It’s a complete coincidence that Quentin Tarantino’s film “Inglourious Basterds” and Pandemic Studios’ most recent game, The Saboteur, are both set in Nazi-occupied France and focus on a resistance effort to sabotage the Nazis. While Tarantino ultimately created a fantasy that changes the outcome of the war and alters history, Pandemic chose to embrace history and historical characters in its original game. Although the new third-person perspective World War II action game tells an original fictional story, it’s inspired by real-life saboteur and war hero William Grover-Williams.
The Saboteur “stars” Irish mechanic/wannabe race car driver Sean Devlin who flights, bombs and shoots down the enemy in Nazi-occupied Paris with the help of the French Resistance and British intelligence.
Sadly, the last big release of 2009 from Electronic Arts is also the last game from Pandemic Studios. The LA development studio was closed as part of EA’s recent layoffs, although members of the team have been moved to the EA office in L.A.
Tom French, lead designer of “The Saboteur” at EA-owned Pandemic, talks about the role history played in developing the new action game.
The Wall Street Journal: How did the team research the French Resistance?
Tom French: The art department went wild with research. They searched for anything that would help guide the look of the game — the faces of the people of that era, what kinds of clothes people wore, what different things people were doing at the time. One interesting find by our art director, Chris Hunt, was Georges-Eugène Haussmann. He was a civic planner who in the mid-1800s was hired by Napoleon III to make Paris a more modern city with better streets, improved housing, and generally enhanced the culture. The rules he set for how the city was to be rebuilt served as a great guidelines for the art team to break down the many different districts of Paris and recapture the ideas behind how the city was laid out in the game.
Did you go to Paris to research the game?
Yes, and we hired a guide who was living in France to help dig up some research about events and locations that we hadn’t seen in our research in the U.S. On top of that, she found a few different resistance museums in France, two of which were in Paris and must-see stops on the trip. At each of them our group scattered about — our art director took pictures of anything he could bring back for his team, while I scribbled in a notebook about weapons, gadgets, little stories, names, and even just facial features I liked for character reference.
EA Are there any real historical characters in this game?
There are no real historical figures in The Saboteur, however there are definitely some characters influenced by real people. Our main hero, Sean Devlin, was inspired by William Grover-Williams. Grover-Williams was a half English/half French grand prix champion driver for the French Bugatti racing team back in the 1930’s. When the Nazis occupied France he fled the country in fear of his life and narrowly escaped to England. He was very much a patriot and joined up with the Royal Army Service Corps, but soon was recruited by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and airdropped back into France to help foster the resistance and execute on Churchill’s charge to “set Europe ablaze!” Sadly, Williams ended up paying the ultimate price for his actions and was executed by the Nazis.
What role do you see games playing in getting players interested in exploring history?
To some degree, there is a passive learning that can come out of some of the more historical era games. Because games are an interactive form of entertainment media, players often find themselves immersed in these worlds, picking up little details about the setting that they might not have retained after class reading a history book. A lot of these historically inspired games, mainly shooters, simulators or strategy games, tend to revolve around the many different wars that have taken place throughout our world’s history — mainly because conflict is a great platform on which to design a game. Players learn about the different conflicts of these wars (sometimes close recreations of the real events), what weapons were used, different strategies used.
How has new technology influenced your ability to tell a story?
If you think back just a couple of generations, game stories were generally pretty simple, more like simple fairy tales of saving a princess in a castle. Now the stories have grown and become more complex. Improvements in technology now can bring the characters to life with more realistic looking faces, natural animations and believable speaking. This allows for players to connect to the emotions the characters are feeling inside the game world and become more involved with what is going on. The better this seems to get the more the players want to be further engrossed in the world, meaning designers have to become increasingly clever with ways to allow the player further interact with the world, thus injecting themselves more into the total experience.
