Video Game to Play in Vintage Gumshoes
By MICHAEL WILSON
LOS ANGELES
A POSTAL clerk heading to work before dawn found a woman’s naked body in a gutter a few blocks from City Hall, a silk stocking tied tight around her neck. The year was 1947, and it had only been a few months since the infamous “Black Dahlia” murder nearby. The city was on edge. Was a serial killer at work?
The victim was Rosenda Mondragon, 20. She and her husband, Antonio, had been estranged for two months, and earlier that morning, at 1 a.m., he had been served with divorce papers. His soon-to-be-ex-wife had been out celebrating at a bar and must have decided to rub it in, showing up at Mr. Mondragon’s home at 2:30 a.m., drunk. They argued. She left. He chased her, trying, he said later, to give her a ride to the boarding house where she was staying. She jumped in a strange car instead.
Later on, she approached an all-night vegetable market at Mission Road, and asked that a clerk call her a cab. Before the cab arrived, a man drove toward her, and they spoke, and she got in his sedan instead. When her body was found, she still wore her wedding ring. Her husband was arrested, but he maintained his innocence and passed a lie-detector test, and the police cut him loose.
The case was never solved. But now, 64 years later, the murder of Ms. Mondragon will be repeated over and over in millions of living rooms and dormitory rooms, and perhaps, with some skill and ingenuity, solved, in a new video game, L.A. Noire.
Not literally of course. The victim has been renamed Antonia Maldanado, “poor Hispanic woman, found dead at City Hall,” a lieutenant explains. And gruesome fictional embellishments abound, like the killer writing, “Kiss the Blood” on her body, in blood. But the case is one of several inspired by real crimes in Los Angeles in 1947 included in the “detective thriller” from Rock Star Games. Is it a shooter game, in which the player sees the world — and attacks — through a main character? Not really, although there is shooting. Is it an open-world game, like the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead Redemption, also by Rock Star? Not really. The invisible hand of the game’s plot keeps you moving forward, not off to the side.
Is it even a game?
“It’s very much like a TV show that you can play,” Brendan McNamara, its developer, said. “We’re hoping to draw people who haven’t played a game before.”
If this is a gamble for Rock Star, and its multimillion-dollar game — the company would not disclose a figure — it is a calculated one. The video game audience, after all, is not getting any younger. “It used to only be kids,” said Dmitri Williams, 39, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “Now the kids are adults themselves. They still like the medium. Now they want content to suit their older tastes.”
The game forgoes typical animation, instead using video of real actors — some 400 of them, mostly relatively unknown but among them notables like John Noble, a star of the television drama “Fringe,” and much of the cast of “Mad Men” — with technology basically invented for the occasion. The actors play cops, bartenders, dancing girls, club bosses, thugs and even that guy at that all-night vegetable stand, in roles much more prominent than traditional voice-overs. They spit out lines familiar to fans of film noir: “Go out there and catch me another sinner,” the Irish lieutenant says. Later a cop tells a suspect: “Save the dramatics for R.K.O., pal. You got bigger problems.” These performances were digitally attached to animated computer-game bodies.
The result is a strikingly more realistic human face than gamers are used to seeing. That is crucial to the story. As Detective Cole Phelps questions witnesses, the player must watch a suspect’s facial expressions and decide if he is being truthful. The player, through Phelps, can accept a character’s story or accuse him of lying.
The game is like an R-rated “Choose Your Own Adventure” story as written by James Ellroy. It is steeped in gorgeous renderings of 1947 Los Angeles, from the exterior of Musso and Frank Grill and Grauman’s Chinese Theater to the “Hollywoodland” sign up in the hills. Characters curse, smoke, drink, fight — the whole noir playbook, over moody jazz, in bright color by day and neon-flecked shadow after dark.
The game play is remarkably slow by today’s standards. If this turns off young gamers, it is expected to appeal to those who were young in the 1980s. “It is unremarkable that there are games targeted at a niche or older audience,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s no different than television or radio.”
Long passages of dialogue roll out without the player touching a button. As Phelps, the player methodically collects clues — a matchbook, a lipstick, half of a torn library card — takes copious notes and questions witnesses until he has enough for an arrest, or fails and lets the bad guy get away.
“Video games are usually like, kill a bunch of people in 20 seconds,” said Mr. McNamara, 49, whose credits include “The Getaway,” a 2003 game with a similar grim and cinematic feel. He attended a game convention recently: “There were 11 shooters. More guns, more blowing up things, more 10-second thrills.”
The game was shown for its largest crowd to date on April 25, inside a Chelsea movie theater, the first video game ever screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. A Rock Star employee played through a murder investigation on the big screen. There was laughter at some of the one-liners, as well as during the unintentionally funny performance of a character who was blatantly lying. But in the end the audience applauded warmly.
The idea for “Noire” came to Mr. McNamara about 10 years ago, in a bookstore, while he was looking at the huge wall of mystery novels. “We don’t do that in video games,” he said. “We just do the little science fiction shelf in the back.”
The game’s technology, called Motion Scan, was created by Mr. McNamara and Oliver Bao, 34. They wanted faces that looked sharper than those rendered with motion-capture technology — the kind that uses little dots all over an actor’s face.
Instead, 32 cameras positioned at eye level, as well as above and below, film the actor’s head as he or she reads the game’s script. The performances were filmed last year in a brightly lighted little room in Culver City, Calif., within walking distance of the storied old studio lots where “The Wizard of Oz” and countless other classic films were created.
The game’s huge cast is sure to be recognizable to television viewers, especially fans of “Mad Men.” (“It’s Peggy’s mom!” “There’s Peggy’s sister!”) Phelps himself is played by Aaron Staton, who plays Ken Cosgrove on television. The cast of the show, set in the early 1960s, was a natural choice for a game set 13 years earlier, Mr. Staton, 30, said.
“What those periods have in common, and is not as much a part of American culture today, is the behavior, manners, a carriage that the men have, and the women,” he said. “I think that’s probably why there’s that frame of reference.”
Actors from shows like “Heroes,” “ER” and any number of “CSI” programs play suspects and witnesses and fellow officers. Each performed his part in the same chair, wearing an orange T-shirt, after a session with makeup and hair artists. The game’s technology, paradoxically, relies on age-old skills with brushes and combs. All the 1940s hairstyles seen on the characters were done in front of a mirror, not digitally. Same with black eyes and bloody wounds.
The performances depend upon sitting stock still. “It’s like acting in a straitjacket,” said Michael McGrady, 50, recently seen in the television police drama “Southland,” playing the tough but philandering Detective Daniel Salinger. In “Noire” he plays Phelps’s partner, Rusty Galloway, a mash-up of all the tough-guy cops in all the dead-end saloons you’ve ever seen — in short, he’s probably too noir actually to be in a film noir nowadays. His character is a growling bag of one-liners that took some 40 hours to deliver, one line at a time, with a straight face. (“If I killed every wife that served me papers,” he says during the Maldanado investigation, “I’d be a mass murderer.” And, while on the clock, working a case in a bar: “Pour me three fingers of rye.”)
“I’ll probably get more recognition from this than ‘Southland’ or any movie,” Mr. McGrady said. “How many people will see this in the next year? A lot of actors are going to want to jump on board for the experience and the exposure.”
A critical element of the plot is the year the game is set, a dark time in the City of Angels, as evident in the last paragraph of the July 9, 1947, Los Angeles Examiner’s article about Ms. Mondragon’s silk-stocking murder: “The new slaying reminded police of the series of unsolved brutal murders early this year, starting with the ‘Black Dahlia’ death of Elizabeth Short on Jan. 15.”
The gruesome crime scene — Ms. Short’s body was cut in half and posed in a vacant lot — set a sort of tone for the city that year, with suggestions of a copycat or a serial killer seemingly following every murdered woman. That list of women was not short: 32 of the 119 people killed in 1947 were women, and several of those cases were not solved. Five of the victims in particular, including Ms. Mondragon, bore signs of violence and mutilation that had the police chasing links to the Dahlia.
Those five cases all show up in “L.A. Noire.” Mr. McNamara consulted a Los Angeles Times editor and unofficial Dahlia historian, Larry Harnisch, and used newspaper accounts from the day for accuracy.
To a point. “We have had to take some license with them,” Mr. McNamara said in an e-mail to Mr. Harnisch. “It’s obviously not a work of scholarship, and I’m hoping it won’t become folklore like so many other spurious things with the Dahlia case.”
There are plenty of spurious things. “All the books are lousy,” said Mr. Harnisch, 59, who called the Dahlia case “a magnet for crackpots,” but who was impressed with the video game creator’s efforts toward realism. “In this time period,” he wrote back, “history trumps fiction every time.”
Some of what they found seemed too strange to be true. “We had a preacher,” Mr. McNamara said, recalling a news article, “walking downtown with a bullwhip, whipping nonbelievers. We’re thinking, ‘Who would believe that?’ ”
The real Ms. Mondragon’s killer, 64 years later, is almost certainly dead, his secret dead with him, but on the screen he is very much alive and doesn’t go down without a fight. In the end it is Detective Phelps who gets the last word.
“You’re a sick man,” he tells his suspect. “You need help.”
