Exclusive: Judge Dredd Vs Judge Death Interview Feature

This week sees the release of the eagerly awaited first person shooter,

Rebellion is one of the few UK developers which has that true entrepreneurial spirit and always try to explore new avenues in their endeavour to create the ultimate gaming experience.

To coincide with the game, 2000 AD will be publishing a terrifying 112-page Dredd Vs. Death special. This special will be the first of 2000 AD's Extreme Editions, an ongoing quarterly series of newsstand specials, each issue of which will be dedicated to a particular theme or 2000 AD character, and will feature a host of never reprinted and hard-to-find classics from 2000 AD's history, plus editorial features, character histories and tons of other material.

Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs. Death will offer a feast of action together with a strong storyline, along with surprises and a number of innovations that will please even the most discerning of gamers. TVG spoke with Jason Kingsley, CEO and Creative Director at Rebellion, about some of the background and hard work that has gone into the making of the game moments before its release.

A chat with Jason...

TVG: Many will have heard of the comic strip Judge Dredd, especially older people, conversely, many will know only the name and not the ethos or spirit of the Judge Dredd World. Can you explain who Judge Dredd is and do you have interaction with the comic strip illustrator/creator?

Mega-City One is a sprawling future megalopolis that covers the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States, hemmed in on one side by the poisonous Black Atlantic and on the other by the irradiated wasteland of the Cursed Earth. The city contains 400 million residents crammed into massive citi-blocks, and with an unemployment rate running at 95%, they are bored and prone to fads, criminal activity and violence, including truly terrifying block wars. The only people standing between Mega-City One and total anarchy are the Judges, officers licensed to be 'judge, jury and executioner', who govern the city and hand out harsh punishments to transgressors. Judge Dredd is the most feared and respected of the Judges, a hard-bitten veteran who has saved the city from destruction a number of times against enemies such as Judge Death, the megalomaniacal Sov War Marshal Kazan, and the totally insane Judge Cal, usually with painful consequences to himself.

We have a great deal of interaction with the Judge Dredd writers and artists, as we also publish 2000 AD magazine, which has featured Judge Dredd stories for the last 26 years! The creators of Judge Dredd, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, still work for 2000 AD, so we are in almost daily communication with them and a huge number of other writers and artists. As far as the game is concerned, the development team had access to 2000 AD's huge archive of Dredd material, including every episode ever published, and we have also been working with Dredd artists, such as Greg Staples, to get the look of the character exactly right.

TVG: Having bought the rights to Judge Dredd, is the comic strip still around and what kind of background information were you privy to (that the public wasn't) about this character and other aspects of the strip?  More important will the team have latitude to change things within the Judge Dredd world?

Indeed it has been thriving since we bought it, and we have seen a healthy upturn in sales and profile for the magazine's characters - and the team had access to the entire archive of published Dredd material, and many strips that haven't yet made print. We haven't changed anything major at all about Dredd's world for the game. Dredd fans expect a game set in the exact universe of the comic strip, with the same weapons, the same outfits, and the same rules and regulations, so there's no reason for us to change anything. In fact we've tended to go the other way, so that the game is actually very carefully integrated into Dredd continuity, and the year in which the events in the game happen - 2122 - was specifically chosen to allow us to use all the characters and locations we wanted for the game, without any of them being out of town or otherwise incapacitated in continuity. The Dredd world is so interesting because it is a universe with a huge amount of depth, masses of background material, and a very identifiable style and look, with larger-than-life characters that lend themselves very well to a game adaptation. 

TVG: Whose idea was it for the game and how au fait is the team with the comic strip?

Well, as long-term fans of Dredd, the game was something Chris, my brother, and I were very keen on turning into a reality, and everyone involved with the character and the company was very supportive. It made a lot of sense to develop a Judge Dredd game as our first 2000 AD related title, as he is easily the most well known character in 2000 AD, known worldwide and instantly recognisable. Like most kids who have grown up in the UK in the last quarter century, the team is very familiar with Judge Dredd, and indeed pretty much all of them were long serving fans of the character even before we started work on the game.

TVG: Tell us the basic tasks for the player and the overall objectives for the game? 

As Judge Dredd, the overall objective for the player is to reduce crime in Mega-City One by arresting perps and protecting the innocent, and ultimately to defeat the evil Dark Judges and their hordes of slavering zombies, vampires and cultists. This will involve going through the 12 levels in the game challenging criminals and arresting them or shooting them if they decide not to surrender. You will also need to perform other tasks such as escorting citizens to safety and tracking down kidnapped Judges, plus discovering ways of capturing the four Dark Judges, as they canât actually be killed. 

TVG: Because Judge Dredd has to work within the confines of the law doesn't that mean the action could be slow and ponderous and he will not be an out and out gun-toting protagonist?  

Who told you Dredd will not be gun-toting? Dredd will in fact be very well armed, with his trusty Lawgiver (containing six different ammo types), plus the ability to carry another weapon â“ from an âArbitratorâ shotgun or âLawrodâ rifle to a grenade launcher or las-rifle â“ not to mention Stumm Gas grenades for subduing large numbers of perps, so he will be more than a mach for any number of fast unscrupulous bad guys. 

As to keeping the action fast, we have tried to make the arrest mode as efficient as possible, so that Dredd is not spending all his time cuffing people, which would slow the game down. We have also given the player plenty of leeway in how they deal with perps, so if they want to play an even faster game, they can get away with shooting most villains, although playing that way means they wonât unlock as many bonuses at the end of levels as they would by enforcing the Law as Dredd would.

TVG: Can you tell us a little about some of the baddies in the game - maybe pick one and explain a little about him?

The main baddies in the game are Dreddâs most feared adversaries, the Dark Judges - Fire, Fear and Mortis - led by the evil Judge Death. Twisted parodies of regular Judges, the Dark Judges come for another dimension where they slew the entire population of their home planet, having developed a twisted logic that dictated that as all crime was committed by the living, life itself must be a crime. Though their host bodies can be destroyed, the Dark Judges cannot be killed, taking ethereal form at will, so the only solution Mega-City One has found to their menace is various forms of containment, from which they have a tendency to escape from time to time. 

TVG: What kind of locations will the player traverse through? (Are all the locales teaming with background life and have interesting events going on?) 

There are many very diverse locations in the game, from the grimy, rainswept Docks level to the clinical sterility of the Hospital and the glossy neon MegaMall. Every level looks very distinctive, and even within the levels there is plenty of variety â“ the MegaMall for example combines big open lighted areas with dark, claustrophobic service tunnels, and even a very cool looking nightclub. And yes, there is plenty going on in the levels, from citizens going about their business to flying vehicles and monorails roaring overhead, criminals conducting their own internecine battles and even dancing zombies at one point! 

TVG: How linear is the game and is the player guided through it or is it an open world with differing ways to play?

Well the player has certain objectives to complete in order to finish each level, but we have tried to give the flexibility to complete these objectives in a number of different ways. For example, at one point you have to gain access to the Death Cult HQ. You can go in all guns blazing, which is obviously fun but will bring the entire Death Cult down upon you. Alternatively, you can eliminate the bad guys from a distance using the Lawgiverâs zoom mode before going in, or you can sneak in through the back door and just avoid the cultists. The ability to arrest perps means you also have the choice whether to kill everyone who takes you on or disarm them and arrest them, which can put quite a different complexion on the game. 

TVG: How are dialogue and injury dealt with? 

Dialogue is used fairly heavily during the game, with all NPCs having a large number of phrases they can speak. In game dialogue is also used to pass on new objectives to Judge Dredd, usually by other Judges, rather than breaking up gameplay by going to an objective screen. The other major dialogue innovation is that Dredd has a âchallengeâ ability, which allows him to demand perps surrender at the press of a button, which the lawbreaker will react to either by surrendering or by fighting back, and they have dialogue to cover all these eventualities.

As far as injury goes, Dredd has the standard health gauge, and also has a rechargeable shield, which allows the player to deal with situations more strategically. Dredd can regain health by approaching a Med-Judge, or by picking up health packs - we have tried as much as possible to put these packs in places they could logically be, such as near dead Med-Judges, rather than scatter them around randomly.

TVG: How technology focused is the team especially when it comes to being innovative and with this coming on a number of skews does it not mean a more generic game

The team is very technology focussed. For a start, the game has been developed using our own in-house Asura engine, which allows for all the cutting edge features that gamers expect, such as full ragdoll physics, seamless transition between character animations and the ability to handle a huge number of objects onscreen at any one time. Asura also has a number of unique features, one of which is our own âgraphic novelâ rendering system. This was developed to allow us to portray characters and environments that looked like the ones in the Judge Dredd comic strip, rather than having to go fully realistic or cel-shaded, neither of which really suited our purposes. âGraphic novelâ rendering allows us to use a lot of the techniques comic artists use, such as specular highlights and shadow effects to make Mega-City One look colourful, larger-than-life, yet also gritty and realistic. We have avoided compromising on quality due to the multi-format nature of the game, by making sure every version is optimised to the system it is running on, and squeezing the most out of the hardware.

TVG would like to thank Jason and the team for taking the time out to answer our questions; 'Judge Dredd Vs Judge Death' is out on the PC, Playstation2 and Xbox on October 17th, followed by the GameCube version in November.