person shooter mechanic. That took a
long, long time for us to figure out and
to get right.”
It was a unique idea, and in order to
get the game made it was imperative
to get his idea across in the right
way. “We took our time,” says Lehto.
“On my own dime, I spent about a
year and a half working with this very
small team to build a prototype that
we believed in. I didn’t want to pitch
the game around with smoke and
mirrors and just say, ‘Hey, I think this
is what we’re going to do.’ We actually
wanted to build it for real and have it
mostly functional in a way that could
clearly illustrate the design intent of
the game.” Lehto then subsequently
signed a deal with publisher Private
Division, after it saw the prototype.
With the early build in hand, a
publisher on board and a growing
development team, Lehto was able to
delve deep into the fiction he started
with to craft an ambitious story.Being human
Set on Earth around 150 years into
the future, humanity is on the brink of
extinction due to overpopulation, food
shortages and disease. “Humanity
is really struggling, and one of the
means of survival is to actually take
the brain out and ‘Integrate’ it into
a robotic armature,” explains Lehto.
“These characters are normal people,contractors straight out of the DigiPen
Institute Of Technology, where he had
spent time mentoring students, and
developed a prototype.
Initially the project started out as a
traditional real-time strategy game,
but this didn’t feel right for the team.
“It was cool and all and we had a
good time playing with it, but it was
just like every other RTS out there,”
explains Lehto. “It wasn’t going to
shine and stand out from the sea
of other games just like it in a way
that we were confident about, so we
decided to try something dramatically
different. It was kind of this weird
‘aha’ moment in the middle of the
night, for me. I knew what we needed
to try. When I approached the team
the next day and said, ‘Let’s try to
take the player camera in the sky and
turn that into an active participant
in combat by making it a vehicle.’
They said I was crazy, that the idea
was ridiculous. There was a lot of
resistance initially but I insisted we
try and give it a shot. ‘If it fails we’ll
go back to something else.’ When we
tried it, we immediately knew it was
different. It was also something that
was going to take a lot of time to solve
and figure out how to make it in a way
that doesn’t completely overwhelm
the player. So we had to completely
reinvent ways in which to command
ground units so it felt fluid with a first-
ABOVE Marcus
Lehto’s new game
plays quite
unlike anything
we’ve seen
before.
BELOW Humanity
has shaken off
its fleshy
bodies for some
more durable
metal ones.040 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE