DAVID Q&A: CRANE

NEED A LICENSED GAME IN A SHORT TIME FRAME? HERE’S THE MAN YOU CALL

How did the Ghostbusters project get started?

When [Activision vice president of product development] Tom Lopez determined that the Ghostbusters licence was available and that he could get it for a reasonable price, he came to the game design group. He told us, “This licence is available. To make financial sense we will have to make a game in six weeks (as opposed to the normal nine months). What can we do?” We all agreed that if we had to start a game from scratch we could not do a quality game in the necessary time frame.

What made the Car Wars design a good fit for Ghostbusters?

One of the coolest props from the movie was the hearseturned-ghostmobile. I could picture how to wrap the theme of this new movie around my existing game, with the minimum amount of effort. I kept the top-view racing game and replaced the guns, missiles and rocket launchers with more appropriate weapons such as the Ghost Vacuum.

How do you feel about the shopping aspect of the game?

If the base game Car Wars hadn’t contained a resourceallocation segment, there is no way that the Ghostbusters game would have featured it. That’s great, because I like the way it works. But the harsh realities of development schedules have a major impact on game features. It always has and it always will.

What did you do to bring the game closer to the movie?

Midway through development, I decided it was important to add digitised speech to the game. Some of the trendiest things to come from the movie were sound bytes such as, “He slimed me” and the crowd chanting, “Ghostbusters!” I felt the sounds helped to capture the spirit of the movie (pun intended) so I decided to keep them in.

For David Crane’s full story of creating Ghostbusters, look for our Making Of feature in issue 25.