In recent years, right, wrong or just annoying, the expression “game changer” has been hung on everything from Washington, D.C., political maneuvers to James Cameron’s “Avatar” to whatever new toy Steve Jobs is putting out. Bounding into the lexicon, the expression went from sports jargon to adventurous adjective to cliché faster than Olympian Bode Miller blisters down a mountain.
Funny thing about clichés is that they are often true -- and in the case of the videogame "Heavy Rain," that’s a truism game-changing downpour.
Released Tuesday by PlayStation, the dark interactive noir game, produced by Quantic Dream, is already the No. 1-selling videogame on Amazon. In fact, it's Amazon's No. 2 overall videogame product, behind the Wii console. “Heavy Rain” also is moving quickly at retailers like GameSpot.
Now, will it sell more than 11.86 million copies worldwide -- including 4.7 million sold in the first 24 hours after its debut on November 10, 2009 -- as “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” did? Probably not, but what "Heavy Rain” has done already is change the narrative and nature of videogames.
And in the fast-growing sector of the entertainment industry, that’s a leap that could rival bringing sound, color and, as “Avatar” so successfully has done, 3D to the movies.
It starts, as these things often do, in the most mundane of ways: A man goes to the mall with his son. Then things fall off into the abyss when he loses the child. That's what happened to “Heavy Rain” creator David Cage, who experienced the beginning of every parent's worst nightmare a couple of years ago when his son disappeared for a few minutes.
In Cage’s game, the primary character, Ethan Mars (left), loses his son in a mall to the Origami Killer, a stalking serial murderer. Mars loses another son to a car accident and, in the resulting familial fallout, his wife to divorce. The frenzied search for the abducted child and a return to lost normalcy is, with three other playable characters and everyday tasks like rocking an infant to sleep, seamlessly woven in and out of the compelling journey of “Heavy Rain.”
The game is fraught with challenges and choices that have far less to do with the action of a “Call of Duty” or even the open sandbox of a “Grand Theft Auto” and more with unraveling the secrets within the shadows. The Mature-rated game is about making the right decision at the right time and potentially suffering the consequences.
That, in all its terrifying emotional complexity, is the gist of “Heavy Rain.” And, like the best of Francis Ford Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher, this interactive drama cuts deep.
“We wanted to push the envelope in terms of gaming conventions,” Scott Steinberg, PlayStation’s VP of product marketing, told me.
“We feel the unique emotional elements of ‘Heavy Rain’ will take players on a journey they have not experienced before,” he continued, “and we hope this helps foster new approaches to storytelling and unique gameplay styles."
