Heavy Rain

• 1. Introduction

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  Heavy Rain, the 2010 video game from the studio Quantic Dream, grew out of a scare in a shopping mall. Its writer and director, David Cage, briefly lost track of his son there. The episode made him ask himself "what it means to love your son". From that question came the tagline "How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?"

  Sony Computer Entertainment published the result, a story about four people drawn into the hunt for a serial killer known as the Origami Killer. His method depends on prolonged rain, and his victims drown.

  The questions the game raises are stranger than most thrillers allow. Why would a stranger test a father's love with trials that demand pain and crime? Who is the killer, and what shaped him? And what becomes of a story when a hero can die halfway through and the plot carries on regardless?

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• 2. Three Days to Find Shaun

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  Ethan Mars takes his family shopping the day after his son Jason's tenth birthday. A car hits Jason and Ethan. Jason dies, and Ethan falls into a coma that lasts six months. Blaming himself, he separates from his wife Grace and moves into a small suburban duplex. Mental trauma and blackouts follow him there.

  Two years later, Ethan blacks out at a park while with his other son, Shaun. When he comes to, Shaun has been kidnapped.

  The kidnapper is the Origami Killer, who abducts young boys during the fall. He drowns each one in rainwater, then leaves an orchid on the boy's chest and an origami figure close by.

  FBI profiler Norman Jayden arrives with a private battle of his own, an addiction to a drug called Triptocaine. Jayden examines the death of an earlier victim and finds that the boy died on the day of a violent rainstorm, which flooded the cell where he was held. From weather patterns, he estimates that Shaun has only three days to live.

  Besieged by reporters, Ethan checks into a motel. A letter from the killer sends him to a shoebox holding a mobile phone, a handgun and five origami figures. The killer phones and explains the rules. Each figure contains instructions for a test of how much Ethan loves his son, and each completed test earns him a piece of the address where Shaun is held.

  The tests send Ethan driving at speed against highway traffic, crawling through broken glass and live electrical pylons, and cutting off one of his own fingers. Others require him to murder a drug dealer named Brad Silver and to drink poison on camera.

  At the same motel, Ethan meets Madison Paige, a journalist who sometimes stays there to cope with insomnia. She decides to investigate the Origami Killer herself.

  Lieutenant Carter Blake works the case alongside Jayden. Their suspects lead nowhere until Grace walks into the station, afraid that her estranged husband is involved. Ethan's psychiatrist, Clarence Dupré, confirms that his patient has a history of blackouts. Blake and his superiors issue an arrest warrant. Jayden is unconvinced and keeps chasing other leads.

  A fourth thread belongs to Scott Shelby, a private investigator who visits the families of the killer's victims. He collects the letters and keepsakes that arrived when their loved ones were taken. Lauren Winter, a prostitute and the mother of a victim, persuades him to let her come along.

  Their trail reaches Gordi Kramer, who claims to be the killer. Before they can question him, both are knocked out and wake inside a car sinking to the bottom of a lake. Depending on the player, Scott either saves Lauren or fails to. He then finds Gordi's father, Charles, and forces a confession that Gordi was responsible for an earlier incident in which a boy was killed.

  What Scott actually wants with the families' letters is something the player learns only near the end.

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• 3. The Boy at the Pipe

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  Thirty-four years before Shaun disappears, twin brothers play on a construction site. Their abusive, alcoholic father has forced them out of their trailer. One of the twins, John Sheppard, falls into a broken pipe and traps his leg just as a rainstorm starts filling it with water.

  The other twin runs home to raise the alarm, but he finds his father too drunk to help. Scared and confused, the boy returns and can only watch as his brother drowns. The game delivers this history in two separate flashbacks scattered through the story.

  From that afternoon comes the Origami Killer, a man who hunts for a father willing to sacrifice himself. He drowns his victims the way his brother died. The surviving twin turns out to be Scott Shelby, who was adopted soon after the drowning.

  Scott's work as an investigator was never about justice for the dead. He needed to gather the evidence of his own crimes, and he later burns it in the wastebasket of his office.

  The finale gives Ethan, Madison and Norman each a chance to find the warehouse where Shaun is held. Ethan reaches it by surviving his trials. Madison has to survive and locate the address in the killer's apartment. Norman must survive and pinpoint the warehouse by running the evidence he finds through ARI.

  If Ethan goes alone, he saves Shaun and then chooses whether to spare or kill Scott. Either way, police shoot him dead when he tries to escape. If all three arrive, Ethan and Madison rescue Shaun while Norman deals with Scott. If Ethan fails to show, Madison fights Scott and Norman saves Shaun. If Norman is missing, Madison performs the rescue.

  Once that last chapter ends, an epilogue reveals what became of everyone, and the ending depends entirely on what happened in that final chapter. In the most hopeful version, Ethan starts a new life with Madison and his son. Norman either retires from the FBI to treat his addiction or is hailed as a hero for saving Shaun. Lauren spits on Scott's grave after cursing his memory.

  The bleakest version leaves Madison and Shaun dead. Norman overdoses on Triptocaine out of guilt. Blake successfully frames Ethan as the Origami Killer, and Ethan gives in to his pain and dies by suicide in his cell. If Lauren has died, Scott escapes and stays at large.

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• 4. Controls and Consequences

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  Holding down R2 moves a character forward in Heavy Rain, while the left analogue stick sets the direction. Everything else comes through prompts. Context-sensitive symbols appear on screen, and the player answers them with the right analogue stick or with Sixaxis movements of the DualShock 3 or 4. The game calls itself an interactive drama, played from a third-person view across scenes that each centre on one of four characters.

  Each of those four characters can die, depending on what the player does. These moments arrive as quick time events, and the resulting branches shape the story. David Cage had long been frustrated by the "game over" message. He designed Heavy Rain so that the narrative continues after a playable character is lost. For the quick time event system, the team took Shenmue as its model.

  Difficulty levels can be changed at any point in the game. Cage added them to appeal to a broader sample of players. A chapter-select screen lets players replay scenes and see how different choices play out.

  The PlayStation Move edition added another way to play. The player can hold the motion and navigation controllers, or pair a DualShock with a motion controller.

  The earliest design for Heavy Rain was a makeshift motion controller, which was judged not feasible at the time.

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• 5. A Film Made of Play

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  Microsoft was the first publisher to see the pitch, and it turned the game down because of its themes of child abduction. Sony proved more willing. At E3 2006, Quantic Dream revealed "Heavy Rain: The Casting", a technical demonstration running on the PlayStation 3. The team built it in under three months, including the engine, script, casting, motion capture and research. It was never meant for the public and appeared at Sony's request.

  Cage was impressed by the actress Aurélie Bancilhon in that demo, so he gave her the part of Lauren Winter.

  The full game took more than four years and carried a development, marketing and distribution budget of €40 million. Its script ran to 2,000 pages. Filming took 170 days and involved more than seventy actors and stuntmen. Animating the faces of fifty actors took another sixty days. The finished game used sixty sets and 30,000 animations. Guillaume de Fondaumière, the studio's CFO, claimed it was the most ambitious motion capture project for a game up to that point.

  Cage organised the game like a film and kept scenes short so that players would not get bored. Each character was made to resemble the actor who played them. Madison Paige was modelled on Jacqui Ainsley, who supplied her likeness and body motion capture. Judi Beecher provided the voice and the facial motion capture. The menus were built with a tool called Omegame Menus Master.

  Cage wanted to continue the interactive storytelling he began in Fahrenheit, his 2005 game, and to repair what he saw as its flaws. The city in Heavy Rain has no name, but Cage travelled to Philadelphia for research. He hired a location scout who had worked on the film of the same name and asked to be taken to poor neighbourhoods. There he spoke with locals, took photographs and filmed.

  The despondency he found in Philadelphia struck him, and he carried the sight of large factories beside houses into the game. He drew on art of many kinds, but mostly on real life. To shape the Origami Killer's methods and background, he read books about serial killers.

  The scene in which Ethan cuts off his own finger came from a childhood accident of Cage's own.

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• 6. Four Instruments

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  Normand Corbeil had two months, starting on the 5th of June 2009, to write the entire score for Heavy Rain. Cage already knew his work, because Corbeil had scored Fahrenheit.

  The director gave him a clear instruction. The music should represent the point of view of each character. Corbeil assigned the piano to Ethan Mars and a chamber orchestra to Madison Paige. Norman Jayden received a full symphony orchestra, and Scott Shelby was given brass and flutes.

  Corbeil recorded at Abbey Road Studios and delivered nearly 300 cues. He played the piano parts himself.

  A track titled "Ethan Mars Theme" later turned up in the best original instrumental song category at the 9th Annual G.A.N.G. Awards.

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• 7. Rain on Release

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  Development for the Xbox 360 and Windows stalled in 2006, and Heavy Rain became a PlayStation 3 exclusive. It was first scheduled for late 2008 but slipped to the 23rd of February 2010 in North America. Europe followed on the 24th, Australia and New Zealand on the 25th, and the United Kingdom and Ireland on the 26th.

  The marketing was a viral campaign on the internet. Players hunted for four pieces of evidence about a serial killer, and the prize at the end was the game demo, which went public on the 11th of February.

  The Heavy Rain Chronicles began as a plan for downloadable content with several scenes. Only one was finished, The Taxidermist, a chapter featuring Madison Paige that was first shown at E3 2008. The rest were cancelled because of the PlayStation Move edition, released in October 2010. That edition included The Taxidermist, three dynamic themes, the soundtrack and nine making-of videos. A slipcased collector's edition offered the same content minus two themes, the making-of videos and Move support.

  In 2011, France received Heavy Rain Edition Modifiée, a modified version aimed at a younger audience.

  Quantic Dream remastered the game for the PlayStation 4, released on the 1st of March 2016 in North America through PlayStation Network. Physical copies reached Europe, Australia and New Zealand on the 2nd and the United Kingdom on the 4th. That same month it also shipped alongside Beyond: Two Souls as The Heavy Rain & Beyond: Two Souls Collection. It was offered on PlayStation Plus during July 2018.

  At the Game Developers Conference in March 2019, Quantic Dream announced it would publish Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human for Windows. All three were exclusive to the Epic Games Store for a year, and the studio self-published them on the 24th of June 2019.

  Hollywood moved quickly too. On the 15th of May 2006, just after "Heavy Rain: The Casting" was revealed, New Line Cinema optioned the film rights. The rights were later auctioned to Unique Features, a production company formed by two former New Line executives, Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne. They bought the rights with their own money, even though they held a first-look deal at Warner Bros., which had acquired New Line before they left.

  David Milch, a writer on NYPD Blue and Deadwood, was slated to adapt the story under the title Rain.

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• 8. Praise, Doubts and Numbers

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  Metacritic summarised the critical response to Heavy Rain as "generally favorable reviews". The game later appeared in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. In a focus group of seventy people, none worked out who the killer was before the game revealed it.

  David Ellis of 1UP.com called the sets "spectacular" and said the world felt "lived-in and genuine". He also felt the game had an emotional subtlety that "very few games have ever succeeded at". The staff of Edge praised its "compulsive pull" and compared the "gruesome curiosity" of its challenges to that of the Saw films.

  Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer found the writing full of "compassion and bravery". Joe Juba of Game Informer called the game a "masterpiece" and said it showed the "untapped potential" of interactive entertainment. Lark Anderson of GameSpot named the story its greatest strength.

  Anthony Gallegos of GameSpy described "the most intense emotional experience I've had with a controller in my hand". Chris Roper of IGN admired how the button prompts set the game apart from its peers.

  The complaints were just as pointed. Ellis and the Edge staff found the controls "cumbersome", and Edge also thought the scene structure was confusing. Bramwell noticed clichés in the dialogue and broken English from some voice actors. Juba and Anderson both pointed to plot holes, and Anderson called the controls "clumsy and imprecise". Gallegos felt uneasy at times over the uncanny valley effect in the character models. Roper thought non-American accents from American characters sounded "weird".

  Awards followed. At E3 2009, GameSpot gave Heavy Rain its Best Adventure Game award, and it was a finalist for Game of the Show, Best PS3 Game and Best Graphics. GameSpy named it both Adventure Game of the Year and PlayStation 3 Game of the Year, and IGN placed it in the PlayStation 3 category. In 2011, Adventure Gamers ranked it the 26th best adventure game. Empire later listed it among the greatest games of all time.

  The nominations ran through the Develop Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards, the Spike Video Game Awards, the Annie Awards, the British Academy Video Games Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards and the Interactive Achievement Awards. Pascal Langdale was nominated for his lead performance as Ethan Mars, and Sam Douglas for his supporting performance as Scott Shelby.

  The sales figures started modestly. Heavy Rain entered the Japanese chart in sixth place with 27,000 units and topped the UK chart the same week. The NPD Group ranked it the tenth best-selling retail game of February in the United States, with more than 219,000 units sold. Two months later it passed one million. Cage's own pre-release estimate had been only 200,000 to 300,000.

  By August 2013, the game had sold three million copies. The total reached 4.5 million in 2017 and 5.3 million by January 2018, counting both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. It is one of the best-selling PlayStation 3 games, and Sony made a profit of more than €100 million from it.

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