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The makers of the stylised master piece Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream, gave us one of the standout moments of this year’s E3 with their stunning contribution during the Sony PlayStation 4 showcase reveal.
The demo features some of the most impressive computer graphics ever generated for a computer game, but if that wasn’t enough, it’s wonderfully scripted and provided one of the most entertaining moments in E3 history during Monday night’s PS4 reveal. In a playstation.com blog post after the event, Quantic Dream Founder and President David Cage discussed the challenge of creating a technological demonstration that not only showcased their graphical processing power but also went beyond their known limits and made people laugh.
Cage wrote:
For me, the most important question was what kind of new emotion could we test? Kara (then Beyond) had demonstrated, for me, that it was possible to create dramatic emotion. It didn’t seem to be particularly interesting to recount another Kara-style story based on the same emotions and the same mechanisms. We had to test another limit, something radically different.
We had to try comedy.
He recognised that making people feel fear is relatively easy, given fear’s universal properties. “Creep up behind someone without a sound and suddenly shout, and you’ll startle them. Moving people by telling a sad story is more difficult, but if you have a moving story and you tell it the right way, you can manage to move your listeners.”
But with The Dark Sorcerer, Cage faced a new challenge. “The problem with comedy is that you need a good story, pacing, and talented actors in order to get even a smile from your audience.
“The other challenge is cultural: although we can frighten or move a Japanese person, an American or a German with more or less the same things, laughter is eminently cultural. People in different countries don’t laugh at the same things. What is hilarious in one country may be considered to be sinister or vulgar in another.”
Well we think David Cage and the Quantic Dream team nailed it perfectly, if you haven’t yet seen The Dark Sorcerer, check it out in the video above. It’s something quite special.
