January 23, 2007
Games move to mean streets and moody monochrome
As a fan of film noir and the novels that provided its inspiration, it is fascinating working in San Francisco, where so many locations have been mixed with dark fiction and cinema.
Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon in an apartment on Post Street, just up from the FT’s bureau, the movie Born to Kill features Ocean Beach, while Dark Passage and D.O.A are centred on the Malloch and Chambord apartment buildings respectively. Hitchcock’s Vertigo is shot all over the city.
In any event, the trend towards video game noir is currently piquing my interest.
Nintendo will release Hotel Dusk: Room 215 tomorrow for its dual-screen handheld, the DS. It describes it as a film noir “video game book” that tells the story of a disgraced detective Kyle Hyde. He checks into a seedy Los Angeles hotel and stumbles upon a 30-year-old murder mystery.
Rockstar Games, developers of the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto series, are currently working on L.A. Noire, an interactive detective story set in the 1940s
It “will truly blend cinema and gaming,” they claim, with action, detection and complex storytelling taking place in a perfectly recreated Los Angeles before freeways.
With these games and the much-anticipated Alan Wake, a “psychological action thriller” coming to the Xbox 360, the video game industry is making a welcome move away from pure “shoot ‘em ups” to titles that are atmospheric in their settings and involving in their story lines.
It is video games becoming more like the movies, not in the verisimilitude they promised, but in their ability to capture us with compelling plots and locations.
