TRANSCRIPT:
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
Welcome to the fourth episode of the Mafia II podcast. Today I’m back with Jack, and we’re going to be talking about how to write a great story. So, let’s jump right back in. Jack, this might be a bit of a recap, but to start us off, is Mafia II a continuation of the first game, do they tie together, or is this a completely separate story?
JACK SCALICI:
Well, because almost everyone died in the first game, we chose to make Mafia II a completely new story, but there will be certain references to Mafia I that fans pick up on, fans of the first game, and there might even be a character or two from the first game who pops up in Empire Bay.
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
Getting into this story, what is the main inspiration for Mafia II, and how did you come up with the basic plot?
JACK SCALICI:
Daniel Vavra came up with the story, it’s a traditional rags-to-riches story. Like many movies and books, Daniel based the events in Mafia II on real-life events, so there will be some similarities, I’m sure, with movies and books you may have read.
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
The script has obviously gone through many rewrites, and revisions, and overhauls. Why did that happen? What have you been trying to achieve? What do you gain when you go through revisions and how has the story changed and evolved over the life of this project?
JACK SCALICI:
Well, the first thing I should point out is that every script goes through rewrites. It’s not just unique to Mafia II. When you’re talking about a game or a movie, the first draft will never ever make it to production, there’s always a significant number of revisions. And because of the size of our story, it went through a very large number of revisions. With a movie, you’re talking about two hours of content. With our game, we have something that is just massive compared to that, so whereas a movie script is about 100 pages, 120 pages, maybe 150 for a really long movie, like an epic. Something like Lord of the Rings, I’m sure those were really big scripts. Our script right now, at the time of this podcast recording, is about 800 or so pages, to give you an idea of the scale. So there was a lot to digest, and a lot to revise. One of the main factors is that Daniel Vávra had written the first draft of the Mafia II script right after Mafia I was done, which is about seven years ago, I think. So, in the video game world, that’s an eternity. We’re now on another console generation, and even PC technology has also evolved, it’s light-years ahead of what it was. So, because of that, new things became possible to do. New scenes, we can have more characters in our scenes now, so because of that, we revisited the script and just about every single scene, every key scene, every cutscene, we said, “What can we do now, that we couldn’t do then?” And it was actually revised a number of times by the production staff, as well as 2K Product Development, before it even got to me. And then when it got to me, what I did - because, Denby and those guys are focused on the gameplay, and I’m more focused on the story. So, I sat with Daniel, and I said, “What do you think needs to be improved here? how can I help you?” And then I spoke to our Product Development and Marketing teams in the UK and in the US. The UK obviously represents…they take care of….hold on, let me redo that one. So, I spoke to our Product Development and Marketing teams in Europe as well as the US, and I said, “What do you guys want out of this?” One of the things that’s great is that a lot of the same people worked on Mafia I are also working on Mafia II, whether it be on Development, or Product Development on the publishing side, or Marketing, so they had a lot of really valuable input. A lot of the stuff in the first couple drafts of the script…it’s not that it didn’t work, it’s that Daniel had written a story that was really a lot like a movie, and we said, “Well, why should we spend five minutes doing a cutscene, when we can have the player playing? Have the player really engaged in playing through the story, and have the story unfold around him, as opposed to doing it like a movie where you just see a bunch of images on the screen?” And I think that’s where the strength of games is, is that you’re not just watching this guy on the screen, you are the guy. And, so whenever we came across part of the story that was originally designed as a cutscene, we said, “How can we make this more of an interactive experience?” And wherever that was possible, we did it. Let’s say, for example, we had a five-minute cutscene, maybe we looked at that and said, “Ok, let’s do this. Maybe we can design a fifteen-minute gameplay segment around this, and then cap it off with a thirty-second cutscene that establishes the same thing that that original five-minute cutscene would.” So, that’s where I think most of the real changes came into place.
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
The original script was written in Czech. How did you work with Daniel to take that and turn it into something that had dialogue that was universal, and have a game that would work for everyone?
JACK SCALICI:
Well, the script was originally written by Dan Vávra in his native language, which is Czech. He speaks really good English, but he’s most comfortable writing in Czech, so we had this monster of a script in Czech, and they hired someone to translate it into English. And when the Czech people learn English, they typically learn British English, which is a lot different than the type of English we speak in New York, as you can imagine. So, the script was translated into British English, and then from there we looked at it, and Daniel speaks really good English, and he was able to identify certain things that had gotten lost in the translation that he felt very strongly about. So he and I went through and he explained to me how the original scene was written and set up, and I translated that properly. And then from there, the task was, and continues to be, the dialogue. We have something like 75,000 words in the script right now. When we started it was about 50,000, so all those words had to be translated from the British-Czech translation into what we call Brooklynese, which is how we talk in New York. I grew up in New York my whole life, so the task fell to me to give it a final pass on the dialogue, just to make it sound as authentic as possible, and I think you’ve heard that in the stuff we’ve released so far, and you’ll continue to hear it, all the hard work we’ve put into the dialogue in future trailers and demos and when you get your hands on the final game. That’s a pretty long process. We started off by…I had a heart attack when I saw the size of the script. Normally we just do a round table and we polish the problematic dialogue, and it’s something that I can easily take care of with the original writer, and it takes no more than a day or two for an average game. For this game, because of the size of it and because it’s so story-driven, and is so cinematic and we have so much dialogue, we turned to Hollywood. We wanted a writer on this full-time for about six months, working with Dan Vávra and myself to polish the dialogue, but we couldn’t really find anyone who really understood video games and also understood this really unique type of dialogue that we needed. If you think about how many good mob movies are out there, there aren’t all that many that feature a lot of really good, authentic dialogue. So, eventually the schedule kept creeping-creeping-creeping, and it was coming up on us, and I just said, “You know what, I’ll just do this myself, tell me how you guys like it.” And the dev team really liked it, and we did the math and we said it’s going to be more than twice as fast for me to just do it myself, so I took on the task of basically polishing all the existing dialogue, and as we added new things to the game, I wrote the original dialogue for that. And once we were all done, it took, I don’t know, about six months. Once we were done, I sat down with Daniel for about a week, and once we were happy with it, we handed it off to our Product Development guys, and together we analyzed everything, and as I said earlier, with how was the script rewritten, it wasn’t really rewritten, it was more that we…our main focus was to make sure a) the gamer, the player, was always engaged, so we shortened a couple cutscenes or moved a couple things around just to keep it a true, interactive experience, rather than, “Ok, now we’re going to show you a five-minute movie.” It’s not to say that we reduced the length of everything, it was only in certain parts of the game where because of the rewrites that I did and working with Daniel, we ended up with sometimes cutscenes where there used to be gameplay in between them, and then the gameplay was removed, so we had these two cutscenes that had to be married together, and they ended up just being so long. And we also looked at the gameplay that took place before that cutscene and after that cutscene, and those were the deciding factors as to which ones were shortened. Some of them were actually lengthened and that’s about it.
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
Moving back into the actual story, how do you guys tie side stories and missions into the over-arching main plot, and how do you write such a story, where there are different things that you can do, rather than just this one linear path?
JACK SCALICI:
Well, because we have an open-world game, we call it a sandbox game, the player can do anything he wants at any time, and that makes it easier for us to tie in whatever we want with the main story. So let’s say you have to go from Point A to Point B to accomplish one of the main story objectives. On the way from Point A to Point B, we can have an event take place that you can choose to take part in, if you choose to. You don’t have to do this, but you’re going to want to do it. If we do our job right, and the game is fun, and you’re going to want to play it as much as possible, you’re going to want to do these little extra things. It was really important to us that they felt organic, they felt like they belonged in the story. There’s nothing that we really shoehorned in there, which is something that, I don’t know, in other games that I play, I find that it seems like someone had a brilliant idea to put this quest in the game, and it really doesn’t fit with the main story, but they thought it was cool, so they just shoved it in there and it just felt forced to me. Our game, we’re really striving not to do that. So, everything you do would make sense for Vito to do, and it would make sense for it to be happening in EB, and we’re not going to have a quest or subquest in 1950 that doesn’t make sense for 1950. The time period really plays into what we’re doing here. 1940s, everything is WWII, the first half of the 1940s. So, some of our subquests were designed around that. 1950s, it’s car culture, golden age of America, and those quests will reflect that.
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
Final question for that. You’ve said over and over that Mafia II is sort of like a movie that you play a part in. How do you create that kind of feeling in a game, and how did that affect your mindset when writing the story, or changing the style of your writing?
JACK SCALICI:
Well, one of the interesting things about our medium is that we can do pretty much everything a movie can do, and then we have that added layer of interactivity. However, as you know, just by playing games and you watch movies, the production values in movies are typically much higher than they are in games, and we really try to address that shortcoming in Mafia II. So, we looked at what we had to work with, and we looked at, “How would we do this if this were a movie? What’s the tone of this scene? What’s the mood? What do we want the player to feel at this particular moment?” One of the ways we did that is by controlling the weather. The days will progress and each mission is comprised of about one day. So on that day, we know exactly what the player is doing and when they’re going to do it, so we said, “Alright, what’s the mood we want here?” and that’s where the weather comes in. It might be snowing, it might take place in winter. It might be a cold rainy night. It might be a bright sunny day, so the weather was one tool we use, one of the weapons in our story-telling arsenal. Another one is the radio. In a lot of other games like Mafia II, you get in the car, and a random station is playing and you proceed to change it whatever you want. We still allow that to happen in Mafia II, but when you get in that car, there’s going to be a song that we feel is most appropriate for the scene. In other words, if this were a movie, that’s the song that would be playing. If you don’t like it, you’re free to change it to any of our other stations; however, on those stations, we’ll also have music that we feel is appropriate. It’s turned into a huge task, because now for every station we have in the game, we have to make sure we have at least three tracks picked. So, I think we have about a hundred unique situations in the game where we’re trying to do this, with the scripted song on the radio, so that will give you an idea of the size of the soundtrack we’re doing. So those two things, I think, the weather, and that radio, the music, will really set the mood, and as far as production values, well, you’ve seen our cutscenes, you’ve seen trailers, the one trailer produced by our cutscene team, and they’re just fantastic, so we now have basically the same capabilities that a movie crew would have in how we set up a scene, and we actually have more flexibility because our actors are virtual. We can replay the exact same scene and shoot it from as many angles as we want, and always get the same great performance. That’s one of the reasons our cutscenes are so good. We don’t like one thing? We change it, and it’s instant. It’s not like we have to go back to the drawing board, we don’t have to call the actors in, we don’t have to wait for another sunny day to shoot. So, the cutscenes, I think, were something I think we were confident about from the very start, and I think it’s one of the areas where Mafia II does it better than anybody else, in my opinion. Something I wasn’t a huge fan of in Mafia I was some of the voice-acting, I felt could’ve been done better. So, for Mafia II, I handled all the casting personally, along with the development team. I just didn’t want Mafia II, because it has so much voice in it, I didn’t want it to end up like a lot of other games. You play a lot of games, and without naming names, some of the best games out there will feature pretty terrible voice-acting, and it just gets to me. It pulls you out of the immersion. It suspends your suspension of disbelief, so we have pretty much a small army of professional voice actors right now that are working with us to record the script. It’s been an ongoing process for the last two years. These games, something the size of Mafia II, it just evolves. We find ourselves adding more and more and more dialogue, so I’ve basically been living in a recording studio for the last two years. One of the conscious decisions we made was to not cast any “name” talent in the game, at this point in time, because – at least in my opinion – when you hear a really recognizable voice in the game, you automatically think of that actor, and it just pulls you out of the story. I think when actors voice cartoon characters and 3D animated animals or whatever, that’s fine, but when you see a well-known or you hear a well-known actor’s voice coming from a 3D character model in a game that doesn’t look like that actor, it’s just really really weird. Imagine if they did that in a movie. Imagine they had someone really famous provide the voice for a live-action actor that no one knew. That’s how weird it is. So, for now, we don’t have any “name” talent. What we do have are really really talented character actors. Maybe you might recognize some of the names and some of the voices, but it’s not going to be anyone like Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino. We didn’t want that. It’s sort of like the first Star Wars movie, “Who were those people?” They were no one. They ended up becoming huge stars, but if you really want the audience to pay attention to your characters, you’re not going to give them a voice of someone who you associate with all these other characters and all these other movies or all these other games. One of the things about writing, the main thing about writing a story, as with all games, writing a story about Mafia II, we had to be constantly mindful that it’s a game we’re making, we’re not making a movie. We have all the tools that we need to make this interactive movie, this virtual movie, but we’re making it for the player. The player wants to play the game and not just watch it. We might have two hours of cutscenes, three hours of cutscenes, whatever we end up with. Mafia II is still not a movie, it’s a game, and we have to tailor it to our specific audience. The audience for a game is really different than the audience for a movie, and if you don’t know who your audience is, just like with anything, you’re going to fail. With a movie, your audience can include anyone who has eyeballs and can get to a movie theatre or owns a TV or a DVD player, so it’s pretty much everyone. With a game, you’re going to need to own a game console, and with the case of Mafia II, you’re going to have to own an X-Box 360, PlayStation3, or PC in order to experience it. And the Marketing people tell me that means that it’s males, ages eighteen to thirty-four. That’s who our audience is. So you have to tailor the content to that audience. If you watch movies or TV shows, even those based on organized crime, they can spend a lot of time on scenes like, if I want to use The Sopranoes, for example, they can have Carmella arguing with Tony and dealing with her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law for half the episode. If we did that in a game, most of our audience would just shut it off. Again, these are basically young males playing. And we still tell this big epic story, but at the same time, we need to keep them engaged, and we need to have them playing. At the end of the day, this is an action-shooter game, so basically if there’s no shooting involved, and if it doesn’t motivate you to play the game, it’s driving and it’s shooting, if it doesn’t motivate you to do those things and to keep playing the game and keep pushing the story forward, odds are it’s not going to end up in the final product. I’d say the biggest question we asked ourselves, when we were, this goes back to the script rewrites, we said, “If we do this, is our audience, are they really going to care about it? Is the addition or removal of this character in the scene, does it make a difference to our audience? Will they care? Will it move the story forward? Will it really draw them into our world?” And if the answer was no, then we didn’t do it.
ELIZABETH TOBEY:
Alright! Well, I think that you’ve given us a really good insight into how you and the team wrote a great story for Mafia II, and I want to thank you for being here, and we’ll be back in a couple weeks with episode five!
