Team Soho
The Getaway

"The future is in the sand," said the eccentric and enlightened video game industry magnate to the bespectacled new engineering graduate. But the naive nerd, with his mind clouded by overly specialized education, couldn't grasp the prophetic metaphor. He returned home, turned on his IBM, made the modem trill, and began to daydream of escaping with the voluptuous woman in the photo that was slowly loading over the course of a dozen minutes, thus postponing a potential revolution.

In 2002, Grand Theft Auto was the real deal ("the real shit" as people used to say, and even more so two years later with the release of the gangsta GTA San Andreas). Everyone asked for it, everyone wanted it, and conversely, all software developers envied it. They wanted to emulate it, but something always eluded them: a secret ingredient that couldn't be grasped and that defined the boundaries between Grand Theft Auto and all the other rival games that appeared as fragile knock-offs.
In 2002, they still hadn't figured it out.
They had tried violence and wrongdoing. But as much of a fundamental ingredient as those were, they seemed not to be enough. Shooting, killing, stealing had always been fun since the dawn of video game history, as is known. And certainly, it was even more so if all that brutality was accompanied by a breath of villainy, of crime, of recklessness against virtual "neutral," innocent individuals. But no, it wasn't enough.

One thing became clear enough immediately. A primary factor that elevated the Rockstar series to another level which others stubbornly ignored was irony, a savory additive always too underrated and forgotten.
Because it's okay to cause massacres, but there must at least be a pinch of hilarity in every rainfall of blood if you don't want the player to feel a horrible sense of guilt and stop playing.
Take Driver 3 (or better "Driv3r"...brr), for example. In that game, when you have a head-on collision with another passing vehicle while driving, you can watch the head of the poor fellow you just rammed slump onto the steering wheel. Dead. Something that, when you think about it, isn't that funny. Yet even with a bit of macabre irony, the mixture was still incomplete. What truly eluded the developers' eyes at the time, and even the users', was the sand.
It seems almost obvious to us today, but in 2002 navigation was still by sight, lacking the words to express it: some magazines came close using some clumsy terms like "play-cation."

They were unwittingly talking about what everyone today knows as "sandbox gaming," which today is a bit more than a metaphor, thanks to a revolutionary game like Minecraft. Sandbox, that enclosure, that basin filled with sand that populates the (primarily American) imagination of nursery schools: a place where a child can sit and create whatever they want within the (very broad) creative possibilities of sand.

But let's go back a bit. In 2002, only a few had figured out this secret, apart from Rockstar, which was already showing signs in its GTA III and Vice City while preparing to drop a true bomb. It wasn't the killing of innocent men and women almost with impunity that lit up the eyes of young and old (PEGI +18 but whatever, who’s splitting hairs) or at least not only that. It was the possibility of doing it or NOT doing it. You could play how you wanted: you could explore or imitate the lifestyle of a good citizen, decide to earn your bread honestly as a taxi driver (though first you'd have to steal one: I know, starting a business is always tough) or as a paramedic or a cop. Or you could simply find more creative ways to be a terrorist than just wielding an M16 to fire on anything that moved without discrimination of sex, race, and religion.
And the main story and "play-cation" were intimately connected: you could switch between the two without interruptions. And let’s not forget another revolutionary factor: the absence of a main menu mediating the relationship between game and user. You’d start the game’s DVD, and you were already in action, sucked into your virtual criminal life. But we aren't here to talk about GTA, of which much has been said. Instead, I want to talk to you about one of the many titles that didn’t know this spark of genius until much later, in the sales data of other games.

The Getaway was a game whose sales were essentially based on the hype generated by the industry press, also because it was almost an obligatory promotion given the fact that it was developed by a branch of Sony Computers Entertainment of Europe (SCEE).
And yet, with the possibility of being criminals in the entire faithfully reproduced center of London, that hype seemed well justified. No one had yet attempted anything like it, if not in a much less accurate way. Years before Google Street View, the developers of Team Soho, armed with a substantial budget, went around photographing the facades of London’s buildings to reproduce them in the form of computer-generated polygons.
The realism of the settings primarily served to increase the degree of player involvement, enhancing the unprecedented "cinematic" power offered by this title. Thanks to detailed and clean graphics, the total absence of a head-up display (i.e., no data on the screen: no health bar, suspicion stars, number of bullets in the weapon. Nothing at all) on the screen, and a massive use of motion capture for realistic animations of human bodies, Team Soho wanted to create an experience similar to that of a film where the protagonist is guided in their adventure by the player-spectator. And let’s say it straight: The Getaway excelled in these objectives. As for the rest... well, not quite, or rather, it would be fair to say "it's complicated."

Let’s return to the context: 2002 = GTA is the king of video games, the one that no owner of the super successful Sony console (the most successful of all consoles with its 120 million pieces sold and the most extended catalog of games, some still developed today, 12 years after its first release) can absolutely afford not to own.
In this context, a game set in an entire city where you can steal vehicles and kill passersby cannot avoid comparison with the king. In that context, gamers couldn't avoid it, and well, the game’s producers did nothing to prevent the comparison, and The Getaway appeared not only as an ambitious interactive film but also as a plausible contender for the throne.
And The Getaway failed miserably from this point of view. There are at least two reasons: first of all, the lack of "sand" (with the main story separate from the free roaming, moreover only unlockable once the game was finished) and second from the fact that it's not enough to create an extremely realistic polygonal world to say you've created a city. But we will talk about this more later.

The Getaway immerses you in the imagery of a criminal London full of mafias and gangs, probably very imaginative, so dear to Guy Ritchie in movies like "Snatch" or "Lock & Stock": it's the story of the involuntary relapse into corruption of Mark Hammond, a former repentant criminal whose son is kidnapped, and his wife murdered, who will find himself in a moment in a rescue and revenge mission. And who cares: the story is rather bland, full of ridiculous situations and plot holes. A thing that pales in comparison to masterpieces like Max Payne, but that's not the point because originality is in how all this is told. There are plenty of cutscenes, often long, but the game’s narrative strength is in the gameplay itself.

As said, the lack of an HUD is unexpectedly crucial for immersion; however, due to this lack, the gameplay style underwent a consequent integration. For example, during the on-foot phases, set in exceptionally well-crafted closed environments (but not without camera problems), the frequent bloody "cover-based" shootouts (i.e., based on using covers: no Rambo-style actions if you don't want to die in half a second) will rarely leave us unscathed, but the only health indicator will be the moans of our anti-hero and the speed of his stride. And to heal ourselves, we just need to use the healing power of walls upon which our hero will lean and pant for a duration directly proportional to the severity of the wounds: a fair compromise (which was very original at the time) between classic medkits and the self-regenerating health of today’s shooters.
During the chases, somewhat realistic due to the presence of actual cars (no bikes) that get damaged very quickly and become almost totally undrivable when tires burst, the "cinematic realism" is delineated by the absence of a map/GPS. To reach the objectives, we will only have the car’s indicators lighting up from time to time to show us the way, which, when you think about it, is a somewhat bizarre solution; the kind where you are being chased by the police, and we calmly show our next turning point. However, as impractical as it is, the system works.
The action is thus truly frenetic, driving like madmen while escaping both the police and rival gangs, trying not to hit those cursed traffic bollards that, unlike in GTA, cannot be knocked over. The tension is always high because keeping the car intact is a feat, but also stepping out to steal a new vehicle is dangerous due to police bullets and the reaction and braking times of other drivers who often fail missions just short of completion by crushing us under the weight of their tires. Even the shootouts in closed places (some quite interesting, like the strip club and the filthy brothel full of "innocent" women with their breasts out) are quite gratifying due to the violence and the groans of pain from the adversaries. But that's it. There’s nothing else.
Yes, there are two well-made phases of the game (plus a third of "stealth" style more frustrating than anything else) but there is no creativity and enthusiasm (created from scratch in GTA’s virtual cities), which even the setting should suggest, but the contemporary and cosmopolitan London leaves only its traditional dreariness. The feeling of a missed opportunity is strong. London could have been a huge playground like that vibrant and effervescent one which British culture had created over the last sixty years, but instead, it’s only the stage for a story that could have been set anywhere else, a well-crafted but inert and suffocating theater with actors (the passersby) always isolated, loitering without doing anything. A dead theater. This is not London, it’s the Trainspotting Edinburgh (which then in the film is Glasgow).
A place without irony: like in that mission where you find yourself in a hospital where you can shoot patients lying in beds for the output of a flatline beep, which isn’t funny, just morbid.

If you have been to London on one of its usual grey and depressing days, playing The Getaway for a few minutes will certainly give you a little heart skip, but this game's limits come out immediately: the city is as photorealistic as you want, but the developers seem to have simply placed a leaden skybox (the enormous texture that covers the virtual sky dome) and punched the clock satisfied. You will only see London in the morning and with cloudy skies, no night, no sun, NO RAIN (in London, got it!?!). Which is even quite ridiculous given that the story unfolds over at least a couple of days. The sand is already solidified cement.

Perhaps if the Team Soho had taken more time, they could have given us (for a dozen of ten-notes of the time) a true masterpiece, but the desire to rival with Vice City (released two months earlier in November 2002) and the commercial necessity to be ready for Christmas has only given us a great game in its way quite unique when not pedantically trying to stand alongside the king of the beach, also backed by decent longevity thanks to the fact that once Mark Hammond's story is finished, it can be relived (for another 12 missions) from the perspective of Agent Frank Carter. One of the many games that silently contributed to glorifying the PlayStation 2 as the most crucial console of the last decade.

If you’ve already played the flagship titles of sand-based engineering and want to take a violent little stroll through a not too swinging London, today you can do it for a really ridiculous price, still well spent.