Interviews// Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice - Lead Designer, Chris Whiteside

SPOnG recently caught up with Chris Whiteside from bigBIG Studios, Lead Designer at on the forthcoming Pursuit Force:Extreme Justice, the follow up to one of the PSP’s most original and hugely successful launch game, Pursuit Force.

Pursuit Force Extreme Justice is an almost perfect high-concept handheld action adventure game for PSP. It wears its action-movie inspirations proudly on its sleeve and Chris is more than happy to boast that it is totally inspired by the over-the-top Hollywood action mayhem in Michael Bay and Simpson-Bruckheimer movies. He is also obviously very pleased with his game, as he just cannot stop picking up the PSP throughout the interview to keep showing off all the cool bits in the game. And there are a lot of very cool bits in this game which is going to have PSP owners grinning as widely as Chris was throughout the interview when the game finally launches this coming September.


SPOnG: Hi Chris, what’s the relationship between bigBIG Studios and Sony?

Chris Whiteside: Well, we’re exclusive to Sony, so we can only produce games for Sony, and we have a great relationship with all the guys over there. We’ve all got the same goal, which is making the best new Pursuit Force game that we can.


SPOnG: The first Pursuit Force was a pretty big launch game when PSP was originally released and it was a new intellectual property (I.P.) at the time. Now it’s fairly well established.

Chris Whiteside: Yeah, we’ve sold close to 800,000 copies of Pursuit Force to date.


SPOnG: You explained to us earlier that one of the major new aspects of Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice is the storyline. The way you explain how you've based a lot of it on your favourite action scenes from movies actually reminded me very much of how George Lucas constructed the first Star Wars movie.

Chris Whiteside: Exactly the same. The way in which he got lots of World War II movie footage and chose his favourite set-pieces – from Dambusters and the like – it’s exactly the same mechanic pretty much, yep.


SPOnG: So what were the movies that inspired the story this time?

Chris Whiteside: We’ve always been inspired by action movies. In Pursuit Force 1 the whole goal behind that product was to make an action adventure, but as we’ve discussed, we didn’t include so much of a blockbuster storyline.

So the goal behind this one – or the kind of way we work towards it – is that when we sat down with the scriptwriters from Hollywood and we were fleshing out ideas for the script, they would say to us “this is the story arc and this is what we want to happen”, and they would send us a first draft. At which point we would look at it and go “we can do that, we can’t do that, this is or this isn’t right for the Pursuit Force universe”…

And iteration after iteration it would get closer and closer until eventually, when we were all agreed on the script, is was almost like a walk-through of a game as opposed to being a narrative. We’d managed to separate the story into individual missions, each of which had ‘acts’ or main events in them. So once we knew exactly what we wanted, we then went and looked at specific movie scenes which we would deconstruct and then reconstruct into the game.