EoN producer Joel Wade talks about cyber-scanning the Hollywood cast

24-Oct-2003 • Gaming

The Boston Globe has interviewed "Everything or Nothing" producer Joel Wade about the Hollywood talent involved in the game.

"We went to great lengths to make sure that this was going to be the best Bond game ever," said Wade.

But it`s a game, not a movie, and that imposes some crucial limitations. In a game, the player - not some invisible screenwriter - controls what happens. So, the game must draw the characters on the screen in real time, showing the outcome of every decision Bond might make. Alas, home computers are nowhere near powerful enough to render human faces with photographic accuracy. Still, Wade says Everything or Nothing will get as close as possible, with the help of "cyberscanning," a technique that uses laser light to draw a digital representation of the actors faces.

"A laser spins around their heads," Wade says. "It`s scanning one vertical line at a time. . . . It maps the entire surface of their heads." The result, he says, will be unusually accurate representations of the actors.

Still, the limits on graphical accuracy mean that movie stars do most of their gaming work in a sound booth, recording lines of dialogue that play at crucial points in the game. Often the words will be accompanied by a short computer-rendered video, known in the gaming trade as a "cinematic cutscene."

The game will feature dialogue written by Bruce Feirstein, scriptwriter for three Bond films, backed by music from Sean Callery, whose score for the TV series "24" won him an Emmy.