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I almost feel sorry for the Warner Bros VP sitting across the table from me. I get the strong impression he wants to keep comparisons between the upcoming Mad Max game and the recent film Fury Road to a minimum, but I'm not particularly keen to comply. Questions on their similarities come thick and fast; will Furiosa make an appearance? ("You know, we just never even went there with George.") The game's main villain looks a bit like the film's Rictus Erectus, doesn't he? ("They might share some DNA...") With hype for the film at fever pitch at the time of our interview, and a recent viewing still very fresh in my mind, I can't help but wonder where and how the game and the film reboot-slash-remake might overlap. Just a few minutes before sitting down for an interview with Peter Wyse, Warner Bros' senior vice president of production and development, I get a good 20 minutes of hands-on time with the game, where I'm free to roam the Wasteland as I please. In fairness to Wyse, I do get a sense that the two properties are cut from different cloths. Both have been in development for a long time - Miller had been trying to get Fury Road off the ground since 1998, and Warner's been plugging away at a game for a fair while too. "It's been about 4 years at this point," says Wyse. "But that's from the time that we started working with George Miller, waiting for the team; the game that we're playing right now, it's probably like three years plus." Wyse is enthusiastic about Mad Max creator and director George Miller's contribution to the game's mythology, of course. "Oh, he's so much fun to work with. You just sit down with him, his mind goes in like 400 different ways, and he's been living with this universe since, you know, the mid-70s probably, when he started thinking about it. It's just a real pleasure; you mine whatever you can out of his mind. He was great about setting up the rules of the universe, and we just absorbed as much as we could and then went off and made the game."
That's another thing Wyse is anxious to impart; while Miller had sizeable input early on in the game's development, mostly during pre-production, at a certain point the title was given over to Avalanche Studios and the team were allowed to run with it. Which is, I can imagine, for the best; Miller is a cinematic powerhouse, but he's no game developer. While respecting his input, Warner were keen to turn it over to Avalanche, to "let them do what they're great at, which is build a chaotic world, and just have at it."
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