GamerNode: Columns - Bringing it Home, Part One

Bringing it Home, Part One

For me, the opening thirty seconds of a video game, film, book or any other form of art is what makes or breaks the experience. Bear in mind I am in no way referring to media that, in itself, requires no narrative, such as Counter Strike, or physics textbooks. Story-driven experiences need to have that hook, that certain "je ne sais quoi" that draws you into the world of its creator's own imagination for long enough that you're not sure whether you ever want to leave again.

With video games, the task of coming up with a stimulating opening sequence is fickle from the beginning. Do we create a short film, or make it interactive and player-driven? Will it have an orchestral, grand soundtrack, or the wonderfully honest musings of DMX? The questions are endless, but the one question they'll always have to answer is the one question journalists fail to overcome themselves fairly often, myself included: what, where, when, how and why.

Those five irritants are the bane of an opening paragraph, and sometimes, you feel like you're it checking off items on a shopping list, as opposed to bearing your literary soul to the world (or, in most cases, the rather more narrow-minded, homophobic and angry world of the internet). However, you'll sometimes find yourself in a situation where, just by the simple act of leaving just one of those five out, the writers will have you hooked instantly.

I could harp on and on about Final Fantasy VII, but I've flogged that horse in this column so many times that it's practically got its own WordPress account. Instead, I'm going to go with an old favourite of mine: not, perhaps, a favourite you'd necessarily consider "old" in the grand timeline of video games, but definitely old enough to think back to with a sense of archaic wonder: Halo: Combat Evolved. If you've not read the novelisation of the first in the Halo trilogy, go out and grab it, or even find an extract on the web, as it expands on the things you'll never see in the game.

However, in-game, the cutscene is a thing of brilliance, due to four words "unseal the hushed casket". Those four words became so synonymous with Bungie's legendary amounts of secrecy on their projects that the second you saw them uttered prior to Halo 3's first trailer, the internet went crazy for months on end. Those four words were the password needed to unseal the cryogenic storage chamber containing John-117, the first ever human embodiment of Kermit the Frog's well-worn phrase "it's not easy, being green."

To emerge blinking into the world of a UNSC cryogenics bay on board the Pillar of Autumn was very much akin to the sensation a lot of us feel when delving into a new universe of contemporary interactive origin for the first time. Not quite sure of ourselves, we look around, shake ourselves out and begin to explore, before throwing ourselves headlong into the task at hand. Breakout is a classic, but let's be honest, once you could work the paddle, it was only a few minutes before you were seeing how fast you could sling the ball around the screen.

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