Interviews// Beowulf Associate Game Director, Alexander Remy

Ubisoft’s Beowulf graces game store shelves this month, billed as an innovative and ground-breaking ‘Hack and Lead’ game, tying in with the Hollywood blocksbuster movie starring Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone. SPOnG caught up with Alexander Remy, Associate Game Director on Beowulf.

The game uses the third iteration of the YETI engine, originally developed for the Ghost Recon games and the developers have worked very closely with the filmmakers in Hollywood in sharing – among other things - assets, scripts, concept art and voice-over talent.

Can the Beowulf game achieve what Ubisoft claims it should – and stand out head and shoulders above other games on the shelf due to its gameplay alone? Or will it be dismissed by gamers as yet another Hollywood merchandising cash-in? Only time will tell. Read on to find out what Alexander Remy had to tell us about his latest baby at a Beowulf preview event recently.


SPOnG: Hi Alexander, what’s your role on this project?
[b]
Alexander Remy:[/b] Hi, I’m the Associate Game Manager on Beowulf.


SPOnG: How long has the game been in development? As long as the movie?

Alexander Remy: Well, we’ve worked on the Beowulf game now for around a year and half or so.


SPOnG: I know when the game was first announced at the Ubidays event earlier this year, Yves [Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO] talked quite a lot about how the game represented quite a big step forward for the evolving relationship between games and movies. Presumably because you are sharing a lot of assets with the filmmakers in putting together the game.

Alexander Remy: Purely in terms of relationship with the movie studios, Beowulf is much different to all the other movie licensed games we’ve made at Ubisoft, because we share much more than just assets with the studios. I mean, not only do we have a lot of the voice-over talent from the actors in the movie – Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winston and the other guys – but right from the get-go we had the opportunity to liase very closely and frequently with the filmmakers, with our guys flying frequently to Los Angeles to debrief with them the whole second act of the game, which is entirely new content. We also shared with them all the 3D models, plus we have regular script reviews, full use of all the concept art, cinematics and storyboards done for the movie.


SPOnG: So you’ve worked very closely with the writers on the movie, because there is an entirely new storyline in the game isn’t there? Can you say a little bit more about this – particularly how it differs to the original poem and the movie adaptation?

Alexander Remy: Yeah sure. We worked very closely with the writers. The original story in the poem and then in the movie is set up so that you have two time periods – you have Beowulf as a young, arrogant warrior in his twenties, and then there is a fast forward of thirty years and you have Beowulf back as an older, established king. And there are a few events and that’s the end of the tale and the myth.

What we were allowed to do with the filmmakers was to take this thirty year period and design a whole new and original storyline for the game. So what we did is take the main themes of what the Beowulf myth is, taking many, many references to Norse mythology and Norse legends and trying to be as faithful as possible to the movie and to the original tale, putting together a strong storyline that resonates both in terms of the mythology and in terms of how it relates to the gameplay.


SPOnG: What about the original movie scriptwriters, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery? Were they involved in writing anything for the game?

Alexander Remy: No, not that much to be honest. They are basically writing scripts and handing them over to the filmmakers. We work much closer with that second team of scriptwriters in Hollywood than with Gaiman and Avery.


SPOnG: Was their involvement key to getting the original movie greenlit?

Alexander Remy: Yeah, Avery was a big fan of Beowulf. He wrote the script. When he first proposed it to Paramount they told him “man, you basically have a script that is going to cost you $200 million… It’s impossible and we can’t greenlight this…”. Then he teamed up with Neil Gaiman and Robert Zemeckis and they were then able to use the performance capture technology that was originally used in Polar Express. So they were able to finally make this epic movie in the way the scenario and the script were written in the first place.


SPOnG: You mentioned working closely with the actors doing voiceovers. What was it like working with Ray Winstone?

Alexander Remy: Oh wow! That was like the best thing that could have happened. Winstone brings so much to the table in terms of immersion, in terms of credibility and authenticity to the game, because not only does [his involvement] enable us to be as faithful as possible to the movie, but also because just the performance of such actors is just so much better than the usual standard of voice over talent. It really makes the difference in terms of immersion and emotion.