After spending three years in pre-production, fifteen months writing and almost two hundred days motion capture shooting, Quantic Dream’s David Cage is ready to talk more about his studio’s upcoming PS3 title, Heavy Rain; a game that he hopes won’t just prove to be an outstanding dark thriller, but a title that will forever change the face of the industry.

D+PAD: Heavy Rain is a brand new IP for Quantic Dream, but just like your previous title, Fahrenheit, you’re looking to break boundaries with storytelling in video games. How do you go about starting a project like Heavy Rain? Do you look at what worked well in Fahrenheit and expand upon those elements, or is it a completely different process?
David Cage: After Fahrenheit, we spent a lot of time reading critics’ opinions and listening to gamers. We also had many things we were not happy with and that we wanted to rethink and change. At the same time, we did not start thinking of Heavy Rain as a sequel, but I had the feeling we found something with Fahrenheit that I wanted to explore further. These ideas of letting the player tell the story through his actions using Bending Stories, of considering the experience as an emotional journey with moral choices, of having short and varied scenes, of moving the challenge from the controller to the mind of the player, all these were interesting concepts that could significantly be improved. But we also had many new ideas that we wanted to implement regarding gameplay and a new technology that allows us to improve the quality of the immersion.

If I had to summarise my motivation for Heavy Rain, it was to create an emotional simulator, use all means to make the player feel something, making an experience rather than just another video game. To achieve this goal, I thought that Fahrenheit opened the way, but that there was much more to do.

Heavy Rain is looking to blur the line between video games and movies. Were you inspired by the work of any particular film creator/director for Heavy Rain, or is the game entirely your own vision?
You are always inspired by other people’s work, not only movies, but also books, TV series, comics, paintings, art in general. Heavy Rain is a dark thriller and I am sure people will find connections with some films we all liked like Silence of the Lambs or Seven. I also really liked a Korean movie call Memories of a Murder and other Asian films. I like Asian cinema, but I also appreciate some Spanish or Spanish-speaking directors like Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Alejandro Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel) or Alejandro Amenabar (The Others).

What’s really different for me on Heavy Rain is that it is the first script I’ve written for a game that refers to things I have personally experienced in my life. In most other art forms this is quite usual, but it was something weird to do for me in a video game. Most games talk about rookies going to the battlefield or heroes fighting against the forces of evil, situations that few people actually experienced in their own lives, so they can only try to figure out what it means for their characters.

Heavy Rain is of course not based on my private life, but it is based on emotions that I have experienced myself, which will – I hope – support the story I want to tell and make its emotions more believable. I think our media is now mature enough to tell more personal stories, and I hope that more game designers will start talking about more personal things, because this is how other art forms reached maturity and more complex and interesting forms.

This is probably my main expectation from next gen games. Rather than displaying more polygons or having a physics engine, they should start to offer meaning.

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