Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1161
its own throat to get anything done — that would be a good example of something we really consciously wanted to get in there. so with BLACKWATCH, if the marines are the standard foot troops, BLACKWATCH are the Nazis. They're awful people and they do awful things, but they think they're serving the greater good. A lot of the [game's] history, if you go deep enough, is based on real history. The bioweapons treaty between Nixon and the soviet union is in there. Basically, both superpowers agreed not to produce biological weapons, shook hands, turned around, and both started pursuing biological weapons. so the idea there was BLACKWATCH is "BW"—"Bio-Weapons". It's a code name. They're set up to investigate and to test fi eld uses of these weapons. They're very secret, and they're called in as a last resort. They're the shock troops that deal with viral outbreaks and things that can't be contained. h+: so Prototype exaggerates real-world fears about the government. DD: There's an old saying that whatever you see on the market now, the government had thirty years ago. All this genetic technology, all that kind of stuff… I wouldn't be surprised if DArPA was using it in the '70s. It wouldn't shock me. There's a very conscious mythos built in there: what if the government had access to something that was the equivalent of the magic bullet for human genetics? What would they do with it? h+: tying aspects of the game to reality helps to establish verisimilitude. Is this why you put Alex and the viral outbreak in New York? DD: The reason we set it in New York is exactly that. It's something people can visualize and understand. It immediately centers Alex in reality — and it's very easy to lose reality, trust me. That's the reason behind how we did all of the vehicles and all of the weapons. You don't see the military running around with plasma guns or jet packs. You see them with Javelin missiles, m-16s, APCs and Abrams tanks and Apaches. That was a conscious choice. even BLACKWATCH wasn't running around with very high-tech stuff. They're running around with real weapons. h+: Let's turn back to Alex and how the player interacts with the game through him. his viral infection permits him to become stronger by consuming other people? DD: One of the earliest ideas we had was… what if you literally ate somebody, absorbed their genetics, and you could do anything they could do? And we took that and just blew it up into: "I want to fl y a helicopter, I better go fi nd a helicopter pilot." It led to a lot of cool gameplay opportunities and makes a sort of dark, twisted sense. It gives you an excuse for why a biochemist can fl y an Apache helicopter. h+: how does this gameplay tie in to Alex's quest to discover who he really is? DD: You can consume any target in the game and become them. You literally absorb them and get all their memories. so you want to lock in on people who know something about you, because you've consumed someone else who knows that other person — and that person was involved in the project with Alex. When you consume him, you get a memory that's relevant to that situation. It's this non-linear progression. You can see things, learn facts that you don't understand until a later point.