama "Law & Order." During her first year on the show, she recorded the dialogue for two computer games based on the series. The first, Dead on the Money, was released last year; the second, Double or Nothing, has recently hit store shelves.

"I did it right when I joined the show," Rohm says, "which was somewhat intimidating, because I was just beginning to explore my own character." Which means that the Serena character you see today was developed in a sound booth, reading dialogue for a computer game. "I really kind of relied on the vibe of the show," Rohm says. "In terms of helping me develop my character, it was really useful."

On the other hand, Rohm says her previous experience in movies and television series such as "Angel" didn't quite prepare her for computer game work. "The rules of my character in the game are very basic," she says. "It doesn't have the emotional range of the television screen or the movie screen." So don't hold your breath waiting for an Oscar- or Emmy-worthy performance in a game. But then, it's a computer game. The person at the controls is the one who's supposed to do the winning.