“I don’t joke, son” – The Getaway

I hadn’t heard of The Getaway before this project, which made it surprising to find out that on release it had the UK’s second-highest-ever first week sales, behind only its immediate predecessor at #1. The Getaway is a third person action game of gangster violence in which you roam around a detailed city, taking cars as you please in a very Grand Theft Auto style. It starts with its lead character’s wife being killed, and him being framed for murder and seeking revenge, in very much the same basic story as was already tired in Max Payne. Yet The Getaway never feels like just another game, and its runaway success is another story of a British developer making bravery and ambition work for them.

As the opening cutscene ends and you drive off after the gang who killed Mark Hammond’s wife, there are no maps to tell you where to go. There are no health gauges or anything else but cars and the streets, either. You just follow the red car in the distance. If you lose sight of it, you watch for flashes of the indicator lights on your car which show when you should make a turn (on the way, you may possibly consider how this throws up questions of free will of the character versus the player, and how these are interesting enough for whole games to have been built up from). The lack of extraneous stuff on screen gives a distinctive immediacy, as does the tense, minimal music.

When you arrive, and force your way through a warehouse, the game goes further into this minimalistic approach. There are still none of the usual information displays. You have to see where you are going and watch out for enemies for yourself, see the condition Mark is in from how badly he staggers as he moves around. You don’t get any fancy aiming help as you fire, and the options to take cover are similarly rudimentary. There is an unavoidable video-gameyness to the layout even before taking the exploding barrels into account, but progressing through it feels desperate and brutal in a way which fits the plot. It made me think right back to Barbarian and the power of grotty simplicity. 

That spirit goes through the plot, too. The murder is still a tired and sexist trope, but it isn’t told from the point of view of the player character and isn’t about his feelings. It’s told from the point of view of the bumbling cockney crooks that professional killer Yasmin has just been assigned to, who are only meant to be doing a kidnapping. “Idiots! Bloody amateurs!” she sighs as they get things fatally wrong. The perspective helps the muddled, accidental nature of the violence feel much more shocking than something more deliberate.

With his son held captive, retired criminal Mark is blackmailed into doing the bidding of the increasingly unhinged boss of the Bethnal Green mob, providing death and destruction in various locations. This is far from the first time I’ve played a game where you’re in the gang but not really in the gang, a popular setup as it allows the player character to deal vast amounts of violence and still feel somewhat morally in the right. Personally this lasted up until near the beginning of the second mission, at a restaurant, where I ended up accidently pistol-whipping several members of waiting staff whose only error was to stand a bit too close to a guy pointing a shotgun at Mark. But it functionally works as a holding pattern while other plot develops, and after each bit of destruction there is the chance for another car chase, another getaway.

Each of those getaways doesn’t just stand out for the minimalism. They are chases through London. Not the London of a handful of place names and landmarks of Grand Theft Auto: London 1969, but a massive, detailed recreation of a large chunk of the city centre that properly looks like London. In the first chase, I saw the IMAX cinema across the river and knew exactly where I was. The whole thing is quite the technical achievement. The Getaway was developed by Team Soho, also responsible for the smaller-in-scope Porsche Challenge and the This is Football series, and at one stage they were aiming at making The Getaway a PS2 launch title. They chose ambition over speed and ended up spending years extra working out how to get such a big and seamless location to work. With some clever arrangement of the files on the disc they managed in the end, although the PS2 disc drive does have a tendency to sound like it’s trying to spin its way out of its earthly confines while playing.

The London of The Getaway is not a functioning city on the level of even, say, Vice City. Other people walk and drive around, repeating the same few lines if you get in their way. You can steal their cars (or buses). But you can’t go into any buildings that aren’t plot relevant. You can’t generally even explore by yourself, instead being channeled to your specific destination at speed. Brilliant technical achievement notwithstanding, the recreation of London is, at one level, completely pointless. And yet, as someone who has lived in London since not long after the game came out, playing it still felt revelatory. 

Being directed to Chinatown and arriving in front of the restaurant Mr Wu, with its distinctive minimal black-on-white signage, meant that it felt like I really had arrived in Chinatown. During each new car chase, while I was dodging oncoming traffic as I went the wrong way up one way streets, trying to work out precisely where in London I was became its own rewarding meta game, in a way that more freedom would have eliminated. Getting directed through somewhere famous like Oxford Circus felt like a reward for progress. Not every place in the game is filled out with real businesses, but enough are there to make for plenty of moments of recognition. I had to pause for a breath at the immediately recognisable and memory-filled sight of the marquee of the Astoria, a long-since-closed venue where I saw many concerts in the early days of my time in London.

I don’t know exactly how it all worked for anyone not as familiar with London. Not the same, presumably. But I think there’s something about being in a real place, arranged according to a historical logic from outside of the world of video games, that would show through regardless. And if almost everywhere is just a painted front that you can never get behind, well, it might as well be the same in a film, and it still stands out when one of those breaks a place’s geography.

The Getaway‘s obvious inspiration from films is strong even by video game standards. Specifically, its inspiration from the cockney gangster films of Guy Ritchie, still enjoying his initial moment in the sun (Swept Away was released a couple of months before The Getaway, so time was ticking). The Getaway is a gangster story told straight, without the safe distance of parody like Grand Theft Auto III. It certainly has humour, as Mark gets menaced by guys called ‘Grievous’ and ‘Eyebrows’ and has to deal with a prisoner broken out of a police van exuberantly firing guns instead of, you know, getting away, but the humour is in-world rather than commentary on it. 

That helps the intensity of the violence feel more real, and lines up with the way the gameplay leaves you so much on your own with little support. The game also has a neat and more complex trick there. Fighting your way through being shot a lot is not very realistic. Just making Mark invincible wouldn’t provide much of a challenge, and health pick-ups wouldn’t fit the atmosphere at all. And so, you lean to heal. Stand still next to a wall, and Mark puts his weight on it and breathes heavily for a while, before picking himself up and carrying on refreshed. With a refilling health bar, it would look contrived, but in The Getaway’s simple world it just plays as a gangster film operating on gangster film logic. Unlike so many games before (and after), its film influences don’t just feel like set dressing on a video game, but a narrative framework that is reflected into a new shape for a new medium.

One area where The Getaway diverges massively from the films it is inspired by is its length. I think that most games are too long, but The Getaway is glaringly, definitively too long. The benefits of simplicity and immediacy can’t last more than a few hours of its 10+ runtime, and it soon runs out of ways to have you do much else than the same things but with more enemies. The new idea of the second half of the game, where you play through all of the same events from the perspective of a different character, could have done with coming in much sooner. That, perhaps, is part of the reason why The Getaway didn’t start much of a series or make as much of a mark on history as it could have done. For a while, though, it showed a different way of doing things with a rare panache.

---

Top of the charts for week ending 14 December 2002:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Top of the charts for week ending 25 January 2003:

• 

• 

• 

• 

•