The German developer Replay Studios recently announced Survivor, which is in development for both consoles and PC. The game is a 3rd person disaster survival game with interactive locations based on famous, historical accurate disaster scenarios. In independent game episodes, the player will experience some of the most dramatic disasters of the 20th and 21st century. We caught up with Claus Wohlgemuth, who answered a few questions on the game for us.
Firstly, what is your role in the development of Survivor?
I am co-producer of the game and the co-writer of design documents.
Very few games cover major disasters, especially real life ones. What inspired you to create a game based around them?
Tragic disasters have always been source of inspiration for great dramas or movies, so why not for a game as well? We feel that disasters can express much of our contemporary situation in the world and it seems we have touched the nerve of the zeitgeist, like some reactions reveal. We are inspired by real life events but also by games, TV, dreams, books, films and comics.
The game's concept document mentions that the player will be able to move throughout the entire level and have "GTA-like" freedom. Does this mean that you'll be able to escape from the disaster area in several ways?
The different areas will have normally one exit point to the following area which is reachable by different ways. The main goal is always to proceed to this point, marked in a GUI mini map. For many main goals in between, there will be also different ways to complete them. The player freedom means that you can move freely throughout the area and complete various goals of your choice or if you don’t want to, you can follow your only main goal; survival.
How structured will each level be? Will the aim be simply to survive or will there be other missions to follow?
Every level contains 5-8 areas which we call 'sectors'. Every sector will have a number of different mission goals to complete, but you’re not forced to finish them all, as I mentioned before. For example, there will be hero goals (saving people, fighting looters and unfriendly security people), crime goals (looting etc.) or voyeur goals (shooting sensational photos at dangerous places). Any items that you gain (helmets, gas masks, fire blankets, crow bars, guns and so on) could be essential to survive later areas. There will hardly be time to complete all the goals as the disaster events often has time limits, so you have to decide what you want to go for, or just go for your own survival. You can also return to past sectors to complete missing goals when you feel ready for it later on. A little TV screen of the Non Censored Network will keep you all the time informed about the situation in the area.
Once you play the hero you’re not forced to be hero for the rest of the mission. You can choose your actions freely, with all the consequences as well. The player will face unique situations all the time without repetitions. You can also use cars and other vehicles in some scenarios. Different disaster events will be going on in the background and structures will often be collapsing. Chance is also playing a certain role in dynamic events but not all the time.
Who will we play and are the characters linked by a story?
We will be a nameless hero of the street, a man or woman of the crowd. In every episode the player character will be a different personality, with the game episodes are all individual and not linked by a story. You can not transport items from one scenario to the next and there will be neither historical comments nor explanations between the missions. All of the missions are introduced from the point of view of our fictional TV station NCN. The player will be suddenly thrown into the events by surprise, without a clue of what will happen next.
How will Survivor look and feel? Are you aiming to make it highly realistic, like a TV documentary?
It is essential to focus the game on realism. In Survivor, exaggerated, theatrical effects will be avoided as well as false heroism and glorifications. Everything must be centered straight on the main subject; the disasters. Contrary to a fictional story or game world, the events in Survivor are very familiar because everybody has the TV images on his mind and a clear imagination how the missions must feel and look like in detail. One man who experienced the big earthquake in Mexico 1985 wrote in a forum that the forces and emotions around are so unbelievable strong that we could only fail in the try to recreate them. Nevertheless, he sees also the possibility to experiment what the game media is up to and maybe to push the medium further in the attempt.
Anyway, we have not the duty to be as close to reality like a documentation. Films or games have the artistic freedom to change things and set real life events into a dramaturgical context. Our perception of reality is very much influenced by the media's visual over-stimulation. But to make a game like Survivor highly realistic doesn’t mean to simply recreate the TV images. This only would trap us into the endless medial loop that we want to break through. We also want to reflect the role the TV has, when they’re selling respect-less, sensationalistic reports as information.
One of the levels you plan to include is the September 11th terrorist attacks, which seems to be a controvercial choice. How will you deal with such a sensitive and recent event?
First of all let me say that art should be free. We are against censorship in art or any other medium. Picasso once said when an artist is waiting until he is given the freedom he is lost. An artist must to take himself the freedom. Do you believe Picasso would have waited 20 years until he’d be allowed to paint Guernica? We don’t want to exploit the tragedies but to do an artistic reflection of these events.
Everybody seems to know in front exactly how the game will be like. I personally hold back my opinion until I see a work finished. Games like GTA sell so well because of the rich and perfect polished gameplay, not only because of the violence. There are much more violent games than GTA which nobody wants because the gameplay is lousy. As long as the victims in a game are Germans, the Vietcong or Iraqis, then everything is all right. No one cares about if they were in reality, forced into the army.
What is reality in a game? What is it not? These are things we’ll have to think about before a perfect world simulation will be technically, possible. The only thing that makes a moralistic difference between our every day reality and a simulated one like for example in Matrix is, that in the Matrix world is no free choice of human self-realisation in a way that a whole civilisation suddenly stops its way and turns to a completely new direction. In an interactive art work like a game, the player is creating and completing the work. The designers are only setting the stage. So there is a multitude of works, everyone individual. Which one can we criticize if not only our own drama? A game event which didn’t bother my wife at all could have a completely different effect on me.
We're sure that Survivor is not more violent than other games. In the opposite of a war shooter where all depends only on your killing skills, Survivor often has you saving people as a mission target. James Cameron proved with his Titanic film that it is possible to be entertaining and at the same time respectful to the real victims. You might say that the Titanic is a long while ago, but how long you must wait until nobody objects? Our time is accelerating more and more and art is reacting to this process more quickly, because art is ahead of its time.
The 9/11 is a great tragedy like many other things in our history, but too important event to be left untouched by writers, artists, directors or game developers. We know about the high sensibility. We thought the missions over thousands of times, the possibilities of how to create them and we are thinking yes, we can do it - but with care. To create the most gory bloodbath game in the history is not our intention, nor a very interesting thing to do.
We try to push the borders of the medium, to offer a new gameplay experience and a different view to reality as well. The media, who are exploiting disasters and who are repeating the horrorible images endlessly are having also responsibility of a collective trauma. We stare on these images with shock and at the same time a strange kind of fascination, because we saw them so many times before in the movies. Movies and games became reality and this reality becomes again a movie or video game. A circle is closing.
When some people hear about Survivor they are thinking we simply want to recreate this same medial shocks, but this is totally wrong. In the opposite of a passive, distant TV consumer, as a player you are an active part of the situation. You are not helpless and passive. You can act. You can save people. You cannot stop the disasters but you carry a certain responsibility that some situations do not get worse.
We feel deeply sorry for all the real victims and their families. We received an email from someone who had lost a family member in the 9/11 attack and he said that he always was wishing there would be a game in which you could fight down the terrorists and stop the planes from crashing the towers. He likes the idea of Survivor and wishes much to play it. A Hurricane Ivan survivor said in our forum that he can’t wait to play the Hurricane Andrew mission. That gave us strong support for our work.
The director of the Hiroshima memorial museum, Mr. Kawamoto said once that he wants every child in the world to know what had happened in his town and to pass the records with exact detail. He himself was a child when he saw the shining, atomic mushroom cloud rising in the sky and he thought it was beautiful. Here we have again this strange mix of shock and the same time fascination. I have great respect of the courage of Mr. Kawamoto. Not many people would normally confess they find an atomic mushroom beautiful. He tried everything not to close the eyes to what had happen. Everybody must find his own way to live with these disturbing images around us.
We want to investigate this more and try to find out what makes us to feel this way, what is causing this emotional chaos and we think that this is an important work and should not be doomed just because it throws up uncomfortable questions. In games you can control situations which you normally can’t handle in reality. This is a positive experience and not letting us become paralysed of pain and fear like when we see the news. This is no escape from reality, but a kind of expansion of it. It could even help to face real life situations better. In another forum, a man mentioned that he once saved a child’s life and he could only do so because he saw the situation before on TV. He is thinking that playing Survivor could even help to avoid panic reactions in an authentic disaster event.
But controversial discussions are positive in general. Everybody should express his own opinion. People who could not see a game simulating disasters like in Survivor for personal, traumatic reasons should not play it. But to try to ban the game from the market is not fair to all the people who are wishing to play it. Of course Survivor should not be played by children. We are very glad about all the positive feedback we had on our forum. A lot of people like the idea.
Have you thought about making Survivor's disasters fictional? How important is it for them to be real?
Essential. If you’d bee on a drowning ship named Queen Elsa, even if it’d looked 100% identical to the Titanic, your feelings wouldn’t be the same. So that’s an important difference. We want to wake up strong emotions in the player. We want video games to be taken serious as an artistic medium and not just as a children’s toy. This misunderstanding causes lots of the bad feeling against games.
But better to recreate an authentic disaster in a game than to develop a fictional one that might be later copied in reality. Anyway, to change the idea only for to avoid negative reactions would be inconsequent. The waking up of reactions in the society, weather positive or negative is already an important part of the artistic process. An artist must dare to do things that nobody did before, even when at first the public opinion is against him.
Finally, when can we expect to see Survivor on shop shelves?
We're aiming for the Spring of 2006.
Thank you for your time
Take a look at Survivor's website here. We'll bring you more on Survivor in the coming months.
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