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Caged Emotion

Heavy Rain creator pours his heart out.

EurogamerWill your next game use the wand?
David Cage

It may. It may. I don't believe that every single game should be motion-controlled. It's great for certain types of game, but there are also games that you want to play just, you know, sitting on a couch.

But yeah, this is definitely something we are going to explore in the future.

EurogamerI have to touch on the games as art argument. I'm sorry. Which medium do you prefer to tell you a story?
David Cage

Interactivity. Games. This is why I'm here. Yes I'm interested in storytelling, but I'm not a frustrated writer or movie maker who couldn't make movies so he makes videogames. That's really not my case. I was born and raised on videogames and I am 40 years old today. I started playing on Oric-1, which is a very old computer, and then I played pretty much every single console, or computer, since then. It's a part of my culture, but it's exciting for me to try to be a pioneer, to try to be explore new ways of doing things. I'm not a frustrated movie maker, honestly: I'm here because I decided to be here.

EurogamerWould you ever make a movie?
David Cage

It's not one of my dreams, to be honest. It's not like I wake up in the morning and say, "Oh I should make a movie one day." No. No. Maybe it will happen one day, if it makes sense, if I believe I'm capable of doing it. But it's not one of my goals in life.

EurogamerLet's get back to Heavy Rain. There are loads of possibilities in each scene, not only how you can succeed, but also how you can fail. And failing, as you mentioned, is also progressing, and can unlock other paths in subsequent stories. How many times can one person replay the game?
Shelby: one of the Heavy Rain's four main protagonists and star of one of the two Eurogamer Expo 2009 demos.
David Cage

There is a huge replayability value to the game if you want to see every single scene, every single animation and sequence. There are so many different consequences that there's no real clear answer about how many ways there are. What I like about people who play it once is that you never know what would have happened if you did something different. It's like real-life. You never know what would have happened if you made a different choice - if you married another woman, if you had done something completely different. I like that people can enjoy the game that way. But I'm sure there will be hardcore gamers who will want to see all possible endings.

EurogamerThe characters of Heavy Rain must have been in your head now for a very long time. Are you bored of them yet?
David Cage

Oh no, no - honestly, no. What is really amazing for me is to see the scenes taking shape and slowly getting where I want them to be. Slowly but surely you start to see the emotion. It's doing black magic: every scene is doing black magic. It's really amazing. It's a very interesting process for me.

EurogamerYou said there are around 70 scenes. How long will I need to finish Heavy Rain, assuming I play through each scene once?
David Cage

Our current assessment is that the game is going to be around 10 hours.

EurogamerHave you thought about what you're going to do with Heavy Rain after release?
David Cage

Yeah, er, yeah.

EurogamerWhat are you going to do with Heavy Rain after release?
David Cage

Well we're talking about the possibility of DLC, probably telling prequels about the characters, where they come from, what happened to them before Heavy Rain. This is still in discussion, but is something we're thinking about.

Madison is another of Heavy Rain's central quartet. She takes her clothes off.
EurogamerYou talk highly of your relationship with Sony and you obviously have a working PS3 engine now. Is your foreseeable future with Sony?
David Cage

Yeah. You know, it really depends on what will happen with Heavy Rain. We're really happy with our relationship so far, and we're really glad Sony gave us a chance. Now we feel like we have to give them something back and make a commercial success of this game. We need to show them that we deserve their trust. We hope to do that, and we will see from there what happens.

It's a platform that we love and enjoy working on.

EurogamerThere are demos of Heavy Rain on show here. Will we see one on PlayStation Network prior to the game's 2010 release?
David Cage

There will be a demo of Heavy Rain. It's a very difficult game to demo and it's always a double-edged thing with demos. My biggest fear is that if we show one scene, people will think, "Oh it's 70 times this scene, doing the same thing." It's not the case: every single scene is unique with different characters, different environments, different gameplay. It's impossible to convey that - we'd have to release 10 demos.

It's a frustrating situation, because if you don't release a demo, people may think you have something to hide, which is really not the case. But at the same time we want to make sure the demo we show really reflects and gives an idea of what the game is really about.

EurogamerMy last question, and I record this for a reason, is can I have a cameo in your next game please?
David Cage

Hahaha. You can! We've done that before. All the characters in Heavy Rain are based on scans we took at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. There are some faces of real people in the game, which is really fun.

David Cage is the founder and co-CEO of Quantic Dream. Video highlights from this interview can be found on Eurogamer TV.

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