WGE MAG: 13
“I would like to write more video games, it’s something I am in to. There isn’t a huge British comic scene at the moment. 2000 AD is still going strong and there is a good indie-underground comic scene but in terms of mainstream publishing there is not a lot going on there, but video games are big over here.”
set-pieces and tried to assemble them into some semblance of a story. It’s kind of the opposite to the way I normally work, but form has to follow function.”
“It was very much a learning experience for me,” Diggle explains. “I was approached by Ben Judd, an American producer based at Capcom in Japan. His brother was a big comics fan and introduced him to my work, and he thought I’d be a good fit for the game. I was told that I was the first non-Japanese writer ever to be brought in by Capcom to develop one of their games. I don’t know if it’s true, but if so it’s very flattering.
“They were working with Grin, the Swedish developer, to put this remake of Bionic Commando out there. Grin had a very specific vision for the game. It’s set in a ruined city where it’s all about height and scale; it’s all about trying to get elevation. If you stay on the ground then you’re going to get shot. The gameplay dynamic is Spider-Man style swinging combined with third-person shooting, which makes it quite tricky to master.
“My job was to try and figure out a reason for all this stuff to be happening; the internal logic. Who is this guy and why is he in this city, why is it ruined? So I took Grin’s ideas and
With an American producer, a Japanese publisher, a Swedish development team, an American management team doing oversight and Diggle the British writer, things were always going to be difficult from a logistical point of view. It was a set-up which Diggle found a little bit frustrating.
“Finding time when we were all actually awake at the same time was very tricky,” Diggle says of the multi-national production.
“I thought they needed a writer who was actually in-house at Grin, someone who could work alongside the development team, look over their shoulder and see how the game was evolving on a day-to-day basis. But I couldn’t do that effectively from another country; it felt like the goalposts kept moving. So after writing the proof-of-concept demo that got the game greenlit, I stepped away and declined to write the full game. Looking back on some of the story choices that were subsequently made, I think I did the right thing. Capcom still asked me back to write a promotional comic, though, which was a lot of fun. I got to work with one of my childhood heroes, Colin Wilson, who drew Rogue Trooper back in the day.”
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