The Making Of: The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay
There’s usually an invisible but pretty strict limit on the quality of a movie tie-in game, but in 2004 a little-known Swedish studio bucked the trend, building a Riddick game in a pioneering engine that beat id and Valve to the new generation
Learn how Starbreeze used a fledgling franchise to create a cutting-edge videogame
ou don’t have to spend much time in the steel-capped boots of Riddick to realise that Escape From Butcher Bay is no ordinary movie tie-in videogame. After a tutorial that ends with the somewhat cheap
‘just a dream’ get-out, you’re thrown for real into Butcher Bay prison – a brutalist behemoth of steel and stone on some wasteland planet in a forgotten corner of the cosmos.
For the first five minutes you’re on rails, escorted by guards through a building that you imagine smells like a damp metallic mix of rust and blood. Dramatic music plays, credits fade in revealing star voice talent like Ron Perlman, Xzibit and, of course, Vin Diesel. Then, you’re thrown into a cell with a single goal: escape.
The sequence evokes Half-life’s famous tram ride prologue, but with a blockbuster movie polish rarely seen in games at the time. The Half-life homage is fitting, because just as
Gordon Freeman’s seminal commute heralded a new generation of gaming, so Riddick’s prison walk ushered in a new era of game engines, somehow beating Doom 3’s id Tech 4 and Half-life 2’s Source engine to showcasing the latest graphical technologies.
Starbreeze Studios wasn’t a prolific developer in 2002. It was just coming off its first major console release, a dark fantasy RPG called Enclave. The game was reasonably well-received, but
Butcher Bay lead writer Mikael Saker remembers that its real value lay in the studio getting the experience of actually releasing a game. “It was a very educational development where we just managed to ship something,” he tells us. “After that we felt empowered. We’d shipped a game and were ready to take on the next thing.”
Starbreeze hoped that next thing would be an original IP, but in the absence of options a
Riddick game fitted with the studio’s visions. Back in 2004, Vin Diesel’s Riddick character was only known from the cult sci-fi movie Pitch Black. The next Riddick movie was yet to be greenlit, so even though the game would need to adapt to the movie’s mythos as it was being written, it still offered Starbreeze plenty of creative freedom.
Butcher Bay producer and Starbreeze founding member Jens Andersson says that a Riddick game was the next best thing to an original IP. “Everyone enjoyed the original Pitch Black,” he recalls. “It had a B-movie vibe and felt very open in terms of what a game taking place elsewhere in that world would look like.”
Work began on Escape From Butcher Bay in 2002, and the original concept was to make it a free-roaming Grand Theft Auto-style game.
Vice City had just come out, and the ‘open world’ label still carried an aura of mystery and endless possibilities. This initial idea didn’t last long, as Starbreeze had bigger ambitions than to follow the flavour of the year. The team began incorporating stealth and light RPG elements that brought Butcher Bay closer to the Looking Glass school of games like Deus Ex and Thief.
This rethink didn’t sit easily with publisher Vivendi Universal, not least because it required a shift to a first-person perspective which meant its star Vin Diesel didn’t get as much screen time. “The solution was to have these action cutscenes, so that when you climb a ladder or enter a vent you shift to third-person for a bit,” says Mikael.
“It had technical benefits because you could reposition the character and make transitions look very smooth, but it also showed the character.”
Not that Vin Diesel, a game enthusiast whose very own Tigon Studios was copublishing Butcher Bay, was desperate to hog the limelight. Vivendi Universal producer Pete Wanat witnessed Vin Diesel’s dedication to the character first-hand.
“Vin doesn’t think of games as lunchboxes but as art, and it showed,” he recalls. “He once showed up to recording only to pause the session while he spent five hours rewriting his dialogue with Flint [Dille]. Was it stressful? Sure, but we got Riddick (not Vin) in the fucking studio. And that voice recording is still one of the best ever in a game.”
“He knew the character much better than we did, so the amount of words that came out of that session was less than originally written,” says Jens. This wasn’t just an actor lending VO to an existing character, it was an actor in the midst of crafting a character for both movie and game, and his hands-on approach shows in the quality of the dialogue. Riddick’s a calm killer of few words, but when he does speak it’s with growling authority and cosmos-cold menace.
Meanwhile, Starbreeze was struggling to gel the disparate parts of Butcher Bay into a cohesive whole. “We really had to fight for it,” says Jens. “First thing to do was prove ‘can we do melee fighting?’ and come up with different implementations on the melee systems. Since the game is in a prison you can’t just put a gun in the hand of the player from the get-go. We needed other strong gameplay elements, too.”
One of these other elements was the RPG aspect. At this time, ideas like quests, complex puzzles, multiple routes to completion and an
NPC dialogue system were rare in action-oriented shooters. “We had to find ways of having ‘lite’ RPG elements that didn’t take over the game – skill trees, advanced NPCS that could react to various things, that kind of stuff,” says Mikael.
These RPG systems exhibit the game at its subtle best. Between high-intensity action sequences where you’re shooting guards or
Everyone enjoyed the original Pitch Black, It had a B-movie vibe and felt very open in terms of what a game taking place elsewhere in that world would look like
being chased by mutants through a radioactive subterrane, there are long segments where you’re mingling with prison inmates. You exchange favours for shivs and clubs, take part in fighting tournaments and build a reputation amidst the prison populace in your bid to escape.
It’s a brave play on power and pacing to suddenly strip the player of their precious gun arsenal, but the strength of Butcher Bay’s melee combat, stealth and immersive sim leanings arguably outshine the more marketable shooting segments, which are often spectacular, but also linear and generic.
We share with Jens and Mikael our preference for the game’s quieter segments over the shooting. “I think we all enjoyed them more actually,” Jens tells us. “Whenever you make games, you don’t know what the game is until it’s close to done. I don’t think we realised what we were doing until very late in the project, when we saw the balance between the different genres and how we divided it up.”
But the very things that made for such a great end product also caused a turbulent development. The powerful in-house engine was hard to master, and there were so many diverse ideas going into Butcher Bay that Starbreeze struggled to convey to the publishers exactly what kind of game it was making. “It was very hard to pick out a vertical slice and say, ‘This is what the game will be,’ even for us internally at the studio,” says Jens.
The Butcher Bay project struggled through 2003. Starbreeze had been working on two other projects at the time but the publishers for those went bankrupt, leading to a sudden funding shortage that forced the studio to ask its Riddick publisher for more money to complete the project. “We basically had to tell them that we need money otherwise the project won’t be finished at all,” remembers Jens.
By the end of the year, a release date had been confirmed for the Chronicles Of Riddick movie, but it looked unlikely that the game would be able to meet it. Butcher Bay was still in alpha and largely broken, with framerate issues, a poorly functioning melee system and an endless sea of bugs.
t one point, Jens remembers that the game was as good as cancelled… until Pete Wanat intervened. “Yes, there was a time when one particular executive at Vivendi Universal very much wanted to kill the game,” Pete recalls. “They were more excited about a Van Helsing and Fight Club game that was in development at the time, but that’s just part of fighting the good fight.”
A casualty of this bailout was the PS2 version of Butcher Bay, which was scrapped. Sony’s flagship console was more successful than the Xbox, but its weaker hardware meant running a game as advanced as Butcher Bay was a challenge. “A lot of the key components, like shadows and dynamic lighting, weren’t really available, but we had a great team working on that which found other ways of using dynamic lightmaps,” says Jens. “I’m convinced it could have been done and become a great game.”
A key factor in Starbreeze’s struggles was working with an in-house engine that was being forged by studio founder Magnus Hogdahl concurrently with the game. Jens describes Magnus as a tech genius, who was obsessed with John Carmack’s id Tech engine and gleaned everything he could from it.
Mikael recalls one time when Magnus showed people online snippets of John Carmack demonstrating id Tech. “I remember at one point Magnus showed us a clip showing how real-time tessellation works – if you had a curved pipe, you could build it with a lot of polygons but limit the number of polygons the further you got from the object,” says Mikael. “The next day, he had implemented it in the Starbreeze engine. He was a really driven guy.”
Despite the engine’s challenges, about six months before the game’s looming release things started to finally fall into place. The team began to fully understand and harness the technology and mechanics at their disposal. On
Xbox, for example, the engine was only capable of displaying four or five characters on-screen at once. “That’s why the whole courtyard in Prison Area 2 is divided,” says Mikael. “It feels natural, but the main reason for doing that was to limit the number of characters on-screen.”
Other technical aspects began coming together, turning Butcher Bay from a broken game into a groundbreaking one. “Visually, a couple of simple tricks like the dynamic light maps started to work, and suddenly the melee fighting was really fun,” Jens tells us. This breakthrough in melee mechanics caused Starbreeze to add in an entire melee-oriented section of the game (Aquilas Territory) just 24 hours before one of the final development milestones. “In my mind, it’s one of the best sections of the game,” says Jens. “It fits the prison mentality thing so well.”
Both Jens and Mikael admit to not really knowing whether the game they sent for release was actually much good. Starbreeze had shrunk from 80 staff to 18 by the end of development, and the focus was on finding the next project to keep the studio afloat. Following the box office failure of The Chronicles Of Riddick, plans for subsequent Riddick games were shelved until the Assault On Dark Athena semi-sequel in 2009. Escape From Butcher Bay sold well and was one of the best-rated games of its generation. It benefitted from delays to Half-life 2 and Doom 3 to become the very first game to showcase many of the graphical breakthroughs we’d soon see in the Source and id Tech 4 engines. Amidst impressive dynamic shadows, the highly textured faces that’d emerge from them, and the obscurity of a movie IP that never fulfilled its potential, a silent trailblazer was born.
Visually, a couple of simple tricks like the dynamic light maps started to work, and suddenly the melee fighting was really fun