EXCLUSIVE - All Guns Blazing: A deep dive into the production of Criterion’s Black, and its cancelled sequel
Defying expectation.
By Jonathan Garrett
18/09/22
Featuring developer interviews with Joseph Hodges, Michael Othen, Richard Bunn, and Ben Minto.
It’s important to contextualise the left field announcement of Criterion’s first foray into first person action, as they sought to do for shooters what they’d brought to racing games. Burnout was for many a seminal take on the genre, so the mere suggestion that the team behind classics like Takedown and Revenge were rolling the dice on such a risky, left field gambit was intriguing at best, and perhaps near lunacy at worst. Criterion were, after all, on a winning streak, having launched progressively more successful Burnout sequels that dominated both critical and audience perception.
Enter Black, a self-proclaimed gun-fest pitched as the videogame equivalent to a summer tentpole blockbuster. Launching for the previous generation right after the next one had already begun, Black kickstarted an epilogue of sorts to the PS2 and Xbox era. It was technically accomplished and projected a clear statement of intent. It leveraged the creativity of a team hungry to innovate in a new space, and boasts a fond legacy defined by creative ingenuity.
Thanks to the generosity and insight from Joseph Hodges (Cinematic Director), Michael Othen (Level Designer), Richard Bunn (Senior Game Designer), and Ben Minto (Technical Sound Designer), we’re thrilled to present this exploration of Black’s road to release, and unpack the fascinating alternate reality of the sequel that never was; a follow up that on paper could have been every bit the equal to this original effort.
Those gravestones are iconic.
From the outset, every aspect of Black’s formative conception was heavily influenced by TV series like Keifer Sutherland’s 24 (an ironically prophetic source of inspiration given Joseph Hodges directing work on that series), as well as big popcorn action movies. As Joseph himself asserts, “Gaming people wanted to make movies. That’s why Black starts the way it does. Michael [Giacchino] does the soundtrack, which is great. They spent the money”.
“They even asked me to do a talk, one lunchtime, about 24. I remember asking Alex [Ward, Executive Producer]: how many people are going to be there? He said: perhaps 20, or 30 people. When I walked in, there was standing room only. There was about 200 people in this room. There were so many questions. They really wanted to learn”.
“I think internally we had our own identity crisis about “What is Black?”, explains Michael Othen. “This idea of wanting the player to feel a sense of escalation; it was about looking at the best action sequences in Hollywood films, and asking: how can we recreate that feeling?”.
For Richard Bunn, the type of experience Criterion wanted to build was very much a homage to a very specific era of cinema. “Our influences weren’t other games. It was film. Black Hawk Down, and obviously The Matrix with its corridor scene. All of these films were amazing, especially when thinking about the impact of the weapons and combat. Those were our references”.
That mindset permeated every aspect of those early conversations, including the sound design. “My reference points for Black were very much Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator 2, big hand cannon explosions and to make it larger than life”, explained Ben Minto. “Unlike the Battlefield games I’ve worked on where you start with an authentic recording to help make it sound like a grounded, real gun. With Black, we were looking and listening to footage from soldiers in a war environment as reference. We were looking towards 80’s Hollywood “over the top-ness”.
The vision was clear, but there was also a healthy, understandable dose of uncertainty in relation to whether the team known primarily for one particular genre was capable of delivering such a radical left turn for its next major project. As Richard explains:
“Everybody was aware of the preconceptions. Criterion is a very simple company at heart, with a philosophy about identifying very simply what you’re trying to do, and to just focus on that”.
I can almost hear the punch behind this explosion.
There was also the issue of knowing what development areas to prioritise, in order to avoid this exciting but unproven new IP from ballooning to an untenable scale. “Like with any video game project, the scope always grows beyond the original intention”, Michael explained. “It wasn’t an incredibly complex game. We kinda joked internally that it was Space Invaders but with really nice graphics. But being that it was Criterion’s first triple A shooter, I’m sure there was a lot that came up in development that wasn’t anticipated. The number of levels, their layout etc… I know that the live action cutscenes came in very late”.
“There were a number of things we thought about (a cover system, a map), but they didn’t serve the core concept,” added Richard. “The only way you interact with anything in the game is through the weapons. Even the framing of the weapons on screen was deliberate. The guns are the star of the show”.
“Lets do for first person shooters what we did for driving. All that mattered was when you pulled that trigger: what happened to the world?”
For Michael Othen, taking the leap to work at Criterion, especially during those crucial formative years of his career, was a big step. “I was learning the process as I went along. Until I got into that studio, making videogames was a bit of a black box for me. I’d actually applied to EA to see if they had any Junior Producer roles because I’d heard it was virtually impossible to get an entry level designer role, because so many people wanted to be designers”.
“I saw they were doing internship schemes, and I applied for a not yet existing producer scheme just so they had my CV on record. They called me and said ‘we don’t have that, but we do have this Junior Design role that you might be interested in…’ It was incredibly fortuitous”. After successfully joining the team, he was thrown straight in. “I was a “mapper”, which I think was the title they gave us, which was basically the bottom rung of the level designer ladder. It was my first job in the games industry. Both me and one other guy, Tommy Hudson, went for the same job. Both of us got the job”.
“They divided it into two, and gave us both the role because they needed extra mappers. I don’t call it mapper on my LinkedIn because I don’t know if it means anything [laughs]. The less cool word for level designer. We had a bit of a hand in design, but it was mainly about populating the levels with enemies, logic, trigger volumes to make sure there was always something to do, especially in levels with so much destruction”.
Richard Bunn meanwhile, who joined the team as Senior Game Designer, noted both the infectious enthusiasm for the project, but also an apparent lack of structure to its design. “We did the whole thing in nine months. I got the impression, after seeing write ups in various magazines, how Criterion were going to do for shooters what they’d done for driving (with Burnout). I loved Burnout and I wanted to work for these guys. I’d specifically targeted them, went in with maximum enthusiasm, and got straight in”.
“When I got there, there really wasn’t anything. No levels, no tools. Just a bunch of guys excited about guns and making this thing. The weird thing was, they’d clearly been working on it for a while. This core team was made up of the Burnout guys”.
“They had an amazing tech demo, where you started off in one room with a few weapons lying around. You could pick them up and blast all the plaster off the walls, blow the door off… all hand crafted because they had no tools. Then you went out into what was essentially a courtyard surrounded by multi story buildings, with walkways and balconies all around. There was a vehicle there you could shoot up, and some bad guys would come out that you could shoot too. Everything was maximum destructive in an enclosed environment. This is what they were using as their tech demo”.
For Ben Minto, those early prototyping days were an opportunity to solidify this bombastic vision from the outset. “Between Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge, I did the pre-production on Black where I helped make the first “Room” demo. We made it as loud as possible, with plaster flying off the walls and loads of destruction. We were still pitching it at this point. When we went to show that, we used the biggest pair of speakers we had in the studio”.
“I worked on a shotgun sound effect for another very early demo, and supposedly Alex Ward (executive producer) came in and said “yeah that’s great, but use that for the pistol!”.
“If you go back to Burnout and compare that to other racing titles around at the time… things like Gran Turismo which was trying to do everything perfectly with sounds that were gentle and purring. We had the confidence with Burnout 2 to then take this idea from Fast and the Furious with boost, pass bys, how everything was aggressive and over the top. With Black, we asked ourselves: what if we use the same process we used on Burnout? What if we just take everything and push all the faders to 10? What would that get us?”
This needs a Wilhelm scream.
One of the most signature attributes of the finished product was the destructible and highly interactive environments, which outside of Red Faction had largely remained a technically elusive feature for most other shooters. As Michael explains: “Tech wise, it was pretty complicated, but it came at the end of the PS2 / Xbox lifecycle, so the devs had a long time working on the engine, and mastering the tools. It’s why they were able to really push what was possible. I think it was built on a version of the Burnout engine, which was designed for effects and speed”.
“You can see how in a lot of respects how Black was the FPS version of Burnout. Games that had come before it that featured destruction, like Red Faction, had always only been in very specific places and carefully controlled. Black was trying to up the ante, like in the famous graveyard level. Everything was still pre fractured, so not happening in real time, but as much as possible we tried to add destructible elements to make it feel like it was happening organically”.
Pushing the visual and interactive fidelity was a massive part of the design process. “We’d put all this effort into the impact your weapons have on the world,” explained Richard. “The bullet hole decals, every impact throws up dust, you shoot rocks and there’s particles flying out. When you shoot a character, we didn’t want to go with blood, but we wanted to see the dust and padding flying off their body armour”.
“We did all kinds of mad tricks to make it fun. Like with the AK47 and the other weapons. All of them are designed in real life to be held on your right. So when the bullet cartridges are ejected, they eject to the right away from you (which meant they would fly off screen). But if you notice in the game, we put the cartridge ejection on the left, so they’d go across your field of vision”.
“You’ll notice things like the enemy placement where you can see that directly behind them is very destructible stuff. Even if you missed, you’re quite likely to still hit something that will react and potentially kill them”.
So much consideration was placed on making sure the visuals matched the team’s ambition with interactivity. Richard stated that: “My favourite version was always the PS2, because it was designed on that platform running on CRT screens. When we were developing it we didn’t have monitors. Nobody really had HDTV’s then. They were just coming in around the PS3 / Xbox 360 era”.
“For me, the game looked really great at that lower resolution, running on the PS2. We added a lot of particle effects, dust in the air, explosions etc… we also had the bloom cranked up. These semi volumetric lights / god rays. The wilderness level still looks fantastic. The grass, rolling hills, colour tone… It had such a level of detail that you don’t expect from a PS2. The first level is blocky and angular and shows its age a bit. But those few levels we had that were a little bit more organic really worked”.
Crumbling pillars are a recurring feature of Black. They’re super jolly.
“The actual process of production itself appeared at times to be remarkably experimental, and turned around in an extremely short time frame. As Richard explains, “This was the thing about Criterion - there was never any documentation. No bible or wiki that the team could refer to. This is how it happened on Black”.
“I would chat with the other designers and the art team to get an idea of the level we were going to build. The art team would later that day or the next day drop a massive wad of print outs of photographic reference material and research. We’d scour through it looking for opportunities for destruction, cover, vistas, obstacles, and any feature that would go into a typical level design”.
“We barely had time to think about anything on that game. Is it exciting? Does it look great? That was it! A really big shout out to the art and tech teams at Criterion because they were amazing”.
“The next stage was SketchUp, which is an architectural tool. It was eventually bought by Google and it became their main tool for making buildings in Google Earth. It’s now a web only tool, but it used to be a standalone application. We were also using it back at Argonaut Games on Catwoman, but at the time, we were the first to use it for that purpose. It went on to be used in so many different games. The guys who made Uncharted used it for building levels”.
“It spread out into the industry because it’s a really accessible tool. It’s very freeform. You can literally just draw any shape onto another surface and then extrude it out. Because it’s an architectural tool, it had a lot of very simple visualisation options. We’d build a block out of each level in Sketch Up, and then luckily one of our artists realised you could export from SketchUp and it only took about an hour to get it into the engine”.
“We’d spend a week or so building in SketchUp, so we could walk through and discuss verbally the key points of the level. We’d screenshot and print out set camera views of the block out, stick them to A1 pieces of foam board, and then divide the workload and assign members of the art team to each level”.
Michael continued: “Effectively we were assigned a level, or couple of levels each, as an empty landscape. The artists would make it look absolutely beautiful. By the time we got onto it, the level would in a sense be complete… you’d know the pathway through the level, cover objects, destructible walls etc… Our job would be to populate the level with enemies, pickups, weapons, configure what types of enemies stood where, and how they behaved at any one time.”
“An example of one moment: the player would come out of a room, go down a flight of stairs, and as soon as they hit an invisible trigger volume, that would trigger two enemies to run out of an alleyway. One with a shotgun. One with an assault rifle. We’d set all of that up with the in game logic, and then turn to our Xbox and play it. We’d then move them around, or adjust the waypoints that they follow, to make sure it was balanced and still fun. Multiply that out by an entire level or two, and it would take months to create 15 or 20 minutes of gameplay”.
It’s fascinating to see the amount of effort that went into these early visualisations.
“The crazy thing is you could theoretically author an entire level in a day, if you rushed or were sloppy. But it’s about the fine tuning, setting the right difficulty, making sure there’s pacing in the action with high and low points, with a gradual intensity increase as you progress with bigger things to blow up and more complex enemies. That in itself was quite a big challenge. As the mappers, we’d have our best guess of what was fun. We’d constantly iterate and change it to get it to the point where it was the most fun for the most people”.
Richard also spoke to the timing of turning around a typical level design. “We’d have one week doing paper designs of the level, a second week where we’re essentially walking through a playable model (whitebox / greybox) - the basic geometry of the level. Week 3 we drop in some enemies into that basic design to get a feel for it and do some scripting, and then Week 4 it’s off to the art team. We decided we could deliver eight levels in that timeframe”.
“One thing to bear in mind: There were no level design tools. Normally you’d make a model in Maya or 3DS MAX. At the time they were using Lightwave. The entire game was essentially made by enemy spawners, counters, and timers”.
Michael was very complimentary of his fellow developers. “Every level had a lot of intense discussion around balance and design. The graveyard level, which I didn’t work on, but was led by Richard Bunn, who’s a really cool guy, really good designer, and very intricate about how everything was structured. The placement of every gravestone really mattered.
“But then we had to add AI, and the ability to get a sniper to aim at a particular point and shoot it. Of course, it’s no fun if you just get hit by a sniper! But it is fun if you’re crouching behind a gravestone and it gets hit and crumbles. Making sure that always happens is quite challenging, because if the timing is off by a couple seconds it simply doesn’t work. There was a lot of very intricate logic set up to make sure that as you progress the graves were getting hit more than you were, but so it also never felt fake”.
“Sometimes with Black you relied on the linearity of the level because as the player you’re always going to be pushing forward. Where possible, you want to break up the sightline with interesting objects and design”.
One of the reasons the graveyard sequence in Black is so memorable is the sense that, as the player, you’re constantly under siege. There’s always someone watching as you dart in between headstones. Richard was able to speak to the design logic behind that particular level’s success. “We added these targets for enemies that we could prioritise,” Richard explained. “Essentially it was an invisible locator, where enemies would sometimes favour shooting them over hitting the player. We’d then put those targets near destructible scenery, or locations where we knew the player was most likely to take cover”.
“Even with RPG’s - they could hit you, but initially they were designed to land nearby and the player would get caught in its hit radius / splash damage. It draws your attention to the enemy without you taking a direct hit, and you also enjoy the benefit of all the other visual effects in your view”.
Richard continued: “You build a level with the best intentions. You kind of have an idea of pacing, the key beats and exciting things you want to include. What I wanted to do with the structure of the Graznei Bridge level was add concrete sections of road where they’re all buckled. They then provided a one way direction and stop you from backtracking, or they provide cover where the whole thing is tilted and you can get behind it”.
These tighter, more controlled moments allowed Criterion to really focus the action.
Michael also spoke to the inherent difficulties when trying to balance freedom and focus within level design. “The idea was that it felt like trench warfare. This is a good example of how things would change through iteration. Initially we had it so you could go underneath the bridge or go up anywhere, so you could choose your route across it, but then we found it was too hard to make a consistently fun experience and have logic that maintained that regardless of where you went”.
“That’s why we had to close off some of the routes, so that we could control the player a little bit more but still give you the sense that you’ve got the ability to make those choices”.
“Too much choice, and it’s not fun. It’s all about the illusion of choice”.
Once levels were in a playable state, testing amongst executives became quite a nerve-racking experience. Michael added: “I remember playing that [bridge] level with Fiona Sperry (Executive Producer). I was watching her play it at quite a late stage in development, where we’d made a lot of changes to tweak the difficulty. I remember her getting really close to the end, and the final firefight where you’re battling to get through the gate. I was literally sweating, saying to myself “Please don’t die, please don’t die” (laughs).
“It’s that fine line where, if you’re playing it and you die, it goes from intense and exciting to really frustrating really quickly. Whereas if you almost die and you survive, you get that adrenaline rush where you feel like “oh wow that was so exciting and fun”. It’s hard to get that balance right, and make sure all players experience that”.
But despite the team having such an acutely defined direction to follow, and a positive internal response to their work, an element of self-doubt was all but inevitable when the stakes were so high. As Michael posited:
“As with any project like this when it reaches a certain scale, you find yourself asking is there enough tactical or strategic elements? Is it too simple? Is there enough context for the action?”
That context ended up taking the form of a series of live action cutscenes, which bookended levels and provided a connective tissue to keep everything feeling coherent. Joseph Hodges, who was responsible for directing these sequences, explained the process of his involvement.
Set phasers to MOOD.
“Here’s how the live action stuff came about. I get a call on the Monday from [producer and art director] Nilo Rodis-Jamero. He had been hired by George Lucas for the Star Wars franchise, and had helped design Boba Fett. He had left movies and was working with EA Games, and got put on Black to help them out and work alongside Alex [Ward, executive producer on Black]. Put it this way: if I’m the Karate kid, Nilo was the master”.
He told me that “it was a pleasure meeting you [on the set of the Denzel Washington film, Virtuosity], and I wanted to tell you that there are those in life that are kept down by those around them. But this is your time to shine. I look forward to seeing you on Monday morning”. Nilo asked “Could you shoot a test for me? All it is, is over the top of an interview table, with the fan going and the single light. Two people. One being interrogated by the other. And that’s it. What will it take to do that? And I’d said “Not much!”
“I was working on [TV series] 24 at the time [as a production designer, co-producer and director]. I’ll ask them if I can use a corner of the stage. An old prison cell set. We’ll go in early in the morning. I’ll just hire two stand ins from the show. I had a Canon XL2 that I’d just bought, so all I needed was a budget for the extras and the DP (Director of Photography).”
“By Thursday evening, I was being sent a nine scene script. The two stand ins were now being replaced by voice over actors (Marty Papazian and Paul Pape). I remember pacing around my bed at midnight on Thursday night going “What the fuck am I doing?!”
Joseph continued: “It was crazy. We only had three hours to shoot it. It was six o clock in the morning [on the Friday]. The [24] crew were going to arrive by 9am, and I wanted to be gone by then. I didn’t want [Twentieth Century] Fox to know that I was shooting this. It was so fast the actors didn’t have time to learn their lines. So all the paperwork on the desk [in the scenes] was the script. I was told that we couldn’t shoot the characters faces. That’s why it’s shot that way. We put the little cassettes in the mail, and sent to an editor. That was it. They did an amazing job”.
“The opening sequence, where you see him walking in with his feet chained and the sliver of the door. That wasn’t written. I was just thinking: “I need a starting point”. I had just assumed this was a camera test, and it kinda worked. Surely now they’ll hire another director and reshoot? But they ended up using everything”.
“I wasn’t paid a penny for it, but Nilo had said “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you”. And then he asked me to shoot the live action sequences for Need for Speed: Undercover, with Maggie Q. It was a five day shoot, and that they paid me for!”
The top down shot. The ceiling fan whooshing by. Maximum cool.
If the visually impressive destruction tech and live action cutscenes quickly became cornerstones of the games development, it was Criterion’s approach to Black’s sound design that has truly endured the test of time. To this day, it remains one of the most successful, pulse pounding implementations of game audio I’ve ever experienced as a player.
I asked Ben Minto (Technical Sound Designer) about whether he felt the process of working on Black versus titles like Battlefield was somewhat cathartic having been given the opportunity to let loose a bit without being as constrained by realism. “No, I’ve never felt constrained because a lot of the time as a sound designer we’re left to define what the rules are. They just have their own challenges”.
“For Black, one of the early taglines internally for development was “gun porn”. How do we mix the game to make sure that when you do fire your weapon it feels like the biggest thing in the world, but when there’s 10 people firing how do we deal with that, alongside narrative moments, dialogue while shooting, and make sure that the pertinent information still comes through?
“We came into a space populated with things like Medal of Honour, Battlefield etc… but we weren’t trying to replicate or copy an existing game. We were trying to use the Burnout formula and recipe but apply guns instead of cars to the same approach. There was no benchmark to hit, because we were defining it for ourselves”.
“Typically at that time you might have two, three, maybe four sound designers on a project, and maybe an audio programmer. Audio programmers were rare. But almost every project I worked on at Criterion we had as many audio programmers as we did sound designers. So we could come up with the craziest ideas, try things and then action them very quickly”.
This evidently allowed Ben and his team to forge ahead with original solutions to unique problems. “Some of the things we solved on Burnout and Black… I still use those solutions today, and other people have taken them and built upon them”.
“There was a key clip from Predator that we always used called “Choir of Guns”, where there’s six soldiers lined up after they think they’ve seen the Predator. There’s several close ups where they start shooting, with each gun sounding different, and it’s like all different parts of an orchestra working together. And that’s the approach we used as a solution for if you’ve got multiple enemies all using AK47’s. It can’t sound like the same sample. So we had different sounding sets of AK47 samples that we assigned to different enemies in an attempt to create our own “Choir of Guns”.
“For most games, what you used to have was a situation unfortunately where if you had a single sample of a gun you could just play it in sequence… “bang, bang, bang” one after the other and it sounded pretty terrible. What we did instead was start from a recording of a burst of gunfire, and put markers in it. This is what we refer to as “GUNSU”. On a car recording, we had software that would cut up every cycle of an engine, and then be able to track through it depending on your RPM (revolutions per minute). That’s why Burnout started to sound better; it was Need for Speed technology”.
The sheer quantity of visual effects and destruction was always an eye catching feature.
“We used the same principle on Black, so if you had this burst gunshot, we’d put a marker in on every gunshot. As an AI was firing, it could skip between them, and build it up. It was like a granular playback of a sample. All of a sudden you have five samples, but because you play them using “stitching” (as it’s called now) it can sound longer, better, and more organic and not just the same sound again and again. We didn’t want it to sound like a videogame”.
“On the second level of Black, you go into a forest and there’s an enemy base, and if you alert them they all start shooting at you. Initially every bullet would just hit a tree behind you, and it sounded really boring – bullet hits wood, bullet hits wood, bullet hits wood etc.
“So we’d just randomly say it’s not wood, it’s something else. You’ll hear metal and glass and plastic. None of those things are there, but you can’t visually verify that as the player in the moment. We could even play a ricochet if we wanted! It didn’t matter, because it was more about the sound being more interesting and dangerous than really real. Again, it was this idea that, much like Burnout, you didn’t have to do exactly what was expected. We weren’t tied to reality”.
This type of left field thinking extended to other aspects of the sound design, as the influence of film continued to permeate every part of development. As Ben explained: “A Foley artist, in film terms, is somebody who performs a sound to picture, like mashing bunches of cutlery together to make the sound of Roman soldiers marching, or squeezing lettuce to simulate a throat rip”.
“We didn’t really know what we were doing, but I think we were one of the first games to approach Pinewood Studios and Jason Swanscott (a Foley Artist) and told them we needed stuff like changing weapons, cloth, putting hats on, getting punched, bullet sounds etc…”
“We didn’t know if it would work, but it did give us a lot more ingredients to work with. It’s fairly commonplace now, but at that time it was considered a bit strange”.
Inventive solutions like the GUNSU tech and Foley effects were not the limit of the technical wizardry that went on behind the scenes on Black. “There was a feature that we did that people always ask how we did it. Since the game was released on the PS2, we had to use a form of audio compression called ADPCM. It basically means you can take a ‘nice’ sound but it gets a bit MP3-like in feel and the perceived quality and fidelity goes down due to the compression”.
“What we managed to do was persuade the programmers to give us the equivalent of 1 second of main RAM, on top of the standard PS2 sound ram, which meant we could play the first second of every gunshot at the original 48khz WAV quality that it was designed at, making the first part of your gunfire super high fidelity compared to all other guns heard on a PS2. That’s partially why it sometimes takes so long to swap a gun over, because we needed to swap out the sample as well”.
It’s yet another example of how disruptive, original thinking defined so much of Criterion’s process. As the finishing touches were being added, so much was still in flux. Richard was able to recall some interesting final additions, and even some unexpected glitches during the polish phase.
“Towards the end of development, in that final week of playing through the game over and over again. At that point we were still adding in audio, secrets like the little extra objectives, the collectible secrets, the golden guns, the different difficulty levels… they all went in during that final week or so”.
Something will probably explode during this sequence.
“I found a bug in the game. I think it was to do with taking the controller in and out. All the HUD in the game would disappear, including the ammo count, the reticule… it would all just vanish. If you unplugged the controller while playing, it would all just go”.
“You could play the game with no UI whatsoever. And I said to the guys “we shouldn’t fix this bug”. We should put in an option or something, because it was one of the most immersive gaming experiences up to that point that I’d ever had. In the end we had to fix it. If we’d had another extra week, we could have put it in as a setting”.
Ben Minto also weighed in on the speed of the games development, and the somewhat looser feel that gave the team space to deliver what they did in such a short timeframe. ““I think it comes down to the fact that it was a small team. It was easier to get leverage, because you just talked to the person next to you. A lot of the attitude was ask for forgiveness, not for permission. Just do it. Why not? With the team I look after now (previously at EA DICE and now at Sweet Justice Sound) I encourage them to go and make mistakes early. Get it out of your system. Go and try it”.
Criterion’s Black was released on 24th February 2006, for PlayStation 2 and the Original Xbox. Eurogamer’s Kristan Reed was effusive in their praise, noting that “thanks to Criterion's otherworldly technical ability to pull off graphical effects that wouldn't look out of place on next gen machines and some truly inspired set-pieces, Black is the most progressive and exciting shooter to emerge on the console platforms for years”.
Chris Roper of IGN had a slightly more mixed response: “It's an extremely focused game that offers one of the most visceral gaming experiences you'll find anywhere. But, it offers little variation outside of blowing things up and its short length and lack of multiplayer will irk some people”.
But it was GameInformer’s original review that really caught my eye. In particular the last line of this specific quote. “For a first-time entry into the first-person shooter market, Black is impressive. We can’t wait to see what Criterion can do with this franchise in the future”.
The notion that Black was always meant to be the first step in a longer journey is something that has been sporadically documented in a whirlwind of rumours, tech demo leaks, and talk of a cancelled sequel that had already started pre-production. But regardless, we didn’t really have a solid idea of what a hypothetical Black 2 would have been. Until now. Although they weren’t explicit about the name of the project, for all intents and purposes, this article will refer to it as Black 2.
Those showers are not up to code.
Without being explicit, Michael made it clear that Criterion did start working on a project that was, to all intents and purposes, a follow-up. “There was, what you could call a 'sequel' in development for some time. With game development, there’s so many factors that determine whether a project lives or dies. There can be all the intention in the world, with a lot of people backing it, and an audience waiting for it, but sometimes other factors can slow things down”.
“We were working on something. At the time they [Criterion] were also working on Burnout Paradise, which was a huge game that required a lot of resources. There were a lot of other shooters coming out, even within EA. Bad Company was experimenting with destructible levels. It might have been difficult for them to see where a "Black 2" fitted in with other games in their publishing schedule”.
“I was disappointed that it didn’t get to see the light of day”.
“My role was a little more involved on this project, as it was kind of a blank slate. We were already as a team thinking about how we were going to do movement, improve the AI, how much freedom there was within each level. For me this was really exciting, to be part of a new project from its inception, and having an open book of ideas. We were encouraged as a team to think about what were the craziest things we’d like to do? Throw all these ideas in a hat and see what’s worth pursuing”.
“It was a relatively small team. At the end of production on a game, you might have 100 people on the project. But when you’re starting something from the beginning, you shrink that down to a small handful because you don’t need all those specific skills during the initial concept phase. Still, there were some really, really cool things in there. There was pre viz and playable stuff that was really nice”.
“We had an amazing [first person] cover mechanic where you could position yourself against things and blind fire. It felt intuitive and organic. There were some cool enemy AI behaviour with the way they moved around the environment. You’d see them jumping over car bonnets and sliding into cover. It looked amazing as a player, because you had that dynamic flow of movement. These were just very early ingredients at the R&D stage”.
Richard Bunn was similarly enthused by the prospect of working on a sequel.
“We wrapped up development on Black around Christmas (2005). After a three week break, several devs had left. Stuart Black went to Codemasters after a falling out with Alex Ward (and eventually developed Bodycount). Tommy Hudson and I were asked to join the Burnout team to work on Burnout Next (which eventually became Burnout Paradise) for about two or three years”.
“But I kept sneaking in to the Black office afterwards! [laughs]. I was still friends with Craig Sullivan (who stayed attached as lead designer on Black 2). There were a few things that they did. They wanted to continue to be influenced by movies. They employed a model builder to build miniatures of life like locations. They could then be used as reference material or as inspiration for design”.
“One of the aspects of pre-vis that stood out was they wanted to have more realistic scenarios. More of this assassin type gameplay, where you’d go into real locations that were a bit more alive, with other people, and take out a target. Essentially a bit like [IO Interactive’s] Hitman”.
“Some of the team went out the back of the building and shot a live action pre vis sequence of a café scene, with a camera attached to the chest of one of the devs and a replica gun held in place to simulate the first person view”.
“Craig had this system in mind: “eyes not head”, or something to that effect. In most first person shooters, you use the stick to look around. Your gun and head are glued together. The idea was that you could look independently of your gun somehow. Criterion’s always looking for an angle. What words / terms can be used to describe it? What’s the hook?”
“The only thing I ever played was in an un-textured format, but you could move and fight. It was this one scene set in Korea, on the surface of an ICBM launch silo. You’re trying to stop them from launching, but in a “fail to do so” type scenario. You’re in a big open area, with great big concrete blocks as cover objects. There’s enemies coming in”.
“While you’re fighting, other vents start opening up and the whole area gets filled with smoke and gas from the rocket launch causing loss of visibility. It’s getting closer and closer to launch, and the whole environment gradually reflected that. Eventually it opens and this great big missile launches out the middle. It was all about the evolution of the gameplay environment”.
One of the most exciting things in pipeline was the addition of multiplayer, the lack of which had been a common criticism of the first game. “I do remember they wanted to have network gameplay,” Richard added.
“So there would have been co-op. They had something where if one player was downed, the other player could grab them, pull them into cover and revive them. The downed player could also shoot while being dragged to safety by their team-mate - effectively giving you 360-degree fire. It seemed natural that the team would start exploring multiplayer”.
Ben was equally excited about the possibilities that a sequel would afford. “At the end of Black, we were going to make a follow up. We did the audio pre-production for that, getting ready to go onto the PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360. We finished early because we were still waiting for the engine upgrade. I was asked to go and “find something else to do” for six months, so I went and did all the guns for Mirror’s Edge… where they sound a lot like Black’s guns! Then, when I moved on to Battlefield 1943, it still sounded a bit Black with its guns. Bigger than they should be. I used the same Foley from Black, and just recut it”.
“Alex Ward released some frames from a demo, with a guy walking around a café with a gun trying to do an interrogation. When he gets to the guy and is interrogating him on the ground, he thrusts the gun into the guy’s mouth. But we couldn’t get the sound right”.
“So Chris Sweetman (sound designer) and I flipped a coin. I lost. And that’s why I have a chip in my tooth, because he jammed a gun into my mouth, scratched the top of my mouth, and *pantomimes gagging sound effect* and it was perfect!”
“I think the subtitle was going to be “Rendition”. The idea centred on American troops going overseas, kidnapping people and bringing them back across borders. The subtitle “Rendition” was sort of tying in to that. I’m not sure that there was a fully-fledged story mapped out though. For me, it was just weird that a car studio made a gun game, and then never made another one”.
So there you have it. The game that never was. After months of pre-production, and undeniable effort from a small, but energised team, a sequel to Black simply wasn’t to be. As a huge fan of the original, I can’t help but feel somewhat bittersweet. The passion to see more from this IP was clearly abundant, and the new direction seemed to be a logical step forward. Still, the legacy of Black endures to this day. As my conversations with Joseph, Michael, Richard, and Ben drew to a close, I asked each of them what the game means to them now, with the benefit of distance and hindsight.
For Joseph, it was the acknowledgement of his efforts under what must have been an extremely challenging turnaround. “Alex Ward sent me this (holds up a framed box art with a plaque). Awarded in recognition of the great achievement of selling over 2 million copies of Black. No. 1 in the UK and US. That was just a nice thing that he sent me. So to this day, I’m very proud of it”.
Michael was equally positive, whilst acknowledging the challenges of its short development time. “When you got in touch with me, it was the first time I’d thought about it for years! It was a super intense period of time. Great fun, but we were crunching pretty hard towards the end.”
“Because it was my first job in the industry, I desperately wanted to do really well and pour all of my energy into it. It was my entry point. It led me to where I am now. Having worked on Black, the opportunity came up to move onto Battlefield, and that was in Stockholm. So I moved to Sweeden for three years, to work on Bad Company 2. Also on Battlefield’s 3 and 4”.
“Initially I only went over there for four months just to help out. But then I realised this was a fucking great game and an amazing city. Stockholm is beautiful. I’m not going back to England! [laughs]. It was my time on Black that got me the position on Battlefield, because of the design elements built around destruction. I suppose it made me a bit of a specialist in FPS games. Certainly for the first part of my career”.
“It was great. A foot in the door. My first proper job after university. I have really fond memories of it. I made great friends that I still have to this day. I’ve got no hard feelings towards EA. I love EA, and I loved working there”.
“It’s a game that at the time I enjoyed making,” explained Richard. “It was hard. I probably wouldn’t want to do it again now, because it was crunch, and I don’t agree with that entire thing. It was hell, but you did it because you were young. I’m fond of the game, and proud of the game. Every aspect of the team, and EA, was behind it. I enjoy talking about it and reminiscing about it after all this time. Its been nice actually”.
Ben shared a similar sentiment. “I think it’s the fact that people still want to talk about it all these years later. I have been super fortunate to work with a lot of talented teams on amazing projects. To me, it’s another gold star on the wall. It was probably hard work, but I didn’t feel like it at the time”.
We’d like to extend a massive thank you to Joseph Hodges, Michael Othen, Richard Bunn, and Ben Minto for their generosity, expertise, and passion. Their contributions to this piece quite literally allowed this story to be told. To them, the entire development team at Criterion, and everyone at EA, thank you for creating a videogame that unequivocally lived up to its back of the box proclamation: “a gun-fest that totally redefines the shooter”.
