January 2007 marked one year since the completion of work on Black. Here, Alex Ward tells the story of its beginnings, and how the early plans were actually for a very different game.

THE ORIGINS OF BLACK

Alex: I have always been a fan of first person shooters, and mainly those on the consoles. On the Nintendo 64, I was a big big fan of games such as Iguana's Turok the Dinosaur Hunter and Rare's Goldeneye 007.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Frank Tindle from Iguana UK regularly used to send me Playstation software every weekend. One Saturday morning, the postman delivered Medal of Honor and I spent the whole weekend playing it.

This was a very important game to me. The audio was very powerful and it took the genre to a new level. This game really immersed me in the action and I truly believed it was all real. I've always been into home cinema and this was one of the first PSX titles in Pro Logic. The mix of strong sound effects and emotional orchestral score took a videogame experience to a new place. Firing a machine gun had weight and impact and exploding sticky grenades just sounded fantastic.

It was that weekend, back on the first Playstation, that the seeds of Black were planted.

Flash forward a couple of years.

I had switched careers and joined Criterion. We were in the middle of working on the first Burnout—then codenamed as SRC for "shiny red car"—and just beginning work with Sony Computer Entertainment on what was to become Airblade.

After the E3 show in Los Angeles, I flew to Las Vegas for a few days off. At my parents urging I visited a gun range called The Gun Store, down the road from the MGM Grand at 2900 East Tropicana.

Now, for any overseas readers, you have to know that all handguns and rifles are illegal in the United Kingdom. You can fire an air rifle at home, but that's about it. Although I had seen real weapons before, I'd never had the chance to fire them.

I handed over my passport and was given a handgun and a box of bullets. I bought two paper targets, put on headphones and protective glasses and made my way into the range.

It was the sound that stopped me in my tracks. I was literally glued to the spot and for a moment I could not move. I think I was just realising that I was now putting myself into a potentially lethal situation. Any one of the guys into the room could just suddenly turn and shoot me.

I don't think my initial fears were helped by seeing two Chinese guys ahead of me firing a Desert Eagle and then hearing another guy open up with an AK-47. If you've seen the film Robocop you'll know the scene where the police range is stopped suddenly by the sound of Robocop's gun— well, this was pretty much the same thing.

My parents were in town and my Dad was the person who came in next and helped me relax. We spent the afternoon firing a range of different handguns, from Glocks and Colts to stuff like the Sig/Sauer and the .357 Magnum.

It gets pretty loud in a gun range so we took a lot of breaks. I think it was when I was sitting outside in the Nevada sunshine drinking a cold Dr. Pepper from the store machine that I decided that Criterion would have to make a shooting game.

Before E3 I had been speaking with some of the Criterion engineers about the sorts of things we could achieve on the PS2. An FPS seemed a lot easier technically at that time as we were spending a lot of time in unchartered territory with the machine on the Burnout project back then.

What struck me hard was how powerful the real shooting experience was. The sound was not what I was expected and it certainly didn't sound like it does in any modern film.

Add to this the incredible visceral visuals—the bright muzzle flashes, the kinetic recoil, the bounce of the shell casing. I had played a lot of shooters, but none of them seemed to capture the real thing. And even when they had, they still seemed like very dry and tactical experiences compared to the explosive action of the real thing.

I started to think about a game where firing the weapon would be like nothing else—where the player could rip the place to pieces and that it delivered a larger than life experience.

This was the first concrete beginning of Black.

Appearing in the Las Vegas Sun whilst beginning research for the game

During work on the first Burnout game, I began research on the "Criterion Shooting Project"—to which I added a working title of "Project JUPITER". I had attended a few Sega development conferences in Japan and was well aware of the importance of a totally bizarre and unrelated codename for a new game project.

The arrival of the PS2 signified a change in the global games market. Japan had been the leader of the videogames business and also the centre of attention, but now the American market really began to grow and it made sense that if you wanted to have a hit game, the key market was going to be North America.

Making a shooting game meant that we wanted to have lots of shooting and lots of people being shot. I began to think seriously about this. If this game was not grounded in a real conflict, then who would the player be shooting and why would you be shooting them? Either the game is set in the Second World War or the future or it isn't. If not, you have to consider this question.

I knew from the outset that modern weapons were incredibly exciting and that a shooting game with all of the modern machine guns, made by Criterion on Playstation 2, would be far more exciting that firing any of the slower weapons that were around during World War II. But I felt strongly about creating an original and fictional setup for the game. I wasn't interested in doing a "Desert Storm" type of game at all or indeed anything that was based on real conflict.

I began to research Russia as both a location and a starting point for narrative in the game. In my mind, at this point, I was imagining a game that was "Medal of Honor in Russia"—it would have the audio finesse and atmosphere of the first two MoH games but with a Russian setting.

A page from my original notebook outlining early ideas for some game levels, circa 2001. Note reference to Afghanistan as a level location.

One of the original Burnout designers, Chris Roberts, told me that for every well-known American weapon there was a comparable Russian equivalent. I thought that having Russian enemies would be acceptable to an American audience, as the two countries had been enemies throughout the Cold War. There were many stories commenting on the decline of the Soviet forces and the risks posed by possible thefts of nuclear material.

I spent several weeks trawling the internet looking for reference material. I still have the original notes I made on my desk today. I put together a list of locations and continued with my research. I bought a lot of DVDs and sat through Red Heat, Firefox, Gorky Park and The Hunt for Red October.

The Russian stuff really fascinated me, not only from the weapons side of things but also the location side. I was especially interested in Russian Space Command at Star City and imagined an alternate version of Goldeneye mixed with Moonraker and also the closed underground nuclear cities, still under guard today, originally built to manufacture and sustain uranium production following the beginning of nuclear conflict.

A "Firefox"-style level was originally planned.

Other locations included a disused Russian airbase—Firefox was a big influence for that one and I collected a lot of photographs of the ill-fated Russian supersonic plane known as "Concordski" and also some experimental aircraft projects based around flying saucers—the main Moscow airport and the submarine pens in Murmask.

For the narrative side of the game I did a lot of research into what are now known as "suitcase nukes"—compact nuclear bombs that were Russian-made. Apart from the threat posed by these devices being stolen or sold to emerging terrorist groups in Eastern Europe, an LA Times Story from 1997 claimed that Russia had lost track of over 100 suitcase bombs and that at least ten of them were rumoured to have been buried within the United States.

I collected a wide range of Soviet military posters.

I was into anything Russian.

I even bought a huge ugly Russian Navy watch over the Internet I receive bizarre Russian spam to this day!). I'm a big fan of Back to the Future and eagle-eyed viewers will know that during the second BTTF film Doc Brown wears a shirt that has a Wild West theme. During press interviews for the film the producers and actors hinted strongly that clues to the next installment were "all around."

I fancied a try at this so I wore that watch for a lot of the early Burnout features and dropped the same sort of hints. Sadly, no-one ever worked it out and I think that has put us off cryptic interview clues ever since!

I studied hard on the "backpack nukes" idea but was eventually put off when I began to see the focus of my research begin to pop up in other media. Not only did Dreamworks release The Peacemaker but I also read that English thriller writer Lynda La Plante was developing a script called Red Mercury which also featured the same devices.

I finally gave up on this narrative when I played the first demo of Metal Gear Solid 2—Sons of Liberty. The E3 demo had wowed me, as I'm a staunch MGS fan, but when I saw the Russians arrive in New York in the cool chopper I threw in the towel.

The mention of Arzamas-16, one of the underground nuclear citites in the storyline was the final nail in the coffin. It seems Mr. Kojima and I were looking in the same places.

It was time to explore a different setting and some different scenarios.

A close-up of my Russian watch.

The Black folder became just that, a black folder full of printouts and web addresses. I put it to one side and started work on our second driving game—Burnout 2: Point of Impact. Shooting guns would have to wait.

Several other games have since come out which feature some of the locations and themes I researched—Zombie Studios' Shadow Ops was one of them. One of the underground cities was referenced in the Tom Clancy film The Sum of All Fears and the threat of suitcase nuclear weapons finding their way into the United States has just been featured in the opening to Season Six of 24.

It still stands as something credible to explore. But I have yet to see my ugly Russian watch turn up anywhere....

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