Beowulf First Look Q&A
The good king and his thanes will spill epic amounts of blood on game consoles this fall. We spoke with Ubisoft Tiwak game manager Adrian Lacey to get the details.
When you think of properties that are ripe for adaptation to the silver screen--and the video game one, for that matter--Anglo-Saxon epic poetry from the Middle Ages probably doesn't leap directly to mind. Regardless, director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) is steaming ahead on his late-2007, computer-animated feature film interpretation of Beowulf, and Ubisoft is likewise hard at work on a video game version of the movie slated for release on the Xbox 360, PlayStation3, and PC. When you think about it, cramming Beowulf into a game isn't such a stretch. You've got muscle-bound barbarians wielding massive weapons, a dragon, a couple of nasty monsters bent on destroying the king's good people...it's almost as if the poem's anonymous author wrote it with your average hack-and-slash fantasy game in mind.
So how do you get from a millennium-plus old epic poem to a modern-day video game, anyway? Ubisoft Tiwak game manager Adrian Lacey took time away from his busy development schedule to answer that very question.
GS: How did Ubisoft get involved with the Beowulf property? And how was Ubi's Tiwak team in France chosen to handle the project?
AL: Paramount came to Ubisoft headquarters and showed us some early artwork and said, "This is a film from Robert Zemeckis coming out. It's a different way of doing it. It's using motion-capture technology that's being developed by his team." This must be going back a year and a half, two years ago. We had just finished [the first] Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, so we were already looking at what other games we're going to do, what's going to be the next stage. But we also wanted to do something a little bit different. We heard about Beowulf, and we were like, "Oh, what's it about?" Our editorial team said, "You know, Beowulf, it's sort of Viking-esque, big burly men, the strength of 30 men and all that kind of stuff," and we were like, "All right. So it sounds interesting, Vikings, that kind of stuff could be cool."
And then we saw a couple pieces of concept art and then we started doing some of our own research, digging up things about the poem--we found out that it had been studied by Tolkien for a long time and that there had already been a few smaller films and animation and comic books, and that Lord of the Rings and things like that were inspired by the poem itself, which was an old poem that was discovered in the 11th century. It's actually quite a unique story in the sense like you've got this big Viking--it's all about death, hacking and slashing--but there's also a deeper side. It's sort of a man torn by his own selflessness and selfishness. It's this balance between the carnal side, the inside of him, and as he progresses through his life and suffers the consequences. It's also based on temptation, you know, all man's bad habits, basically. I think that's what gave us the first hook into it.
Then from there we turned around and we had an opportunity to meet the filmmakers and said, "Have a think about what kind of game you want to come up with and how to think of the concept, the basic concept. But in parallel, come and meet the filmmakers so you can get an understanding of their vision," because there's been that many interpretations of Beowulf anyway. It's inspired so many things like The 13th Warrior and things like that, that we wanted to understand the visions of [Zemeckis] and Steve Starkey, who've made everything from Back to the Future to Forest Gump. So we thought, "All right, that's cool. Let's see what he's going to do. His vision obviously is going to be pretty cool." We went to sit with him and we just let them tell us the story, tell us what they could feel. And the script was written by Neil Gaiman, and so all these little things--when we started listening a bit more, we started realizing it sounded pretty sexy.
So we went to see them, they explained to us their vision. You know, the Vikings were sort of like the Marines of yesteryear. They were like Special Forces of the fifth, sixth century. So there were some tie-ins to a certain extent. We wanted to apply that to that time period and to the "hack-and-lead" element. There's something about this guy who's an arrogant young warrior who then becomes a king. There is something about that sort of journey that we really thought made a good story for a game, and we could also apply it in terms of the gameplay mechanics. The filmmakers spent a lot of time explaining [their] story, but they also gave us a lot of liberty in terms of how we were going to tell the story. They obviously insisted on key elements of the movie being interpreted. But they realized that if they make a two-and-a-half-hour movie, they also appreciate that we've got to give 10 or 12 hours of game play.
So we have to expand the universe, and that was one of the big things that we discussed with them in the first meetings: "Can we expand outside [of the movie] and what are the limits of where we can go? We don't want to just tell the exact story of the movie. We want to extend the universe a little bit more so the player understands what the torment of Beowulf is all about." So that's how we got to that.
GS: Are you expanding the universe based on your own creative ideas, or are you going back to the original epic poem to flesh out the story in the game?
AL: For us it's Beowulf versus his inner monster, the monsters within. The poem and the movie don't really deal with that situation. It's sort of like an ellipsis. It goes from when he's young and flashes forward to when he's old, and then has little flashbacks to when he was progressing. That's all you see.
So we wanted to give the player that journey, those 30 years where he's suffering for the decision that he made when he was young, and that's how we give the player the experience of being torn, because he's facing his own monsters within. We based it very much on Viking mythology, Norse legends, that kind of stuff. We were very much inspired by the Norse gods and that kind of stuff from that time. But it's completely independent from the movie or from the poem itself.
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