Interviews// Saints Row The Third

SPOnG: Saints Row The Third could best be described as a parody of many different video game and movie cliches. What’s been your favourite send-up in the game?

Greg Donovan: My personal favourites involve scenes that really break down the fourth wall. One example is a bit of dialogue during an intense gunfight where someone asks, ‘How long do we have until we get backup?’ and your character might say, ‘Oh, maybe about two waves of SWAT guys.’ That kind of thing I love.

Scott Phillips: I think, out of the things that we’ve announced in trailers, the cyberspace stuff is probably among my favourites. It’s a great send-up of Tron, but the first thing everyone thinks about is getting the light cycles in there. And we did do that, there’s an activity where you’re racing down tubes in kind of a Sonic the Hedgehog style. Doing that stuff is just fun.

We love all the same things that every other gamer and reviewer loves, and we want to put those things in our game because we like them. We enjoy them. Whored Mode is a perfect example of that, really. We had Zombie Uprising 2 in Saints Row 2, but we wanted to do something new. Gears of War’s Horde mode kind of restarted this whole idea of wave-based combat, and I think ours ended up just being, ‘let’s do a Horde mode, but let’s do it our way - gimps with dildo bats and take it to a different, ridiculous level.’


SPOnG: Activision recently said that Modern Warfare 3 is like a game that Michael Bay directed. If you had to make a similar comparison, what director or what kind of film would you say Saints Row The Third is closest to?

Greg Donovan: I can’t remember the director’s name, but Shoot ’Em Up (Michael Davis), I think that’s totally Saints Row material.

Scott Phillips: We made a video early on that was a compilation of crazy moments from all of these different films to sell the team on the tone of the game. Those films included Shoot ‘Em Up, Bad Boys II, Hot Fuzz... I think that scene at the end of Hot Fuzz, where Simon Pegg is having an epic fight with all the old people. 90-year-old people with uzis and shotguns, that’s the sort of feel that Saints Row has.

Greg Donovan: You could also say Die Hard. It’s all-out action, but it still has that humour in there. Smoking Aces, that was another film.


SPOnG: Can you explain how the waves are designed in Whored Mode? Each wave is different, but are they the same scenarios for each stage, or different every time using some randomising algorithm or something? If it’s scripted scenarios throughout, would you introduce DLC to add new scenarios?

Greg Donovan: They’re the same scenarios each time you play through a map, but each map has different ones. The three maps have 30 waves that are all completely different from each other.

If players wanted new scenarios in the form of DLC, we’d absolutely do that too.


SPOnG: Any ‘Hot Coffee’ moments in Saints Row The Third?

Scott Phillips: Nothing that we built into the game [laughs]. But I’m sure there’s stuff people can do on a PC that’ll mod the game in their own design.

Greg Donovan: We didn’t want any kind of Hot Coffee moments in our game at all. We have to disclose everything we have in the game to the ratings boards, and it’s always interesting to navigate through the whole ‘violence good, sex bad’ philosophy that we have in the US. Certainly in Germany, it’s reversed. In the States, if you show a nipple, people freak out. But yeah, generally if you leave something hidden in a game, bad things happen. People are going to find it.

Scott Phillips: It was a much bigger deal when Saints Row 2 was getting rated, because the whole Hot Coffee business had just happened within a few years of that game’s release. And I think everyone in the industry had a realisation that we had to be more careful about that sort of stuff.


SPOnG: Is it harder or easier for you guys in general to get your games rated, because it’s a parody of various things?

Scott Phillips: The parody and silliness context actually helps us, yeah. Even the degree of violence we have in the game is so over-the-top it’s comical. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. And certainly the age-rating boards get that, and understand that the game is - for a lack of a better word - ‘cartoonish’ rather than realistic.


SPOnG: Saints Row has a lot of mock promotional adverts and franchise tie-ins with various fictional companies. Given the recent fiasco with Grainger Games’ sponsorship and behaviour at the Games Media Awards, would that be something you’d like to send up or parody in a future game?

Greg Donovan: [Laughs] I heard about what happened at that event. That was really weird, man. I’m not familiar with the company, I hear it’s a small independent retailer? But sure, if there’s going to be a Saints Row 4 we’re always willing to talk about partnering and things like that for sure.

It’s not out of the ordinary for us to do that - I mean, we have Astro headsets in Saints Row The Third, and that’s a real headphone brand. If... the whole Grainger Games thing fits, then we’d absolutely look at it. It might be an ironic partnership, but you know [laughs]!


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time!

Greg Donovan: Thanks a lot!

Scott Phillips: Thank you!