The Making Of: Gun
The Wild West has always been a perfect fit for videogames, but there was a time when the genre was bone-barren. In 2005, when the allure of the western in both cinema and games was at a low, it was Neversoft’s Gun that braved this dusty frontier
The story of how Neversoft ditched skateboards for gunslingers
in 2003, Neversoft was in a position that every developer dreams of. Working under Activision, it had just released Tony Hawk’s Underground, its fifth entry in as many years for the Tony Hawk’s franchise. Tony Hawk’s was a phenomenon, and Neversoft had been working almost exclusively on it since its inception in 1999.
Things were comfortable, but with that comfort came a sense of routine, and a creative craving to explore games beyond the half-pipes and crunchy roll of polyurethane wheels on concrete. As Neversoft development director Scott Pease puts it, “It was pretty clear that people needed a break from Tony Hawk’s.”
Thankfully for Neversoft, Activision was happy to oblige. The Tony Hawk’s juggernaut would keep on rolling, but the studio was also given the chance to pitch its very own IP. “We’d earned so much money and accolades for Activision at that point that we were gifted the golden ticket to do what we wanted,” Scott remembers. “We went through a period of brainstorming, but it pretty quickly came around to a western being a natural fit.”
The project was based more around the personal tastes of the Neversoft team, rather than cold business calculations. Neversoft president Joel Jewett was from Montana – a mountain man with a horseshoe moustache and a love for horses and open country. “He was basically a cowboy,” character artist Jon Bailey says.
Scott, meanwhile, grew up playing Lucasarts’ first-person shooter Outlaws, and wanted to reinvent its ideas using modern technology.
This would be an ambitious open world-style
videogame – albeit more The Legend Of Zelda than Grand Theft Auto – with tightly authored missions set across three midwestern US states.
But with Grand Theft Auto dominating the conversation about open world games at the time, it would’ve been remiss for Neversoft to ignore it. “GTA was this huge force that showed what an open world setting could do from a gameplay perspective,” Scott tells us. So when it came to pitching to Activision, there was only ever going to be one way to present the game: ‘GTA in the west’. Activision gave it the greenlight, and Neversoft’s open world western title was born. Its placeholder title: Gun.
This was uncharted territory for Neversoft, but in its own way the studio had already been preparing for it during the making of Tony Hawk’s Underground. “I look at Underground as our practice run for a bigger story that would come later,” Scott tells us. “We added tech around cinematics, dialogue and story to the engine – a lot of stuff that would be absolutely critical to Gun”.
Underground’s levels would serve a more direct purpose as well. “Essentially, we just replaced the skateboard and skater with a horse and cowboy,” Jon Bailey recalls. “I remember riding a horse around one of the urban Underground levels.”
In making Tony Hawk’s Underground, Neversoft was building up its muscle memory for Gun,
but there was still a long way to go. Shooter mechanics, streaming levels, first-person walking controls, and myriad other elements would need to be made from scratch. The Neversoft team expanded, bringing on new motion capture, AI and mission design teams, as well as Hollywood screenwriter Randall Jahnson.
Gun was shaping up to be a true western epic, fronted by an impressive voice cast that included Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen and Kris Kristofferson. It remains one of the few games of its era to rival the GTA series in the way of voice acting. “The beauty is that the voice cast loved the script. They were superinvested and I think it showed in the end product,” Scott Pease says. “At one point, we had Brad Dourif and Lance Henriksen performing the scene right in front of us – it was awe-inspiring, one of the highlights of my career.”
gun is an unabashedly violent revenge tale. It follows mountain man Colton White around the American frontier as he hunts down the people responsible for a steamboat massacre where everyone, including his father, was killed. Along the way, Colton is thrown into the middle of tensions between frontier townsfolk and natives, playing peacemaker while directing everyone’s
“GTA was this huge force that showed what an open world setting could do” scott pease
attention to the real enemy: a former confederate general called Magruder, who is hunting for fabled treasure in the Midwestern mountains.
The violence in Gun is often gratuitous, letting you scalp wounded enemies and blow heads clean off in slow motion. But while Scott cites ultraviolent western novels like Blood Meridian as influences, Gun harnesses the romantic aspects of the western, which you feel when riding across its great plains to Christopher Lennertz’s swelling orchestral score. Gun owes just as much to pre-sixties classical westerns as it did the grittier, revisionist twist on the genre that came with later films like The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy.
But more mainstream inspirations show up too. “The golden cross, the mis-measuring of the treasure’s location, the showdown in the mine. We stole plot devices from Raiders Of The Lost Ark!” Scott admits, with a hint of mischievous pride.
Despite spanning three states in a region renowned for its plains and vistas, the plan was always for Gun to have a compact game world; a space that made it easy to dash between sidemissions such as deputising for sheriffs, capturing bounties and hunting legendary animals. But building this world wasn’t just a case of making a landmass then populating it. It was more akin to an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, with different people building world segments based on the story missions that took place there.
“Imagine you have 20 missions, 20 different little areas, and then you have one designer tasked with puzzle-piecing these little bits into a whole,” Scott says. “We knew there would be missions around Empire City, Dodge, the fort, but the geometry of these locations relative to each other was a mystery until later on.”
You can see some of these jigsaw-piece borders if you take a closer look at the world; there’s a notably large field near the centre of the map that exists just to pitch a spectacular horse battle later in the story (a mission that Scott counts among
the game’s finest). Then there’s a winding canyon pass between Dodge and Empire City that was made for a stagecoach mission between the cities. “This crazy-complicated system gave the artists a tough job,” Scott chuckles. “We’d just bolt a ranch onto a desert onto a snowy mountainside and say ‘Now make all the art for it.’”
Gun was developed in 18 months – a short turnover which led to some visible sacrifices. One of these is the chapter where Colton White works with the corrupt Mayor Hoodoo Brown in Empire City. The team’s original plan was for the player to do missions alongside each of the mayor’s lackeys and see the extent of his corruption before he (unsurprisingly) double-crosses you. In the final game, you meet the mayor, and are duly betrayed in your very first mission for him. “In the end, we just didn’t have enough time. You can feel it in the end-product,” Scott laments.
But these were teething issues in a game that felt like the first step into a major new IP. Gun is mechanically fluid, and one of the first games to really make shooting while on horseback feel right, leading to some excellent ride-and-gun sequences through the game’s scrublands and canyons.
There are quite a few novel systems in there, too. The explosion physics lets you throw a stick of dynamite towards enemies, then use the slowmotion ability to shoot it in the air as it descends on them. Then there is the subtle faction system – crafted by a former Rockstar developer – which causes, for example, the Chinese in Empire City to have shootouts with the local gunslingers.
With Gun’s forward-pushing story, it’s quite easy to overlook such fine details, as well as the side-missions that bolstered your stats much like an RPG (which would cause a lot of players to hit a wall when reaching Hollister and Father Reid – a gruelling double-header of late-game bosses). “This one’s my fault,” Scott confesses. “We put way too many reminders about how to stay on the story track. I was a little gun-shy that people would lose the story track, and in hindsight should’ve trusted players to go off and engage with the world more.”
gun’s brisk development was selfimposed by Neversoft to hit the 2005 Christmas window and the launch of the Xbox 360. Designed for the outgoing Playstation 2, Gamecube and Xbox generation, Gun was in a tough position for a new IP. Neversoft decided late on that it needed to have a presence on Microsoft’s seminal console.
“It was just a case of, ‘Get it working on an Xbox 360,’” Scott says.
“We updated some texture resolutions, and normal maps were the new thing back then so we included them even though we had zero experience working with them,”
Jon Bailey adds.
Gun did well upon release, eventually selling nearly 2 million copies across all platforms. But these numbers were unremarkable for a publisher like Activision, and Scott was frustrated by its marketing; its messy trailers and hard-hat yellow box art downplaying the fact that it was a western. “The potential names for the game these guys came up with were so cheesy that we just stuck with Gun – the shorthand title we used to file the game at the studio”, Scott tells us. “And to make that skull-and-guns box art fit better with the narrative, we took the image and pasted it onto the front of Magruder’s train.”
Nevertheless, an option to make Gun 2 was on the table for Neversoft in 2006, and Scott believes it could have been the breakthrough the series needed. “We had the foundation of a really fantastic engine,” Scott rues. “There are very few really big open world engines that exist, and games are constantly made on them – whether it’s Assassin’s Creed, Rockstar games or whatever. Unfortunately we didn’t have the foresight to see that we could sit in that territory”.
The plan was to make a sequel to Gun and keep at the Tony Hawk’s series, but when Activision bought the rights to Guitar Hero in 2007 and offered it to Neversoft, a decision had to be made.”there was no way we’d be making three games, and Guitar Hero was ‘all hands on deck’; we had to decide what to cut and what to keep”.
Gun 2 was cancelled, and Neversoft returned to the relative comfort of making record-breaking franchise titles for Activision, including Guitar
Hero III: Legends of Rock in 2007. But Scott still sometimes imagines an alternative timeline for Neversoft. “Much of the awesome talent that worked on Gun left, because they came to make adventure games,” he says. “The tough thing in hindsight is that maybe there’s a world where we keep going with Gun and put Tony Hawk’s to rest for a little while”.
And maybe that’s a world in which Gun, not
Red Dead, would define the western genre today. But even though it’s long since been buried in the desert, its makers can take pride in being unsung pioneers of a genre. Like a lone rider silhouetted against a blood-red sunset, Gun trotted the open-world western onto the videogames horizon.
“We put way too many reminders about how to stay on the story track” scott pease