Iron Man 2 Interview: Rebooting A Franchise - PAGE 1

We have taken some time to sit with Mike McHale and Dean Martinetti, development director and producer for Iron Man 2. With a rough initial game behind them, the two talk about developing a franchise and how they feel they have defied the movie video game curse with their latest project. Chase from Access Communications acted as moderator for the discussion.

McHale briefly summarized the game as an extension of the film, allowing you to further explore the universe as Iron Man or, for the first time, War Machine. Suits are entirely customizable; objects are destructible, and many classic villains are featured.

How closely does the games story go along with the movies story? How much of the game ties in with the movie?

Mike: Traditionally movie games try to follow the movie beat by beat, and either fill in the blanks in-between or tell the story of what’s happening off camera. As we’ve worked on movie games here, I’ve started developing a philosophy with our production teams and developers. I don’t think that following a movie point by point and scene by scene is the best way to make a game. In gamer terms, you can think of a movie as a two hour non-interactive cutscene really and that doesn’t lend itself to a great game.

What we’ve done is write a completely new story and we want the player to feel like it's the film universe, so we’ve taken great steps to re-create the characters, making sure they feel like the film and that the environments could be part of Tony Stark’s world. It’s actually a completely new story, that way the user never knows what’s coming up next and we can design the content for great game play instead of trying to shoe horn game play into scenes from the movie. I actually think it’s a better way to make movie games and I imagine here at Sega that’s how we’ll be doing things going forward.

Was it liberating or daunting to make a movie game that doesn’t actually tie into the movie?

Mike: It’s liberating; Marvel has been great to let us do this. We’ve completely stepped off the movie plot and expanded on the movie universe. It’s been really fun. We wanted to stay true to the film and make sure that things we were doing felt like they were happening within Tony Starks world as it’s depicted in the movie. It is truly liberating to be able to design missions and scenarios around an interactive game instead of scenes from a movie. I think Iron Man as a character is a very workable character, as is War Machine; they have a suit you can modify and add new technology to and make it your own which is awesome. We took the vibe from Iron Man 1 and what we knew about Iron Man 2 and tried to build a new storyline in the world and I think it worked out well.

Were there any elements of the Iron Man comics that you wanted to include in the game but just couldn’t make it work?

Mike:  I’m not sure there was. When we started out we kind of looked and said, “What’s a truly epic story we could make in a game that would be too expensive in a movie?” We have some enemies and bosses that are massive and much bigger than anything seen in the film and would be too cost prohibitive to do some of the things we’re doing in the movie. We have some missions in the in the heli carrier; we have bosses that are probably some of the biggest in any video game ever made. We did things that they wouldn’t be able to do in the movie because of time and budget. It’s nothing really that we looked and said we couldn’t from an IP or story perspective; we had to stick to our schedule and watch our feature set to meet the deadline.

What were any challenges when improving from the original Iron Man?

Dean: Flight was the first thing we thought of. The team took the feedback from online and the reviewers and worked to make the game better than the first. Control was the first thing for flight, to give it usability to get in and out of the game without being a hardcore gamer. Within 10-15 minutes anyone should be able to move easily and modify the suits by the end of the lab area. We aimed to succeed where the original game failed -- game content and melee fighting with customization were key points, improving the AI and rebooting the entire game this time around. Hopefully people will notice right out of the box that it’s much easier to get into and adapt much faster thanks to Jarvis and other tools; maps are able to mark and show players where everything is clearly without any confusion of enemies or allies.

How long has Iron Man 2 been in development? Was there enough time to improve upon any omissions that the first game had? What were some features you wanted to see this time around?

Mike: I don’t think any production or development team feels they have as much time as they want. I mean at one point you have to finish the game; you never quite finish as there’s always some additional polish. The game has been in development for two years; we had a starting point with it. The character Iron Man is very strong but its very challenging as he has near unlimited abilities. He can switch from ground to flight; he has a huge variety of weaponry and goes from hand to hand to range weapons. It provides challenges as it goes from a shooter to a brawler but it wouldn’t be Iron Man without those elements. We could of course use extra time but our aim was to provide the best content we could with the movie schedule. We knew Iron Man 2 would be a given after the movie success and were able to get up and running fairly early to develop the game.