July 26, 2007
Even some Rockstar employees hated the orginal Manhunt.That's the word from Jeff Williams (left), a former web producer for Rockstar.
On his Alphabet City blog, Williams pens a fascinating take on life inside the controversial publisher. The insightful Williams toiled in Rockstar's fields from the launch of Grand Theft Auto III to just before the release of GTA San Andreas.
Williams on working at Rockstar:
Rockstar was considered a promotion. More than once, I heard the phrase "you're in the big leagues now!"... Working there also really did buy the rock star treatment in certain circles... this didn't always transfer to other walks of life... That was always a bit disappointing... We thought we were changing popular culture...
Every Rockstar project turned into a huge clusterfuck. I mainly blame this on a horrendously inefficient company structure combined with a few individuals who thought they were hot shit but really didn't know anything about either video games or marketing. By that time, Rockstar was arrogant to the point of absurdity.
On GTA: Vice City:
The first time I played Vice City was definitely a moment of zen. That was the first and only time at Rockstar that I really felt like I was involved with something culturally important...
On Manhunt:
I didn't support Manhunt's release... there was almost a mutiny at the company over that game. It was Rockstar North's pet project - most of us at Rockstar Games wanted no part of it. We'd already weathered plenty of controversy over GTA3 and Vice City... but Manhunt felt different. With GTA, we always had the excuse that the gameplay was untethered - you never had to hurt anybody that wasn't a "bad guy" in one of the missions. You could play completely ethically if you wanted, and the game was parody anyway, so lighten up.
Manhunt, though, just made us all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line. That was the beginning of the end of my time with Rockstar. I began to lose faith.
On Hot Coffee:
You may ask if I knew about "Hot Coffee"... The truth is I did... I was in good with one of the guys closer to the game than I was and he had seen [the hot coffee scenes]. He couldn't believe it himself, and just assumed the scenes would be removed before the game was released... I don't think "hot coffee" was intentional - or at least I don't believe those scenes were intended to be found. Rockstar just didn't think anyone would go to the trouble.
The response Rockstar gave to the Hot Coffee scandal had my jaw on the floor, for three separate reasons... they apparently blamed their consumers for creating the sex scenes; and... their response was flat-out wrong!
Comments
About the company itself, it is pretty much established that Eliber and his way of running things was all in all, outright terrible. I honestly don't know how trustworthy or "correct" his knowledge about the company is, but considering what we do know Eliber has done, I am willing to belive that a "horrendously inefficient company structure" at the very least would be true enough.
About Vice city. I personally liked San Andreas better (I may be something of a minority here, but the RPG elements within really worked with it), but I did enjoy VC all the same. I particularly have always liked the radio within the games (the commercials and talk radio made me laugh so very hard. The songs fit the era and station they are on too).
About Manhunt. I really haven't played Manhunt, so I can't really say anythng about it. I do believe, however, that it (and every game, for that matter) should be judged on the quality of the game its self and not solely on the particular style of content.
On Hot Cofee. I don't know if he is telling the truth or not, but I do agree on one thing. It is absolutely idiotic to blame the consumer for it ,particularly for it's appearance on the console version. Given that the game is a pre-pressed read-only-memoy file, therby being unable to ever be overwritten on the same disk, it is virtually inconcievable that the consumer could somehow add content to it (otherwise, that would have been done to many a game for a long time now).
Come to think of it kinda perplexed why this article is deemed newsworthy.
And yes, I can totally see the marketing department being pushed to the bottom of the priority list as the game is being made.
As far as burn out due to long hours and poor management, thats nothing new in the industry. Unfortunately fun and games isn't all fun and games.
try call of cuthulu that will change your mind on the insane :P
Dumb it down manhunt is a sadistic realistic stealth based action game and out of them all the one to turn the more eyes because it uses a modern theme if it was set in a diffrent theme I doubt there would be as much distaste for it.
at 16000 kills so far i think...
~Otaku-Man
The game brings up serious questions about what one does during times of chaos and severe threat to self. Manhunt for me is a virtual example of fight or flight to the extreme. Thoughts of New Orleans after Katrina, military torture in the past several American-fought wars, movie renditions of life during martial law, and several fiction tales of life after a widespread disaster crushing technology and society come to mind. Real life is far more gruesome than any fiction Rockstar can produce. For me, Manhunt was a sociological jaunt into hell.
As far as killing a mentally handicapped person, I think we need to again look to real life. In real life, the mentally handicapped still have no real rights. Most people don't even treat them as humans. I have a cousin who is high-functioning autistic and have spent more time around a range of behaviors from clients that were not all a result of their condition. Acts out of free will and learned negative behavior on some people's parts should not automatically be washed away as excusable. Can we assume Piggsy was angel-white before he fell into the video-snuff-hell? Did Starkweather make him a monster or was he one in part due to his own desires to be? I ask this not even having played through that far into the game. I can say from personal experience that said cousin beat me mercilessly with water hoses when I was younger knowing full well what he was doing. To me, Piggsy was a stereotyped character used to maximize effect on the gameplayer's reaction to the violence. He was a character, demented as the rest who due to plot was going to be killed in either event but very well could have enjoyed the killing. Parallels to Mad Max's duel against the Blaster in Max Max Beyond Thunderdome relate here, but that exists in another fake reality where the hero's choice to not kill Blaster due to mental defect could not necessarily be applied to Manhunt's character. The whole kill or be killed thing makes it hard for me to know what I would do given the same circumstances in real life.
As far as Vice City goes, it was an evolution when compared to GTA 3. I loved it, but never beat it. Instead I borrowed a friend's save to copy and played the game with the all access pass and a ton of cash. Videogames rarely hold my interest enough to want to beat them. The payoff is seriously lacking for me ever since I saw the crap ending of NES Tiny Toon Adventures.
On a related GTA Vice City note, I allowed my younger sister to play it framed around the idea that she knew the game wasn't real, and no one really died. She saw the Ambulances come and fix the wounded/killed and was always happy. Instead of killing in the game, she enjoyed racing around the streets. When she did hit people she was sad, exclaiming "Uh oh! I hit a model. Sorry!" It proved to me that violent games could be played by some children if they understood the content and were not obsessed with the violence. A friend's son about the same age could not play these games because he thought it was "cool" to stab people in the face. My sister (nearly 14 now) plays the animal sims and random DS games for the most part when she isn't doing other things. The same girl was exposed to Metallica, Soundgarden, Pantera and the like while in the diaper and it doesn't seem to have caused permanent damage.
Be fair. That was Paul Eibeler's tenure. Enough ink has been spilled about what an incompetant CEO he was. The fact that Rockstar was an organizational mess should come as no shock, since it's a mess he created and lost his job over.
Let's see how Zelnick does before we completely condemn them.
You act like those 'concerned parents' actually make a difference in the industry. They can complain all they want, but as we know they can't make laws that'll do crud. They are absolutely no threat to the industry, so why shouldn't Rockstar push the very limits on what an M rating means? Besides if they make good games why should it matter if they are very violent? Eventually the criticism of games will die out you and I both know that.
Well, yeah, no doubt that God of War's setting is more fantastical than Manhunt's, but I'm still talking about the overall graphical violence that can be found in said game. But, I understand what you mean. Still though, I'm glad that you understand and even agree with me on the subject. Thanks.
@ Keaton2008
Firstly, Ron?! Don't make me sad here, heh.
As for Piggsy, yeah, he's supposed to be mentally retarded, but it doesn't matter when it comes down to it. He's been trained to kill for years, it's not something you can just talk out of him and he's after you. Mentally challenged or not, if you want to live, you'd kill him too. As far as I'm concerned anyway, you'd really only be putting him out of his misery. He's kept chained up in Starkweather's attic being beaten and abused and being trained to do the horrible things that he does. The only way out for him at this point is his death. So I think killing him is also pretty justified. I mean, there is no doubt that you're killing him solely for your own survival, but in the end you're also saving him from the cruelty they've forced him to endure up to that point and you're also saving innocent lives by keeping him from ever possibly escaping into the public.
@Ron
You have a good point. I refuse to play the game because of certain features, but he -is- killing psychopaths because he wants to get out alive and stuff. Not alot people would like to be the main victim in a snuff movie. But what keeps me from playing this game is the plastic bag and Piggsy. Chainsaw or not, I don't look kindly on killing the mentally handicapped. (I don't like saying retarded in terms of those with metal problems)
*Brokenscope
My freind brought over Vice City last week and none of us really liked it. We just made fun of it and played with the cheat codes, but I guess at the time it was the shit.
I agree with a lot of your reasoning, and ultimately your point, but Manhunt is much more realistic than God of War, though not perhaps as graphic. God of War is largely fantastical and over-the-top. On Manhunt though you get a sense of the resistance of the flesh and the bone when you're sawing off a dude's head with the wire or cutting through it with the machete. The blood spurting is also more realistic than excessive. The sound also plays a huge part in the realism.
Hehe he said "clusterfuck", one of the best words ever made.
Also, I don't see how it was realistic violence any more than shooting a gun on beating someone with a bat in GTA. The graphics in the game were decent, but not ground breaking and it wasn't nearly as realistic looking as something, like say, God of War which is extremely graphic with it's violence and even features full frontal nudity in many cases and had a sex mini-game you just could see. He doesn't know what he's talking about, he makes it too obvious.
It's facinating to read about the inside of such a secretive company.
Huh, That's what I always thought. Shame on Rockstar for how they handled it though.
Seriously though, this guy makes it sound like Rockstar Games should just die off. And you know what, it should. Every game they release is a giant sucker punch into the face of the industry when the media gets a hold of it. I'm sure that if Rockstar didn't exist anymore, we would be hearing a lot less from "concerned parents", and the like.