hat goes into the making of a video game?  How about a first person shooter?  Is it just, here's a gun...here's some nazis...go kill them?  Not so much.  Criterion has been developing Black for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox for quite some time, and in the creation of our feature for the December issue of Game Informer, we got to find out the origins of Black direct from Criterion's Creative Director Alex Ward.  Here's part one of our Black Interview series....

Game Informer:  Where did you come up with the concept of Black?

Alex Ward:  This game started off five years ago. We were working on a game where we had a character on the screen and we were always arguing over what jeans the character was wearing. We argued for hours over that.

I remember saying, “F*** this. The next game we make’s going to be a shooting game because you can’t argue about what an AK-47 does or doesn’t look like.” And we were all thinking, “This will be good. No more meetings about character design. We can just do shooting.”

The game started off as a ‘modern Medal of Honor type of game’ because I’m a big fan of Medal of Honor. It was very powerful to me on PlayStation and at the start of PlayStation 2. It was a very powerful experience. And I was amazed at how my imagination filled in the gaps. It really hit home to me. I wasn’t into World War II, but I was after playing that game. And it spawned a whole genre really, the World War II shooter.

So I’m a big fan of Medal of Honor, and I’m overtly aware of the difference between a PC title and a console title. And you’re either doing one or the other. You know, it’s hard to do both. So if we were doing this game on the PC at the same time I’d be very worried because we’d probably f*** up both of them. There are a number of shooters on PlayStation 2 where you know it’s a port from PC code and there’s been no love spent on it either visually or the gameplay.

The codename for this project on my PC was called 'Project Firecracker ' because we knew it was going to be explosive. I’ve been reading and researching the modern thriller genre heavily for the past five years, studying weapons, the world of modern intelligence, anything modern or military.

I’m a big fan of the writer Frederick Forsyth, particularly Day of the Jackal – that was certainly an influence on the ideas behind the game, both from the book and the filmed version. I definitely recommend reading it if you are interested in the character portrayed in the film. And I’ve been a big Tom Clancy fan over the years too.

As I started thinking about this game, Alias started to air in the United States. I’ve become a big fan of JJ Abrams. I would have loved to do the Alias game because I know we would have done a really good job with it. As an IP Alias has been fantastic and I feel that I clearly understand where they have been and where they might go with it.

In 2002 I was traveling around the US showing off Burnout 2: Point of Impact. The big story on all of the network news stations was about John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban.’ He was an American who was captured by US forces in Afghanistan. This really stood out to me as something really interesting. An American who was fighting for the enemy. I was really interested in him and thought this was something that was interesting from a dramatic point of view. Black is all about the REAL world of modern day black operations. This is an interesting world, a world full of quick and deadly decision making, and it’s a world that has not really been explored fully in videogaming. It’s been heavily associated with stealth gameplay, and that is something that wasn’t too interesting to us from a gameplay point of view.

That’s really one of the reasons the game is called Black. It’s powerful and mysterious and it means more to a North American audience than it does to a European one. There are always references in the American media about black budgets, black projects, black warfare and black operations. The stealth fighter and stealth bomber are famous black projects. NASA has some black projects. Over the past five years I’ve been traveling and visiting as many ‘black’ locations as I could.

While I was in Nevada I drove out to Area 51 and the nearby town of Rachel, Nevada. I think it’s known for being one of the most black places in America. Last month I was in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. The scene of the Kennedy assassination. Some people believe that was a black operation. Something certainly happened in Dallas and even now we’re not quite sure exactly what. I’m fascinated by the black world, the world behind the headlines, behind the façade. We had a tagline internally that was;’ this is the world you won’t see on CNN.’

I was briefly introduced to John Milius at E3. He was working with EA in Los Angeles writing Medal of Honor: European Assault. We were talking about John Walker Lindh and he was telling me that there is a lot more to that story than the government and the media is letting on.

I am fascinated by the world of conspiracy, but I’m not always a fan of the way that this world and their stories are portrayed in gaming. I knew our game was going to be heavily about shooting and blowing stuff up and the whole thing is very overt. The software was never going to be about stealth. It was always going to be a shooter that was like an action movie. Visceral and exciting.

So we wanted to do a fresh take on the world of black operations and we set the game in Eastern Europe because that’s where all modern thriller writers were heading. The Cold War is over now so it’s hard to write about a nuclear threat from Moscow or about the world of counter espionage. We also didn’t want to do a game where the player is constantly traveling around the world. It’s hard to tie a story together if the player is in the middle of the South American jungle in one scene and a space base in the next.

I wanted to connect the action of the game and the storytelling and I am painfully aware that this is very very hard to do in games. First, it’s hard to pull off. Second, it almost doesn’t matter what we do our specialist media aren’t big fans of it. Some games do it better than others. But most of us agree that game storytelling is generally pretty poor, particularly for action games.

For me the Metal Gear series has always been good. I’ve always enjoyed them. When I play MGS I like to really take my time and watch all of the cinematics and listen to all of the voiceover performances. I think they have done some really good stuff.

With Black, we were headed towards something really black. We have some very overt game action, and the story was heading in a dark Alias meets 24 type vibe. That was cool to me because I’m a huge fan of those series. How the story is told, what the feel of the story is, what the issues are that it treads into are all very important to me as I always strive for things to be believable and credible. I didn’t want the game to explore a world of fantasy. I wanted it to be very current, very believable and very up-to-the-minute.

Black is hopefully the first game in a series so I’m setting something up. All I have to do with the first game story wise is set up the world. That’s what the first Star Wars did, that’s what the movie of The Bourne Identity did and the first seasons of Alias and 24. I have to say a certain amount and make you want to experience it more. Hopefully you will like what we have created. Too many games have featured bad story telling using generic subjects. They are often like a bad movie, and a bad movie that you rented cheap at the video store at that. I want to move away from that. I say what I want to say and then get out of it quickly and into the software. I hope that the audience will understand where we’ve been and be with us for where we are going.

-Game Informer Staff