THE MAKING OF GOD OF WAR
There’s a moment in the original God Of War that, like an ancient Hellenic pot developing surface cracks over the centuries, wears its age with pride. As you’re scaling a cliff up to Pandora’s Temple, which is mounted on the back of the Titan Cronos, the camera moves with the deftness of a drone to up above you, looking down. From this perspective, you see how much cliff face you’ve covered, below that you see the back of the formidable Titan as he crawls across the desert, then far below that you see the desert flying by with each of Cronos’ titanic steps.
It’s a dizzying display of visual layering and camera craft – one of the first wake-up calls that games weren’t reliant on pedestals, cranes and helicopters like movie cameras were before the advent of drones. It showed that games could, in their own way, be more cinematic than cinema itself, and God Of War asserted that with the authority of a vengeful Greek deity.
Looking back, an action game in the vein of the immensely popular Devil May Cry but with a Greek mythological theme seems like a foolproof idea, but it took years of near-cancellations, conceptual struggles and what was unanimously described as a tough development to bring it all together. And all this was achieved at Santa Monica Studio, a studio that until that point had only released a little-known futuristic racing game called Kinetica in 2001.
“THAT ROOM WAS OUR PROOF OF CONCEPT, AND PROBABLY A BIG PART OF WHATDAVID JAFFE
