Getting WET

by Pierre Boudreau

For the last official meeting of 2009, the Montreal Chapter was treated to a presentation by Stéphane Roy, who was senior producer on A2M’s stylish third-person shooter, WET.  Stéphane compared WET’s long and challenging journey from studio to shelf with the twists and turns of an absurd and somewhat incestuous soap opera. While I grant that the game’s development was not without some major drama, what came across to me was more of a cautionary tale with a twist ending...but I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s begin at the beginning:

Stephane Roy discusses the typical soap operate structure. Messy.

Following the release of the PS2, publishers felt they could increase their profits by focusing their energy, and their capital, into the hardcore gamer demographic. The remaining companies, like A2M, were perceived as more family-oriented studios and denied a piece of the publishing pie. But A2M was hungry, and so, a project was conceived.

In 2004, A2M brought in director, Chuck Russell (The Scorpion King, Eraser, The Mask), with the idea of developing a game and movie simultaneously. The result, I.C.E.137, was a slick, but grim vision of the future with an amnesiac female protagonist and a lot of genetically enhanced butt-kicking. However, before you could say not-too-distant-future, Russell left the project, taking a good chunk of the IP with him.

Initial concept: ICE 237

The ice theme stuck and Deep Freeze followed. Our heroine was recast as a mountain-rescue expert, scaling ice-covered skyscrapers in a frozen metropolis. It was enough to get the attention of Vivendi who like the general concept, but wanted more kick than climb. And that’s when “Rubi” got her name and a small, portable arsenal. A2M was up to the challenge, but the order was a tall one: a new engine for the emerging platforms (360, PS3) in an unknown genre with a new style for a new team. The heat was on, the ice was gone and WET began to emerge.

Originally set in Hong Kong, the design team on WET were forced to adopt a more global view upon the release of Stranglehold, the video game sequel to John Woo’s classic HK film, Hard Boiled. But that little setback would pale in comparison with events coming to a head in late 2007: the merger of Vivendi and Activision. In the dead of winter, the deal was killed.

Second iteration: Deep Freeze

All rights to WET were now the sole property of A2M, but it was cold comfort. Morale was low. Nevertheless, the dream remained alive and the game hit the road. The state of the gameplay was “abysmal”, but a definite style was starting to show through enough to impress Bethesda who came on board with their own timetable.    

At some point in Stéphane’s presentation, I felt the soap opera comparison no longer applied; we had moved well beyond the melodramatic to the truly proverbial. But, was it a case of “too many cooks” with at least five producers and four separate creative directors? Or of “putting the cart before the horse”, or rather, putting the cutscenes before the engine? In the end I realized the most apt expression was: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

The overall roadhouse style, complete with intermission reels, plus Rubi’s ‘rage mode’ were largely born out of the need to minimize man-hours spent on less significant transitions scenes such as corridors and the like. Yet these ‘Band-Aid’ solutions were some of the elements that impressed critics and gamers alike. Rubi’s katana was a design afterthought that nonetheless aroused enough interest at Vivendi (when they still held an interest) to become an integral part of the character. Even Bethesda’s 11th hour involvement turned out to be the final push needed to get WET to the shelf.

So, one could say that although the game may have fallen short of the original expectations, it appears to have succeeded in some unexpected ways. But Roy was coy on the subject of a sequel and it’s anybody’s guess if we’re going to get any WETTER.