An ailing, 80-year-old Marlon Brando, only a few months before his death, holds court in his study at his LA home. After some initial niceties, a wave of his hand indicates that he is ready to get to work. He dismisses all but two people from the room — the Irish games producer Philip Campbell and his sound recordist. The actor stuffs tissue paper into his cheeks and starts recording lines for a new game based on his most famous film, The Godfather.
“We realised early on that the player in our game will need a lot of contact with Don Vito Corleone,” explains Campbell. “A team of us spent four hours with him at his home. At first Marlon worked me over on the script — it took a while for him to get comfortable and I could tell he was messing with me.
“But once he started to get a feel for the part he read his lines with gusto. He messed with me a few times over pronunciation and, if I corrected him, he’d do exactly the same thing again — that was the way he wanted to do it. He did tell me that if I thought something stank I should tell him. I tried it once or twice but, to be honest, it made no difference as I was in awe of him.”
He may have been as difficult as ever to work with, but Brando had been relatively easy to sign up for the project, the finished version of which EA will release in time for Christmas. “It wasn’t a huge or particularly protracted negotiation to get him for the game,” reveals David DeMartini, EA’s executive producer for The Godfather. In any case, although Brando recorded new lines especially for the game, soundalikes will also be used to bring the immortal Don to life in the new digital outing.
In The Godfather, being developed internally by EA’s Redwood Shores studios in California, the player begins as a humble hood carrying out a series of petty crimes until invited to join the Corleone family, America’s most notorious underworld clan. “We did not want to do the game of ‘Godfather the Movie’,” explains Campbell.
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“Instead we decided to make ‘Godfather the World’. We picked the era between 1945 and 1955 — the time frame from the book by Mario Puzo and the movie. The Godfather is a story that runs through our world, but it is only one of many. Our story inter- acts with the most memorable moments of the movie plot, although you play an independent Italian mobster.”
Independent, maybe, but nothing so radical as being a female hood. Life in the Mob, it seems, will remain a job for the boys. “You choose what your character looks like at the start — but you can only be male,” confirms Campbell.
Speaking of the boys, Brando is joined by two other stars from the original 1972 movie. James Caan and Robert Duvall have been signed up to re-create their roles for the game, and a clutch of other actors from the films have also been contracted to lend their likenesses. There is no Al Pacino, though, as the actor seems set to co-operate with EA’s rival games-maker, Vivendi, on its violent game Scarface, which is also due for release at the end of this year.
Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather, is another who has distanced himself from the project. “We met with Coppola one afternoon and shared our ideas,” says DeMartini. “He said he wasn’t interested in participating in the game because he had worked on the story three times already.”
“But he did open up his archives to us,” adds Campbell. “The jewel is his book annotating the pages from the novel with notes for the first film. It was clearly a precious cinematic document and to be able to read through that was invaluable for getting a sense of what the man was trying to do.”
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Caan and Duvall both appeared at the recent party to announce the game, held in Little Italy, New York (where else?). At the event, Caan admitted that he plays computer games with his young children, although they always beat him. “I wanted to do something that they would recognise me in when they are teenagers,” he announced, neatly consigning an entire film career to the dustbin. Duvall’s reason for taking part was more basic. Asked why he had signed up, he simply rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
The Godfather is likely to be EA’s most violent game to date, but the company’s head of press, Jeff Brown, argues that it should not be seen as irresponsible even in the present climate, in which violent games appear to be earning the industry a bad name.
“The guys that make the games will tell you that what they look at are the verbs. Not talking and emoting, but fighting, driving, shooting, extorting. In The Godfather there are lots of things that lend themselves to great action.
“The people who are terribly concerned about violence in games tend to be the people who see games as the domain of children. If you believe that, then all games need to be based on Barney or something equally benign.”
In fact, the demographic for gamers nowadays is almost as broad as it is for films and, just as with movies, there is a ratings system in place in the UK. “Why shouldn’t somebody who is 35 years old be able to play The Godfather as it is in the movie?” continues Brown. “Why does it need to be dumbed down? And anyway, it would be wrong to say that the game is just about violence. Arguably, too much violence will slow you down in this game.”
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The Godfather will be released before Christmas on the Xbox, PS2 and PC platforms as well as Sony’s new PSP handheld unit. For many of us, playing the game is likely to be an offer we cannot refuse.