With Heavy Rain, David Cage created an interactive thriller that possibly has one of the biggest impacts on the game industry since many years. In an in-depth interview with Beauty of Games, the the CEO and Lead Game Designer of Quantic Dream talks about making the game. He also shares his thoughts on how and why you should tell stories for grown-ups. If you want to know more about Cage's next project and his personal dream team of developers, you should not miss this interview.

Beauty of Games: Do you actually remember the moment, when the core ideas of Heavy Rain had been born?

David Cage: Yeah actually the idea of Heavy Rain came to me in a mall. I was with my wife and my five years old son and we were in a very crowded mall on a Saturday afternoon. And I thought that my wife was with my son and my wife thought my son was with me. And we lost him…we lost him in the crowd.

So for ten minutes we were looking for him and, you know, it was probably the longest ten minutes of my life and all kinds of things go through your mind and you wonder what will happen if you never find him again. You are full of guilt and fear and frustration. There were really horrible feelings for ten minutes and then we found him again, of course. We didn’t lose him, but he was waiting for us at the desk. But I was really stalked by this experience, because it truly made me think about this strange relationship between a father and a son and how much you love your kids.

And I really wanted to tell a story, an interactive story about this relationship and about this strange question: “How far are you prepared to go to safe someone, you love?” So basically my starting point was what would ever happen if I never found my son in the crowd. And that was really the starting point of Heavy Rain.

When and where do you get your best ideas? Together with your developer team, playing with your son or in bed? Grasshopper’s Goichi Suda has his best ideas sitting on a toilet…Is there a special environment that you need?

Actually, no. I have a strange way of thinking, because basically when I start thinking about something, I am very haunted by this idea, by this concept. I think about it pretty much all day, all night…I think about it all the time. And I don’t try to write immediately, I let the idea grow in my mind. I know maybe sometimes it takes a day, sometimes weeks, sometimes months and at some time you feel ready to work and to start to write it. It had grown in your mind, because during this time, without thinking about it, it was present in your mind at some point.

Then you start writing about it and you know that it’s all about hard work and spending time, digging and fighting and struggling, but you know the idea is there.

How did you come up with the idea of multiple protagonists in Heavy Rain?

Well, that is something that has been a part of my work since many years. Actually, when I worked on my first game Nomad Soul, the idea was already that your mind can be transferred into another body, so that you could be someone else. In my previous game Fahrenheit you could control three characters within the story. When I really started working on this in the year 2000, TV series were at a point where they were becoming really popular. TV series like The Sopranos or Lost or Desperate Housewives. All these TV series featured several characters, several points of view and you couldn’t say there is a main character or secondary character, because there were several main characters.

So I thought there was a convergence between my personal work for years and also where TV series were aiming at. I thought that this was definitely something I should continue to explore. This is what I have done with Heavy Rain: I was really excited by this idea of telling four interlaced stories, telling you a bigger story. It has been done before in TV series and movies. There is a great movie called “Crush” that is about ten characters telling the story and you see different pieces of their lives. I am really fascinated with this idea. I think that video games should be about becoming someone else. So if you had this possibility, why telling the story of one character, when you can be four?

Instead of fearing that the player might not develop such a deep emotional relationship to each character if there are several ones, you believe that any kind of player will identify with at least one protagonist?

What I discovered is that a player can identify himself with more than one character. In Heavy Rain, all players have one favorite character, but no one really hated one character at a point that they were not interested at all in the story. But all these characters offer you a different point of view. There is probably one that you feel closer to, but you can feel identification in a way or another to all four of them. Then just offering a different perspective on the story, these different points of view; I think that this plays an important part in the experience, Heavy Rain is.

Since we have multiple protagonists in Heavy Rain, did you ever experiment with a multiplayer mode? Can you think of how to make it work in a game like this?

Not for Heavy Rain to be honest, because this type of experience has never been created for a single player. Creating something about interactive storytelling, an experience that is not based on violence or weapons or cars, but just on decision making and more dilemmas. This is something that has never been created before Heavy Rain, in that form. So this was actually such a huge challenge that adding a multiplayer layer on this was simply impossible.

But now that Heavy is done and we learned so much from it, this is maybe something that we are considering in the future.

So could you think of some kind of versus mode in a thriller game, where one player controls the hero character and the other the villain and both try to find their way? Could this be possible right now or are games like this are far far in the future?

I think that these are very interesting ideas and there are many different ways of interactive storytelling for multiple players, but this is really something challenging. This is something we work on right now, but it’s going to take time until we reach a point when it definitely works. But, yeah, this is definitely the way to go.

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