I was playing Midtown Madness last night (the first incarnation of the game), which is a driving game set in Chicago and I got to wondering how faithfully games like this represent the real world - do they really have all those lifting bridges in Chicago? All those parking meters (which nobody uses in the game - there is not a single parked car)? Are there any recognisable businesses in the game (such as the shops with glass windows you can break through)?
Discussion about other games depicting real-life locations is also welcomed.
I can’t comment on Midtown Madness or Chicago, but the makers of The Getaway spent a couple of years of production converting some 40 square kilometres of London into the game’s graphics to get the game as close as possible to real life London (except that the traffic is nowhere near as bad ). There’s a gallery somewhere on the web that compares photos of streets and shop fronts to their game counterparts and it really is incredible the level of detail that the makers went into, right down to the scaffolding around some of the buildings.
About the Getaway game, I have lived in London, and driven through many of the areas included in the Getaway game. The reality of the game is incredable, to the extent that I can use several real life short cuts, and can quickly recognise where I am from such things as the sighting of CentrePoint, the Bridges, and the Parks. They do take some liberties in location, and simplify out many minor roads, but the journey from The Strand to Soho is unnervingly realistic (and It is fun to break the law arround Waterloo bridge to use the Bus Lane to carry on up the Strand for instance.
So allong the Strand you pass the law courts, the little church at aldwitch, King’s College (unfortunately not named but the buildings are accurate), Waterloo Bridge, the national portrait gallery and trafalga square. You could carry on to Picadilly Circus (where not only Eros, but the statue of the horses in te fountain besides lillywhites is well imaged), or turn right up past leicester square and Into China Town and SoHo, all with recognisable shops and restaurants in roughly their correct position.
The producer who sits behind me is working with a team on a game set in the real world that’s got a crazy amount of research going on. They’re still in preproduction and already she’s got about 8 linear feet of 3-ring binders full of reference images, newspaper clippings, maps, etc.
On the other hand, the game I’m working on is set in a fantasy world, so, while I’ve got tons of concept art, none of it is an accurate description of anything in the real world.
When I worked on Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon we were hyper-realistic about some things, and didn’t try too hard on others. For example, all the weapons and uniforms were as accurate as we could make them because that’s the sort of thing Clancy fans expect.
With settings we were a little looser. For example, the layout of the Vilnius level in Ghost Recon is based loosely on the real street layout of Vilnius, and we tried to duplicate obvious landmarks like the Vilnius cathedral. But we didn’t so far as to go to Vilnius and take photographs. It just didn’t seem like most of our audience would care about details like that.
I haven’t played Midtown Madness, but Project Gotham 2 is incredible in its attention to detail. They have several Chicago levels as well, and there’s nothing missed in the graphic representation. Real storefronts, real construction sites, parking meters, everything (well, except for pedestrians.) It’s the most realistic rendition of Chicago I’ve seen in any game.
IIRC, San Francisco Rush (the arcade racer) was fairly authentic in depicting San Franciso, though a lot of the smaller side streets were streamlined or eliminated.
Vette!, the old game from Spectrum Holobyte, was supposedly an accurate depiction of San Francisco. That is, as accurate as technologically possible in '89.
All of the *Gaberial Knight * games depicted real locations(Namely New Orleans, Munich and the environs, and Ren Les Chateau and the surrounding area). However, having never visited any of those areas, I can’t say how realistic they are. I’ve heard that the parts showing Neuswanstein in GK2 are very realistic(except for the singer’s hall).
Red Alert 2(and Yuri’s Revenge) was unique in that you actually got to run around real cities(Washington DC, Paris, Austin, San Fransisco, Seattle, Los Angelos, Sydney, London, New York City, St. Louis, Chicago) in several missions, though I don’t know how well the game maps and actually cities match up. Some liberty was taken with scale and other details, for the sake of gameplay.
Having visited Washington DC, I can attest that the DC missions in the game were a fairly good approxmation of the real city, getting the locations of the mouments and museums pretty close to where they actually are. Close enough for a black comedy RTS, anyway. Washington is really the only city that one can really tell by the sheer number of landmarks.
). There’s a gallery somewhere on the web that compares photos of streets and shop fronts to their game counterparts and it really is incredible the level of detail that the makers went into, right down to the scaffolding around some of the buildings.