Rated mature

Wet blends bloody action, oral allusions
and grindhouse aesthetics, and banks
on its heroine Rubi Malone for the future
of the franchise

UNBRIDLED MISH-MASH OF SPAGHETTI WESTERN,
BLAXPLOITATION AND B-MOVIE INFLUENCES: Wet

by ERIK LEIJON

Montreal’s own Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) has churned out 70 games and sold 28 million copies since opening in 1992, yet to most gamers Wet will probably be their introduction to Canada’s largest independent game development studio. A2M has always been the go-to company when it comes to family-friendly fare, with such past classics as the Nintendo Wii’s High School Musical: Makin’ the Cut under its belt. Despite being outside our collective purview, it’s considered to be one of the best at keeping preteens entertained.

Not unlike the company’s own suggestive acronym, there’s something sinister lurking inside A2M’s unassuming downtown office. For over three years, around 90 of the studio’s 450 Montreal employees ditched Disney licences for a foul-mouthed, gun-toting, katana-wielding sexy Grindhouse caricature named Rubi Malone (voiced by smokey-voiced beauty Eliza Dushku, of Buffy fame) in the acrobatic old-school shooting game Wet. The Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 title hits stores on Sept. 15, and before you think the studio has gone completely to the dark side, Wet is supposedly short for wetwork, a euphemism for a covert assassination.

True grit

High School Musical this ain’t, but not even wetwork properly defines this assured first foray into mature gaming. There’s nothing covert about the demo currently available on both consoles: Rubi crashes through a glass ceiling, interrupting a meeting between some cartoonish crime lords. Whipping out her dual pistols, she climbs the walls, slides under the tables and dives in the air action-movie style, reducing her colourful foes to bloody corpses on the floor. No doubt the A2M crew wore our their copies of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse.

“It’s the perfect calling card,” says creative director Patrick Fortier of Wet’s visual style. “It sets the mood: it’s over the top, a little crazy and it’s not a game that takes itself too seriously. Embracing [the Grindhouse look] seemed like the right thing to do, to announce to players that we plan on having a fun mix of violence and humour.”

The finished version of Wet is an unbridled mish-mash of Spaghetti Western, blaxploitation and b-movie influences that belie the current glut of sleek futuristic or realistic military games out there. Where most studios working on high-profile games strive for crisp and flawless graphics, Fortier, art director Jean-François Mignault and the team devised the grindhouse filter, giving the game a gritty, crackling, jaundiced film-reel look. Between levels, players will be treated to old-fashioned public service announcements and advertisements the team culled from the Internet, and an energetic soundtrack featuring mostly hi-octane rockabilly cuts. If it sounds hammed up to extreme levels, that’s certainly not by accident, and having Malcolm McDowell deliver a screwball performance as supervillain Mr. Ackers likely brings that point home.

Wet’s aesthetics will likely be the title’s gift to the annals of gaming history, but at its infancy, the unnamed prototype that A2M started with was an idea to combine acrobatics, shooting and swordplay in as simple a way as possible.

“No game had really combined those aspects before so we didn’t have anything to draw inspiration from, so we came up with our own solutions,” says Fortier. However, in its final form, gamers will be able to pick out elements inspired heavily by Max Payne, Stranglehold and a multitude of other lone-badass-taking-on-an-army-of-enemies type of games, as well as acrobatic platformers such as Ubisoft Montreal’s Prince of Persia series. Fortier says the team went through a considerable amount of trial-and-error before finding a system that worked: Rubi enters slow-motion time when airborne, and one of her hands is manually controlled by the player while the other hand auto-locks. With a single-button press, Rubi can then unsheathe her sword for close-quartered combat. “It seems like a pretty simple idea when you talk about it,” says Fortier, “but there was a lot of time spent finding a combination of manual and auto shooting that we could be happy with.”

ART TO MOUTH: (from left) Patrick Fortier,
Avi Winkler, Eliza Dushku, Ashraf Ismail and Sylvain Awad

Hits and near misses

The game was already far along in development when, in July 2008, A2M heard the news about Wet’s publisher Vivendi merging with Activision to form the gaming industry’s largest publisher. Fortier and his team were confident in their project, but it didn’t stop their new bosses from dumping it, and a bunch of other games, as they streamlined their new business.

“We found out [about the project being dumped by Activision] on the Internet, just like everyone else,” Fortier told the Mirror last November. At the time of the interview, A2M had already approached famed Fallout 3 creators Bethesda Softworks, a small company not known for publishing games they didn’t develop. Bethesda was interested in the project but too tied up in their own high-profile release to pick up the orphaned Wet. This past April, Bethesda not only announced they had acquired publishing rights, but allowed Fortier and his team to get creative with their grindhouse motif, something Vivendi did not embrace as readily.

To have a game dropped in mid-development can be the kiss of death for studios, since publishers are the ones footing the bills during the long, costly development cycles. But years of making critically ignored yet highly lucrative children’s games proved to be A2M’s saving grace, as the company was able to pay its employees and keep development going as they looked for a new home.

“There are a lot of studios closing, and a lot of projects falling off the grid,” says Fortier. “We could have been one of those, or have had to settle for the first publisher that came by and we would have been forced to make massive modifications to the game.”

Not only was Bethesda high on Wet when most media and gamers condemned the title to vapourware status, it’s been pretty creative with marketing a pretty silly, non-traditional game. There’s an amusing viral video called “Shot at Love” in which a bunch of bullet-riddled, impaled bodies opine for the deadly, raven-haired operative in song. A2M CEO Rémi Racine says the publishing deal with Bethesda is no different from the company’s usual agreements, and A2M still owns the rights to Wet and its characters, but he wouldn’t comment on what happened to the money A2M spent funding the game, or what percentage it will get from each copy sold.

Future franchise and oral sex

There also hasn’t been any official talk concerning a sequel, although, as with every other new gaming intellectual property, Wet was designed with future versions in mind. Fortier hopes the Rubi character will have some staying power, saying “she brings people into the universe. She’s at the top of her game when we meet her in Wet. Based on the military fatigues she wears, her dog tags and contacts all over the world, we get that she’s been in the business for a while. You get a feel of the world and that it’s bigger than what we cover in Wet.”

Then there’s the matter of vexing the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the draconian, shadowy organization that slaps age limit ratings on games with seemingly arbitrary guidelines. There’s a scene in the game where a nurse, in the subtlest of manners, gives oral sex to a male character. So subtle, in fact, that when I tested the demo at the A2M offices last month, I witnessed this panty-twisting scene without even realizing it. The suggestive sound effects were dulled in order to avoid a row with the ESRB, who already gave Wet a Mature 17+ rating (or with parental consent). No game in recent memory has received the one notch higher Adults Only tag, since most retailers refuse to carry games with that rating.

Hopefully for A2M, Wet isn’t a one-off excursion into mature game-making but rather proof that the veteran studio can learn some new tricks. “With the history of being in between publishers, for a while a lot of people were scared about what was going to happen to the game,” says Fortier, “but I think we definitely have those on the Wet team who have developed an appetite for more mature titles. Wet was meant to open a new door.”