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While Grand Theft Auto III was first out of the gate, The Getaway, which has been in development for over three years in Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's Soho Studio, is poised to become the first videogame to truly blend movie-quality story with videogame freedom. As fun as GTA III is to play, its virtual city only had certain buildings you could enter. The Getaway maps out a 20 square mile area of London and let's the player explore every nook and cranny. If there's a door, you can open it and enter the building. If there's an alleyway, you can run or, if it's big enough, drive through it. Add to this complete immersion an excellent story of revenge, Mature-rated language and violence, and cutting-edge graphics, and you have the makings of a blockbuster game that could redefine the notion of what a videogame is.

“We like to tell stories, and in the past, game stories have interfered with gameplay,” said Brendan McNamara, director of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's Team Soho. “What interested us with The Getaway was to get the story working within the game. Once the game starts, everything occurs in real-time within the game engine, from the cinematics to the gameplay.”

After watching his wife murdered before his eyes and his daughter kidnapped, Mark Hammond is out for revenge. The action starts right away with a car chase through the streets of London to a warehouse, where you meet Charlie Jolson, the man behind everything. As Mark Hammond, you know Jolson through your days in crime. He's holding your daughter hostage and sends you on a series of suicide missions. The game's first 12 missions focus on the exploits of Hammond as he tries to get his daughter back. Then the game introduces Frank Carter, an undercover cop who helps Hammond. The rest of the game follows Carter's story, much of which dovetails on things that Hammond had done earlier in the game.

McNamara and his team of 50 have designed a game that features a realistic driving engine on par with Gran Turismo 3 and an on-foot action game equal to Metal Gear Solid 2. The game's been designed in such a way to immerse players in the experience and attract a more mass market gamer.

“We tried to avoid all the videogame clichés you see out there today, like arrows pointing out where you should turn and symbols and targets on-screen to show where enemies are located and which weapon you're using,” said McNamara. “We want the player to be immersed in the story, and I think those kinds of things remind you that you're playing a game. We didn't want inventory screens, so when you pick up a gun, you have it for as many bullets are in it. Then you need to find another one. We want people to participate in this virtual world. If you need to find a building in London, you'll do what you'd do in the real London, drive around until you find it. We found the map in Driver and Grand Theft Auto III to be intrusive, you spent all your time looking at it rather than exploring the virtual city.”

The game's driving engine will allow players to jack any vehicle and drive through a virtual London, sometimes being chased and shot at by the opposition.

“Smashing your car up will impact how the car looks and how it drives,” said McNamara. “It will progressively get harder to steer your car as you continue to accumulate damage. Smash up the front right tire, and the car will pull to the right. We're talking to all the major London car manufacturers like Range Rover, Toyota and BMW to include accurately detailed vehicles in the game. We're not going to license cars, we're working with the companies to cross-promote their vehicles.”

Every detail in this game is realistic, right down to the stolen crates of PS2s in Jolson's warehouse, sitting next to Channel (spelled wrong on purpose) perfume, and the use of Sony mobile phones throughout the game.

The Getaway constantly puts the player at the center of the universe. The team went throughout London and wore out digital cameras taking pictures of every area of the city. The team also got permission from individual store owners to use their names in the game. Adding to this realistic virtual city, everything in the game reacts to your movements and choices.

“When you jump out of your car and pull out your gun, cars will stop,” explained McNamara. “If you don't draw your weapon, cars will run you over. If you take a hostage, police won't shoot at you. If you grab a high-ranking member of a crime family, his cronies won't shoot, pick a low-level guy, and they'll kill him and you.”

The gameplay is very simple, allowing layers to enjoy the experience rather than worrying about controls. Press the R2 button to free aim at enemies and the R1 to target them. The narrative progresses from mission to mission, but you can take any route you want to get from point A to point B, which opens up the gameplay. You can run or drive from mission to mission, and do whatever you want along the way.

“You gain health naturally over time,” said McNamara. “We didn't want to do those corny health cases you pick up with the red cross on them. To me, that takes a player out of the game experience. We want to appeal to a broader audience with this game and we think making it more realistic will help. One shot to the head and you're dead.”

The team is going after the gritty feel of European films like ****** and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

“When the city looks so real and the cars look so real, you need to have characters that look and act real?and only live actors can achieve that,” said McNamara. “If you can cast actors for your game, you can use them. We brought in actors to read for their parts, and we knew what we were getting by going through casting calls. In the past, it would take 10 months of tinkering to get 3D models that still weren't what you wanted. Now you can actually see the characters acting in real life, so you'll know how it will look in-game. It makes the whole experience much more theatrical and the acting much more believable. I don't think there's any way to go back to the old way of digitally creating characters and then using voice actors at the end to record dialogue.”

Team Soho created proprietary technology to utilize real actors within the framework of the game. There's over 60 minutes of cinematics in the game, all featuring real actors that were digitized live, rather than going the traditional voice-acting on top of polygonal characters.

“We scanned each of our actors, not only their faces but their costumes,” said Gavin Moore, Senior Animator, The Getaway. “We have gone to painstaking lengths to be accurate. We have a facial animation system, created in-house, called ‘Talking Heads.’ This is placed inside each of the character's heads and drives all their emotions and lip-syncing. There is a full range of emotions, such as angry, happy, sad, perplexed, surprised and so on. Each of the actor's emotions are created on an individual bases, for instance, each actor's virtual smile is different, matching their own real-life smile. We also drive other nuances such as blinking and breathing and shaking and nodding the head. As I have said, we have gone to great lengths to try and be as accurate and realistic as possible.”

The actors worked as if in a theater in the round, performing on a stage in front of a green screen, wearing special gloves to capture their hand movements.

“We captured our motion capture performance and glove data and sound and so on,” continued Moore. “We then used the recorded sound to drive our lip-syncing technology. We run the sound through our system and it automatically creates the mouth shapes from what has been said. This speeds up the animation process and has given us excellent results. Then the animator watches the recording of the actor's performance and using a facial animation deck, lays down the emotions. Then the mo-cap data and facial animation are married together and played real-time on the PS2, giving us very believable story-telling pieces.”

The end result, which will ship in November, is a videogame that blurs the lines between movies and interactive entertainment. The Getaway, which has already tested through the roof with casual gamers, is also the envy of hardcore gamers. The game was the runner-up at E3 for Best Console Game, as judged by the official E3 Critics Awards. Sony not only has a blockbuster hit on its hands, it has another franchise.