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"There were other things that we would watch once or so, but we kept sort of going back to 'The Warriors' and watching it sort of obsessively," Mr. Houser recalled. It turns out that the episodic pacing and cartoony visual style of "The Warriors" were just about perfect for adapting the film into a video game.

"When you watch it as a 7-year-old kid, it seems super-weird and terrifying," Mr. Houser said. "When you watch today, it's over the top. It's sort of surreal in most of the points. But the structure and the style translate perfectly into a video game world. The structure of the journey - encountering people and defeating them on the route - was a fighting game in a movie format before it was ever a video game.

"In a lot of films you look at the way the narrative is designed, and the way the focus is so heavily on characters or the period means they wouldn't translate into good video games," Mr. Houser said. "Maybe in 20 years time you can make a game that's more sophisticated at a character level, but we're still at a point in the evolution of games that physical actions are more effective to convey than emotions or conversations."

Smart soldiers decided to flee the Rings battle
Digital warriors thought for themselves - and their first thought was to run away

JAMIE PORTMAN
CanWest News Service

Monday, December 15, 2003

It's the greatest and most spectacular battle in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But filmmakers faced one surprising challenge - how to keep the computer-generated soldiers from fleeing the battlefield.

Director Peter Jackson had laid down his requirements for the Battle of Pelennor Fields - the climactic engagement in The Return of the King in which the heroic defenders of Middle-Earth face the overwhelming might of Sauron and his armies of Darkness. Jackson wanted the computer-generated antagonists to have absolute authenticity on the big screen and to be indistinguishable from the real actors.

Computer wizards responded brilliantly, not only with Sauron's swarming armies but with such additional lethal adversaries as the massive winged Fell Beasts and the giant elephant-like Mumakil. The next step was to ensure that the confrontation itself have detail and authenticity.

"I want battles like nothing anyone has ever seen on screen," Jackson said. I want every soldier fighting for himself - you have to come up with something."

Special effects designer Richard Taylor says this led to the writing of a "massive" principal code for the battle to give more than 200,000 digitized soldiers and some 6,000 horses distinctiveness and individuality.

"So to create these individual agents, there was a code that was especially written and developed," Taylor says, adding that it was like being involved in a living work of science fiction.

"It was the fact that you could get a computer to think for itself, that you could get 200,000 agents within the computer to think for themselves.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that."

Basically, all the necessary information for decision-making was fed into this network of computers without determining for them whether they would win or lose.

But this attempt to ensure that they acted spontaneously almost sabotaged the the battleground sequences.

"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.

"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."

So some extra computer tinkering was required to ensure that the trilogy's climactic battle worked the way Jackson wanted.