Deadly Premonition director originally considered a female main character, less gunplay
Benjamin Ebell January 17, 2013 - 5:34 pmIn an interview with Toybox, Deadly Premonition director Swery revealed some interesting tidbits about early concepts for the game.
A recent interview held by Toybox with Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro revealed some early ideas that the director had for Deadly Premonition, a game which relied heavily on the bizarre charm of it’s story and characters to make up for it’s relatively small budget and garnered a huge cult following as a result. Set in a small town full of occult secrets and odd characters, Deadly Premonition was originally envisioned with a female player character rather than the now familiar FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan. “At first we were considering a female FBI agent as the main role, but after receiving some input from overseas we changed it to the male character that’s in the game now,” said Swery. “We listened to a lot of advice from overseas and since I play a lot of non-Japanese games I wasn’t so opposed to much of the comments.”
The main character wasn’t the only change Swery made based on input from others. “What I am picky about is the story and the gameplay so when we heard that we should add some gun shooting aspects to the game (probably marketing advice), I wasn’t so sure,” said Swery. “With hindsight, I guess the game was seen as a kind of twist on the survival horror theme so perhaps they weren’t completely wrong to suggest it.”
Perhaps one of the more unique aspects of the game was the character of Zach, whom York spent most of the game addressing when talking to himself. It was a narrative device that made the player feel as if they were Zach. “The idea of Zach came about late one evening, drinking coffee at a family restaurant with the co-scenario writer Goda-san. Unlike movie scripts in games you need a hint feature to drive the player, so we discussed how to best achieve this and it ended up taking a lot of time,” said Swery. “I scribbled down various things down on the back of the menu such as Talk to me, Talk to Characters etc, and then it occurred to me that this might be the solution. Everything grew from there and the idea of Zach was born, thanks to the power of the night!”
BeefJack will be at a Q&A for the Deadly Premonition Director’s Cut next week, so stay tuned for coverage on what we can expect from the upcoming PS3 release of the game.
You can do that, right Zach?
