THE MAKING OF NO ONE LIVES FOREVER 1&2
DISCOVER HOW A CEASE-AND-DESIST FROM THE OWNERS OF JAMES BOND LED TO CATE ARCHER, THE HERO OF MONOLITH’S CULT SPY SERIES
The late Nineties were a pioneering time for first-person shooters, but also a time when these early 3D games were all slathered in dark, rusty colour palettes. Then, like an expressionistic splattering of rainbow paints in a drab industrial control room, sassy Sixties-themed shooter No One Lives Forever shook things up in 2000.
The radicality of this game and its 2002 sequel went far beyond their swinging stylings. They were story-driven and sharply written, they offered freedom of approach in tackling objectives and the sequel introduced an AI system that laid the foundations for FEAR –a game that’s lauded to this day as one of the best implementations of enemy AI in videogames.
1998-1999 was a prolific period for developer Monolith Productions (see our feature on the early years of Monolith in issue 219). The studio released no fewer than nine games in that time, during which it also began development on
No One Lives Forever. Working out of a huge multi-building complex in Kirkland, Washington, the studio’s rapid expansion and wealth of simultaneous projects was largely fuelled by its big-thinking cofounder Jason Hall – which came with its perks and drawbacks.
Hall, along with several of the founders, was an audiophile, which meant that Monolith had its very own sound studio on-site. Monolith cofounder Toby Gladwell tells us, “Jason was always very big on audio and one way in which Monolith was ahead of its time was that our audio was always really good, and music wellscored.” The crisp dialogue and Guy Whitmore’s excellent soundtrack for No One Lives Forever
were born from this obsession for acoustics.
But the obsession with ‘going big’ meant that certain basic amenities could get seriously overlooked, as No One Lives Forever 2 AI engineer Jeff Orkin reveals. “Monolith was really scrappy in those days before the Warner Bros acquisition,” he recalls. “The office was not in great shape, and the bathroom across from my office overflowed somewhat regularly.”
Amidst the projects and toilet turmoils of Monolith circa 1998, work began on No One Lives Forever, with designer Craig Hubbard brought on to lead a team of 18 people. It all began with a simple premise: action-movie game.
Monolith’s previous game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division – an anime-inspired game with gundams – was a critical darling but commercial failure. In classic Monolith style, this motivated the studio to try something completely different rather than play it safe, and early plans for a Shogo sequel morphed into what would eventually become No One Lives Forever. “One of the first ideas we came up with was a sequence aboard a doomed airliner that ends with you skydiving and stealing a parachute, which survived to make it into the game,” Craig recalls.
Talks within the development team gradually shifted the theme from action movie to Sixties spy thriller. The late Nineties were a bit of a postmodern golden age for the spy thriller, with
really Monolith scrappy was days in before those Warner Bros the acquisition
JEFF ORKIN
Pierce Brosnan’s Bond movies poking fun at a formula that had grown staid in preceding years, and of course Austin Powers turning the genre into Sixties-themed slapstick. It was a great time to get a bit silly with the premise.
But Monolith’s inspirations came from lesserknown examples of spy-themed shlock. “We started prototyping a more stealth-oriented experience with gadgets, but it was still modern day at that point,” says Craig. “Then I saw The Avengers with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, which was a bad movie with a great aesthetic and cool soundtrack, so I pitched a similarly retro-futuristic, high-tech Sixties vibe, which we explored for a while.” It also transpired that producer Chris Miller was a fan of Modesty
Blaise and other campy spy-fi classics.
The series’ iconic frontwoman Cate Archer was conceived quite far down the line, after the original direction of the game – starring a male protagonist – was met with a cease-and-desist from James Bond IP holder MGM. As the team struggled to find a less overtly Bondian, angle for the game, the breakthrough came when Craig decided to quite literally flip the script.
“One day I was re-reading a scene I’d sketched between the player character and a female love interest and it suddenly hit me that all we had to do was reverse the roles and it would suddenly feel completely fresh,” he tells us. “I think we were all a bit nervous about whether a female protagonist was a good idea for an FPS considering the overwhelmingly male audience in those days, but we decided to go ahead with it.”
It was the right choice. Cate Archer was sharp, subversive and steadfast in the face of grave danger as well as the steady drone of sexism. Through Archer, the developers got to explore themes that would have been overlooked had the hero been male, and were remarkably progressive even by today’s standards.
Archer has to contend with the dismissive attitude of Smith, her superior at her spy agency UNITY, who only sends her out into the field because all other (male) operatives are dead. Smith is quick to attribute the agency’s failings to the fact that they “put a woman on the job”, and refuses to acknowledge Archer’s successes. Add to this the chauvinistic condescension of her fellow agent Tom Goodman, and Archer has to put up with a lot of shit to prove her worth – as if the spectacular feats and high body counts you amass throughout the game aren’t enough.
Archer gives as good as she gets with the sexist jabs, never getting flustered or frustrated. She is attractive without relying on hypersexualisation (at a time when Lara Croft was still burdened with DDS in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation while Angelina Jolie was padding her chest for her role in the 2001 Tomb Raider movie). “I really loved the idea that Archer was this competent, self-assured badass who couldn’t get credit for her accomplishments but also got the blame for others’ mistakes,” Craig tells us.
Throughout 1999, No One Lives Forever was being developed with the kind of energy that
I a was re-reading the scene player between love character interest and and a all it hit we me had that to do the was roles reverse
CRAIG HUBBARD
typified many burgeoning studios. There was little management, a lot of ambition and an uncontainable amount of creativity. No One Lives Forever was something of a crossroads project for Monolith. It was the game where Monolith’s in-house Lithtech engine was really starting to shine, and the studio pared back its operations as a publisher and motion-capture studio to focus purely on making games.
Yet the chaotic creativity was still there. No One Lives Forever had a lot of ideas in it, but many of them, such as stealth, weren’t quite fully formed. One of Craig’s all-time favourite games is Thief: The Dark Project, which is evident in the way walking speed and different surfaces affect the amount of noise you make in No One Lives Forever. Likewise, the silenced pistol was a rewarding and lethal way to play the game.
But as soon as you were spotted, the game reverted into an all-out shooter. That’s because, according to Craig “there was no easy way to implement ‘recoverable stealth’ with the tools we had for the first game”.
Craig is candid about the things that didn’t quite click in No One Lives Forever. “By far the thing I regret most is that I didn’t yet understand the importance of external playtesting,” he tells us. “We had a couple of insta-fail stealth sequences that were insanely hard.” He attributes its long and verbose cutscenes to the fact that he wrote the script and created the scenes very late in the project. “As I was implementing, I realised it was a lot for players to sit through, but it was too late to address.”
Thankfully, Craig would get a chance to tie up the game’s loose ends. No One Lives Forever was critically lauded upon release in 2000, and sold well enough to justify a sequel.
For a game released just two years after its predecessor, No One Lives Forever 2 made huge strides in almost every area. Levels were now non-linear, giving you free roam of large areas like the Siberian wastes, urban Calcutta and a Japanese village. An Rpg-lite levelling system was also introduced, whereby you gathered intel to amass points that you could distribute into attributes like stealth, weapon damage and gadgetry. This allowed you to effectively have different