Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015)
Creative/Game Director, Producer, Story Creation & Script, Narrative Director (including working with Kate Saxon/SIDE on casting & voice direction, dialogue editing), design direction, Publisher Liaison (SONY, including marketing + PR responsibilities), Concept creation and development
Superficially, Rapture seemed a lot less complicated than most games mechanically, but one of the things I’m really proud of is simple we made it look, because it meant we’d done the complicated stuff well. Everything in the game was focused on an emotional, meditative experience. I’m really not concerned about people finding it slow, because for me it’s about trying to work into a differently paced mindset. Most media is fast, heavy on stimulus, driving forwards. Some, equally great, media is very slow, heavy on reflection and consideration. I was very inspired by Tarkovsky’s work at the time, which definitely falls into the latter. But Rapture was also about talking a walk in the countryside and being alone with your thoughts, not taking a run to achieve something. That’s not going to be for everyone of course, but that’s OK.
Some of where Rapture really shines is subtle. I’ve talked a lot in interviews about it being a game about discovering a story, and that the more story you discover, the more differently you’ll hopefully interpret things. Images can flower into subplots of new sympathies for characters, but only if you’ve gone looking and found them. Those shoes thrown over the telephone line that you only know Stephen has stolen from Howard if you get that scene, and that he’s done it to try and force Howard to stay in case Lizzie shows up. But then you only know Lizzie is pregnant and the stakes have been raised if you find a different scene and have spotted the secondary mote that follows Lizzie around.
The music and audio system underpinned this, blending Jessica’s cinematic cues with procedurally generated ambiences, music snippets and subliminal voicework. Then there’s the cloud shadow system, which could shift the emotional tone of movement but did so randomly. We knew that the slight darkening of the world had a definite impact on players, but the fact we had no control over when it would happen added another element of chance to the discovery.
We talked a lot at the time about Rapture being a spiritual successor to Esther. Looking back the evolution is clear – we were much more experienced in terms of actually making a game, of handling emergent properties and having the confidence to place the actual architecture of experience within the player’s hands.
Lastly, credit has to go to Kate Saxon and the extraordinary cast. We ran the Rapture shoot like a TV production. No booths, no mo-cap, but three weeks on a soundstage, following a couple of weeks of rehearsal. Everythingwas blocked like a traditional TV or theatre scene, and actors were captured as they performed with rough video that then formed the basis of the visuals. They wore head-mics and boom operators also followed each character. It gave a wonderfully natural feel to the voice-work and since then I’ve always advocated allowing actors to improvise, interrupt each other, talk over one another and so on – and wherever possible, always having all the actors in a scene together in the booth. I’m not a fan of bringing them in separately to record – of course it’s a lot easier (and cheaper) from a production side of things, but there’s a wonderful magic you just can’t capture. Both Little Orpheus and Still Wakes the Deep were also recorded as ensembles and you can just tell in the performances.
