For this blog post we have a few words from our talented writer, Stark Holborn, in which they explore the process behind one of the more unique parts of the project: The fan-favourite in-game tv crime noir show! Without further ado, I'll hand you right over...
Whenever anyone asks me what my favourite part of working on Shadows has been, my answer is always: all of the things we didn’t have to do, but did. To be clear, I mean that in the loosest sense: things that wouldn’t make the game fall over if we took them away, but which – I believe – have a huge impact on the game’s atmosphere as a whole.
One of these is the screenplay for Claw of the Fathoms, the noir film that can be heard playing on TVs throughout the world. A bit of background: from an early stage, Cole wanted the televisions in the world to be interactable: there’s something so atmospheric about hearing the sound of someone’s TV through the wall, or the switching on a black and white set in a dark room in the middle of the night. In early internal builds, we used audio from a Public Domain movie called The Big Combo. That had the right tone, but didn’t necessarily fit the alt-history 1970s dystopian world we were developing for Shadows.
The solution? A totally ridiculous one in some ways. We’d write our own.
It’s something some developers or publishers might have dismissed as too extra; too much work for something that has no direct impact on gameplay. But not Cole or the Shadows team. Which is good because the script for Claw of the Fathoms remains one of my favourite examples of worldbuilding in the game, and is one of the best writing jobs I’ve ever had.
When it came to a starting point, I’d already developed a range of crime noir novels (with synopses) that can be found on bookshelves throughout the game: the Decka Gill mysteries by Madagan Fitch. So I took the basic building blocks of noir tropes – a jaded, world-weary PI, a gruff cop, a psychopathic gangster, some stolen art, a snitch – and Shadows-ified them. In-keeping with the diversity of the world, I gender-flipped the traditional private eye role, and made the central conflict one that revolved around the Fathoms/Echelons social division within the city.
For all those interested, here’s the cast list I ended up with:
- Decka Gill: Private Eye
- Leonid “Lennie” Blaise: Police Detective
- Angel Harris: Crime Boss
- Samuel Delaney: Crooked Art Dealer
- Gruff Man: Mysterious Informant
- Trent Franklin: Low-life Hood and Snitch
Then it came to writing the script. Obviously, I would have loved to write the entire screenplay for Claw but that was a bit much, even for us. We decided we needed around fifteen minutes of run-time.
I wanted the scenes to have that organic, just-switched-on-in-the-middle-of-a-movie feel to them. Which meant that each scene had to be a discrete chunk that would make sense in almost any order, while simultaneously establishing the tone and characters. I ended up with seven scenes, ranging from the interior of a police station to a bar, an antique shop, an interview room and a docks warehouse.
I’m a fan of film noir in any case (some of my favourites being Night and the City by Jules Dassin, High and Low by Kurosawa and The Hitchhiker by Ida Lupino), but to get the right vibe I watched a whole load of examples, aiming for a classic back-and-forth patter typical to 1940s/1950s crime noir films. Then I threw a noir slang glossary at the writing. Case in point:
DECKA GILL: Lieutenant.
LIEUTENANT BLAISE: What you doing here, Gill?
GILL: Same thing as you.
LIEUTENANT BLAISE: Now look here–
GILL: Look where? Down at that Alderman you're carrying these days?
LIEUTENANT BLAISE: I should send you to booking.
GILL: Oh, on what charge?
LIEUTENANT BLAISE: On whatever the hell charge I please.
Part of the joy of this whole task was the license to go hog-wild and be as noir-ish as I wanted. There’s a commissioner, bullets, rye and bodies piling up. But at the same time, this couldn’t be a noir written in our world, it had to be one written in the Shadows world. And that meant weaving as much lore into the script as possible.
In Decka Gill’s city, people light up Holy Smokes and are paid in Crows and suffer from Mustard Sickness. John Does are Jacques Does – thanks to the enduring influence of the Bourbon Empire. The scene with the most Shadows detail is probably the interrogation between Gill and Franklin, where she reels off all the things he stands to lose if he doesn’t talk:
GILL: Oh, I know all about you, Mr Franklin. I know you've made a deposit on a plot out in The Fields; just two payments left and it's yours. Far away from here, a patch of grass, four wall to call your own...
FRANKLIN: I said shut up!
GILL I'm afraid you have to kiss it goodbye, Mr Franklin. 'Cos you know what happens to that nice family of yours if you go down? They starve. They wind up in the Fathoms, living on trash and bleeding-heart funds, and all because you wanted to protect a rat like Angel Harris...
The character of Angel Harris – incidentally – is based on some of Richard Widmark’s classic villains. His monologue to Gill about Rossini is one of my favourite bits of the whole script. (Second only to the immortal: BON VOYAGEEEEEEE HOOOHOOO HAA HA HA HA, which Allen Enlow, the actor who plays Angel, ad-libbed on the day, so I can take no credit for).
Which brings us to voice casting. This all happened during one of the Covid-19 lockdowns, so there was no way we could record in-person. Luckily, there are many, many talented voice artists with home studios out there. We put out a call for the roles and found our dream cast: Sheree Wichard as Decka Gill, Allen Enlow as Angel Harris, Amir Yussof as Gruff Man/Franklin and Ben Britton as Lennie.
We were almost there. We had our script, our voice-acted scenes, but we still had to make them sound like a noir film. Step in Nick Dymond (aka monomoon), Shadows’ resident composer, sound and game designer and audio wizard. Using an extensive sound library, home-recorded foley, processing and mixing, he transformed the raw VO files into something that not only sounded, but felt like a movie.
I still get a kick out of hearing the scenes from Claw of the Fathoms in the game. The city’s citizens never seem to get tired of it, either, which is good as it’s the only film available for them to watch. (They do have sports games to break things up now too – but that’s a subject for another post…).
Even after hearing it hundreds of times, I’ll still pause to listen to Angel Harris’s insane cackle before the screen fades to static. Hopefully it’s a sign that – by going the extra mile – we created something truly unique and worthwhile.