If you’ve ever watched AMC’s wonderful Breaking Bad, you would possibly bear in mind a scene the place one of many characters performs Rage.
The scene in query is especially memorable as a result of the character, Jesse Pinkman, is taking part in id’s first-person shooter with a lightgun. The precise sport, which launched after it was on the present, was managed with both mouse and keyboard or a controller.
So, how precisely does a cross-promotional partnership with the world’s largest TV sequence and an upcoming FPS come to be?
“There was an advertising opportunity and our marketing folks started talking to their marketing folks and they were like, ‘They’re big fans of id’, and we were like, ‘Well, we’re big fans of them’,” id studio director Tim Willits tells me throughout QuakeCon.
“So we started talking. At first it was sort of game advertisements, and then they said, ‘We’ve got this idea for this vision that Jesse is going to have in this upcoming season and we kind of want to make something. Can you guys help us?’. We were like, ‘Yeah!’.”
The scene seems in Season four of Breaking Bad, as Pinkman is affected by post-traumatic stress within the wake of his homicide of Gale Boetticher. It’s meant to indicate Pinkman trying to flee his demons, however the sport simply retains pulling him again to that second.
At sure factors within the demo, you may see the phrase “Gale” scrawled backwards in graffiti within the degree’s partitions.
“So we took one of our areas, the Well map, and fixed it up for them,” Willits remembers. “We left all that content in the game. We just filmed a bunch of gameplay. They told us what pacing and length they wanted. So we sent them tons of takes, they looked at the takes and they were like, ‘Yeah, that works’.”
The artwork added for the extent utilized in Breaking Bad stayed within the sport, so you may nonetheless see Boetticher’s deal with and title immortalised in graffiti round that particular degree. The developer additionally popped in some extra Breaking Bad easter eggs to verify it wasn’t simply this one-off weirdness within the Well map.
“In the Sheriff’s office in Wellsprings. If you go back you can see Tuco Salamanca’s teeth,” Willits says.
Detective Hank Schrader in Breaking Bad retains Salamanca’s enamel in a perspex dice after his colleagues present it to him following a shootout with the drug seller. If you look carefully, you may as well discover Los Pollos Hermanos – Breaking Bad’s KFC and meth lab entrance – cups scattered across the sport.
“Once we found out those guys were cool, we just started adding stuff,” Willits explains.
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