John Woo's Stranglehold

Stranglehold

NOUN

1. A grip around the neck of another person that can kill by asphyxiation if held for a long time.

2. Complete or overwhelming control.

There was a time back in the late nineties when video games sought the talents of Hollywood movie stars to breathe some of that Tinseltown spark into their projects.

Bruce Willis tried it with Apocalypse (a project he swiftly lost interest in and reduced his involvement in). Jet Li followed suit with Rise to Honor on the PlayStation 2, and many more have followed suit.

However, it was filmmaker John Woo's Stranglehold that changed the game by being an actual sequel to one of the director's previous works.

Hard Boiled was John Woo's last Hong Kong film before setting his sights on Hollywood, and he couldn't have picked a finer swansong. With its ridiculous body count (307) and over 100,000 rounds of ammunition fired, Hard Boiled received critical acclaim when it was released in 1991, introducing the world to the toothpick-chewing Inspector Tequila, played by Chow-yun Fat.

Tequila was a hard-drinking, skilled marksman working for the Hong Kong Police Force, with a dead wife, and his only comfort playing the clarinet in a jazz bar, Tequila was John Woo's answer to Dirty Harry. As is typical in any cop film of the era, Tequila has trouble with authority, and even when he's dropped from a case and told to leave it, Tequila can't help but pursue the Triads that took the life of his partner.

The idea of using a different media format to produce a continuation of a storyline is not a new one. For decades, comic books have carried the flag of many franchises that could not continue their story that started on the screen. Cult TV shows such as Quantum Leap and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all saw their stories continue in the comic book world. Stranglehold, however, was a sequel no one expected, and certainly not transitioning from the movie world to the video game world.

The company brave enough to attempt to translate John Woo’s shootout ballet signature to the video game world was Midway Games. Midway was a successful video games company, whose origins dated back to the late fifties. Their first real success of note was distributing Space Invaders to American arcades. Becoming something of an arcade powerhouse, in 1996, Midway moved into the home console market. With arcade games such as Mortal Kombat on their books, they had plenty of material to adapt into the home genre.

It was the release of Max Payne in 2001 that may have sparked the inspiration for Stranglehold. Max Payne was a noir thriller telling the story of the game namesake and his quest for vengeance over his lost love. Pulling inspiration from John Woo films and his use of highly choreographed gunfight cinematics, Max Payne went on to receive critical acclaim.

The idea was floated to take it one step further and seek the man who inspired Max Payne and who was so often imitated but never succeeded in the cinematic world.

Midway approached John Woo with the idea of bringing his cinematic vision to the video games world, with the approach to produce such a faithful take of a John Woo property, that it would feel like the player was actually playing a John Woo movie.

Cinematic Icon John Woo

Woo was more than receptive to the idea. And whilst many creators would be happy with just allowing use of their characters and concepts, John Woo went one step further and insisted on having direct input into the game. Using the same staff Woo used for the story-boarding of his movies, Midway Games set out to work on a script and overall direction of the game with the John Woo flavour.

John Woo had final approval on all aspects of the script, and whilst it was very important to have John Woo overseeing a product that would bear his name, there was one missing key component. Inspector Tequila himself — Chow-yun Fat.

Chow-yun Fat is one of Hong Kong’s greatest exports. With his solid back catalogue of action films, he is one of the most recognisable film stars in the world today, straddling the cinematic industries of both the East and the West. He is also a firm favourite of director Woo, who would put Fat through so many high-risk stunts whilst filming Hard Boiled, that he once set off explosives so close to the actor, he singed the hair on the back of his head. The story goes that after Fat was finished berating Woo for risking his life, he asked him ‘Was the shot okay?’

Chow-yun Fat

John Woo is a director who is notorious for working outside of the boundaries of what is expected of mainstream Hollywood. Stories of Woo shooting entire films without storyboards or even a script suggest a level of extreme confidence of his vision... or a certain creative madness that so few are able to channel. Even fewer are able to bring that vision to life without strict planning and coordination, especially when it comes to dealing with actors, cinematographers, sound technicians and entire film crews looking to you to lead them. How do you get a band to play a tune when you‘re not even sure what the tune is yourself? For a man like Woo he knows his inner creative rhythm, the beat that drives any artist, that belief in their own skills, their own minds, but when taking the flavour of an individual and trying to distill into a video game, where do you even begin with that? Where do you point your crew when it comes to direction?

For Stranglehold, Midway Games relied on the involvement of John Woo, who was willing to offer guidance and input on the script and storyboards for the game’s action sequences, with everything requiring final approval from Woo for the story and script of the game.

A John Woo film will have three tenets: Gun ballet, explosions, and violence. He does not write about love. He does not write about home comforts. John Woo gives us broken people with broken lives and little left to believe in. How would a games developer capture the chaos of John Woo’s imagination? By inventing new and experimental techniques to bring Woo to interactive life.

Massive D is a new technology developed specifically for Stranglehold allowing the complete destruction of environments and settings. Debris is scattered by the hundredfold as Tequila will perform stunt-after-stunt, all with the frenetic energy of Woo flowing through each scene as he jumps, wall-runs, dives, and ducks as he tears through the Triads and Russian gangs that oppose him. Each time the game reminding the player the collateral damage of the chaos the player inflicts. The game’s one main purpose is to bring the gamer into the land of Woo and let them walk in the chaos orchestrated by this Hong Kong film legend.

Chow-yun Fat, the avatar of many John Woo films, was instrumental in lending his voice and likeness to the project. Allowing the team from Midway to fly to his home in Hong Kong and provide full-body scans and high resolution photos of the actor for use in bringing his digital double to life. Through a combination of motion-capture and highly detailed textures, Chow-yun Fat‘s Inspector Tequila is the closest anyone will ever get to walking in a film character’s shoes.

Games are notorious for sprite repetition. Often the same stock character will be seen over and over in a game’s stock campaign. The idea is that a human cannot be generated by a computer. Each element needs to be crafted by an artist. A creator giving his subject life. The team at Midway overcame this problem by using detachable assets, arms, legs, torsos, heads, and coding the game to create new enemies from this selection. The stunt NPCs would avoid the sin of breaking the illusion by seeing behind the magician’s curtain, instead, it would be rare to see the same Tequila victim twice.

'Tequila Time' allowed the gamer to slow down the action bringing a second, or a moment to a complete standstill as shots could be chosen and then chaos unleashed. The technique‘s been used before, but Midway applied the same level of love John Woo applied to his films to bring their violent delights to life. The game does carry the same level of intensity Woo packs into his films. Bullet wounds, blood loss, gunfight where the size of the clip doesn't matter. Midway recreated it all, working in a reactive soundtrack that set the tone of the chaotic scenes into overdrive.

Whether Midway achieved what they set out to do with Stranglehold is up for debate. Like a novel translated to film, the crossover in mediums needs to be considered. John Woo is a cinematic auteur, to achieve a John Woo game would require distilling the man down to his DNA to put that into the game.

Stranglehold is a standalone that has likely been forgotten by some, but not all. At it's heart it makes no excuses for being a short campaign that lets the player interact with Woo's world in a way very few other games have achieved. With Midway Games' collapse it is unlikely we will ever see another entry in the world of John Woo's cinematic world crossing over to the gaming world, but the legacy of Stranglehold and everything they set out to achieve lives on.