During my time at the New York Comic Con, I got a chance to interview Glenn Gamble from Terminal Reality. Glenn is the Senior Artist for Terminal Reality and he spent a great deal of time chatting me up about Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

In the interview that you'll find after the break, Glenn spoke about the storyline, the Infernal Engine, and Aykroyd's involvement. We spoke for about 10 minutes, so there's plenty to read. If you want to hear the actual audio for the interview, you'll have to wait for this week's episode of Kombo Breaker. We'll be including it there, that's episode #15 if you want to be sure.

Glenn talked to me while I played the game, and he told me some stuff that we didn't get into in the actual recorded interview. He told me about the proton pack and about how all of the HUD information shows up there. I know what you're thinking, Dead Space did that, and Glenn assured me that they did it first. With a game that's been in development for two years, it's hard to say which came before the other. But it's there, and it will only help raise the level of immersion for us gamers. I've seen it in action, and it's great.

Kombo: All right, let's get this going. Who are you and what do you do?

Glenn Gamble: My name's Glenn Gamble, I work at Terminal Reality where I'm Senior Environmental Artist/Senior Effects Artist on [Ghostbusters: The Video Game].

K: Okay, and what did you do that brought you [to the New York Comic Convention]?

GG: Well, I'm the guy who got the lucky job of actually building the proton pack in 3D.

K: Tell me about the proton pack...

GG: We have full access to the Sony prop archives, which I know a lot of people would chew their left foot off in order to get access to. We got a lot of nice, hi-res images of the proton pack, all of the surviving props, the ghost trap, the slime blower, all that stuff. Pretty much, we built the proton pack from the ground up exactly like the film, then we got it in the game, then we saw the way it played. We tried to make modifications based on gameplay around that.

Example being, first off, with the proton pack, what prevented the player from running through the entire level always with the stream on? That lead to overheating. The problem with overheating is that when it overheated it just shot out steam. And everybody thought that was really lame. So that eventually lead to a scenario where, which has a funny story behind it, of the actual pack and the proton core -- it's a nuclear accelerator on your back! I figured, you know, the four little red things were rods deep down inside, it has to pop out to cool the rods.



K: That's kinda cool!

GG: That was like one of the first things they revealed to the public, and they were really kind of worried about that, but the public loved it! The big thing about every piece of tech in the game is that it was approved by Dan Aykroyd. So it's legitimate for the guys who want to make props, there you go!

K: So they could pause the game and detail their costumes off of the backpack and be really replicating the actual movies?

GG: Yup, the Dallas guys are already constantly milking me for information about it... I tried to keep everything based on real world items which is what they did there, you know?

K: Well, now, my question for you is, I know when the Ghostbusters game takes place in terms of timeline, but are you allowed to refresh anyone else?

GG: Yeah! I can tell you sorts of details about the storyline up to a certain point. The game itself takes place two years after the second movie. The short version is -- and I told you earlier -- you got hired as the experimental weapons technician, which of course sounds great in theory. But when you've got more and more dangerous things cobbled onto the proton pack, it's a bad thing…that could be a good or bad thing.

The mayor of New York has basically gotten elected on an anti-ghost stance because a non-paranormal New York is a happy New York! Essentially what happens is you're hired to keep the ghosts out of the city. There's a Gozer exhibit going on at the museum which kind of starts the whole ruckus. This is your first day on the job, by the way, so you're just kind of thrown in there even faster than--



K: Well let me interrupt you real fast.

GG: Yeah!

K: You talk about Gozer; will we be seeing like a lot of Gozer followers and denizens trying to recreate what happened in the first movie? I mean, Marshmallow Man's in the demo, that's pretty--

GG: Yeah, that's pretty obvious. But! He's not for the reason you'd expect him to be there.

K: Okay, so Dan Aykroyd didn't think about him and then all of a sudden--? (Laughs)

GG: (Laughs) Aw no… The thing about the game is that we wrote a list of all the ghosts we wanted to see in the game. When Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script, we wanted a reason for [the ghosts] to be in the game logically, we weren't going to shoehorn them in. Granted, there were ones we had to make concessions for like Slimer and Stay-Puft, but there's that whole idea with the librarian. That all kind of came about because of part of the script. They actually wanted to go back and revisit her. What was her whole story? What was her whole thing?

K: That's awesome.

GG: We explain everything about the librarian in the game. If you're a fan of the movies, you will pick up that the whole story ties very heavily into the movies. It's not exactly what you'd expect, but the references are all there. It actually feels like they just wrote [the stories] back to back to back.

K: So does Gozer play a large part in the storyline?

GG: I cannot comment on that at this time.