A lot of games have long titles with colons in them, but House Of The Dead: Overkill is one that really means something. You're often in a house. There are dead people in it. Fair enough. But in particular, 'Overkill' best describes the experience of playing ONM's favourite on-rails shooter. Developer Headstrong Games took every trick in the trashy B-movie book, multiplied it by ten and came up with Overkill. Let's hope Sega sign them up for more...
It's no surprise that while the movie industry has a whole genre of trashy, low-rent B-movies with a cult following, there's no real equivalent in gaming. While you can sit back and enjoy the sheer awfulness of a shoddy '70s zombie romp, you simply can't get away with making a rubbish game and tell people "It's so bad it's good!"
But what happens when you take the grindhouse aesthetic of low-budget thrill-a-minute filmmaking (given a hefty shot in the arm by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's over-the-top Grindhouse double feature in 2007) and place it in a game that's actually really good? House of the Dead: Overkill, that's what.
House of the Dead was already a firm favourite with arcade-goers and a cult shooter on home consoles, so when Sega decided to create a brand new chapter in the series exclusively for Wii, it chose a team with real pedigree. London-based Headstrong Games (formerly known as Kuju London) had already created two excellent Battalion Wars games for Nintendo (a seal of quality in itself - it's not often that Nintendo publishes UK-developed games) and describes itself as a specialist in Wii development. The rest is history, as they say. We spoke to House of the Dead: Overkill producer Neil McEwan to get the inside story on the Gold Award recipient and 'most outrageous game ever made'...
Neil McEwan and his Headstrong team
ONM: We love the B-movie style. How did you come up with it? Neil McEwan: When I joined Headstrong in January of last year, all we had when I joined were some prototypes of the basic arcade-style shooting zombies in the face stuff, much like all the other House of the Deads.
We were playing around with the scenario for a couple of months, so we went down the usual routes of a steampunk game, or setting it in the future - all the stuff you usually go through. I guess we came up with the pulp-style in around March of last year.
ONM: Were there any films that inspired that specific look, perchance? NM: Obviously the film that set it off was Planet Terror. Once we saw that, everything fell into place from there. We read a lot of books and found out what Rodriguez and Tarantino were inspired by and started off with those. We really liked the style of the Grindhouse trailers. They show off the coolest stuff and they have all that 'be amazed' 'be thrilled' exploitation voiceover style. It was a good place to start but we also watched loads of other films that inspired that look. It was a lot of fun researching it, that's for sure.
ONM: How did you get away with pushing the shock value so far in the game? NM: From a creative point of view Sega gave us a lot of room, which was great. We did a rough draft of the script in April and we took it down to Sega and ran it through them. Their biggest concern at the time was how we depicted G. We had some discussion over whether he should swear. In the end, he does swear a bit at the end as Washington begins to rub off on him a little bit. We've been amazed at the fanbase that Agent G has got now - he seems to have attracted quite a following.
ONM: Is there anything that you wanted to put in but thought it went a bit too far? NM: Actually, there was a bit of discussion about the end. We told the censorship body what happens and they wanted to see it really early on. I had some great conversations with them describing exactly how the scene unfolds in the game and the kind of sound effects that we'll play.
With the final boss mother we did talk about her giving birth to the pukers so she would squat down and squirt them out. They would be like baby Bambi characters sprawling around in the afterbirth. But we toned that down a little bit.
It was really funny putting it all together - we wrote all this stuff, then acted it out, and all the time we were saying "we can't do that" or "we can't say that" but then we kind of just thought "who says we can't do that? What are we putting restrictions on ourselves?" It's funny that once you start actually making your cut scenes and doing the sound it actually becomes more shocking.
I knew we were onto a winner with Overkill when the team started quoting lines from the game in the office. I knew we had something good. We definitely didn't restrict ourselves with anything. I think we could even go further with it. And we've already got ideas what we can do and where our characters go from here.
ONM: So there's another one on the way then? NM: I can't really say but when we were working on our characterisation for Agent G and Washington we gave them a backstory and because we feel a lot of love for these characters we worked out where they went after Overkill. So there's definitely still scope in the Overkill universe.
ONM: House of the Dead has always been an on-rails shooter, but were you ever tempted to play around with the basic gameplay mechanics? NM: What we did was go down to the Trocadero Centre in London and played a lot on the House of the Dead 3 and 4 arcade machines and started to make notes on what kind of speeds they use, camera angles, where the enemies attack from, how long they take to die - all that stuff. And obviously House of the Dead 2 and 3 came out on the Wii as well so we had that as a point of reference.
We wanted to stay true to the fundamental elements of what House of the Dead is all about. We spent a lot of time prototyping a lot of different guns and how they should feel. I definitely think that there are further things you can do with an on-rails shooter and I think with the time that we had we made the best game that we could. But there are other areas we can push it and more you can do with the genre.
ONM: How do you feel about the finished game now that it's out there on shelves and generally considered a success? NM: It's been brilliant. We've just received an entry in the Guinness Book Of World Records for the most profanities in a videogame. There was a time when my scriptwriter was very nervous about the amount of swearing we had in the game and we even considered cutting a lot of it or bleeping it out. But in the end we're pleased that we stuck with it. We're really happy with what we created and we're glad you guys liked it!
