How Tony Scott and Michael Mann changed modern video games

Since the early to mid-90s, video games have become more widely accepted not only as a popular form of entertainment, but also as a new art form. As the hardware became more polished, leading to lifelike characters in virtual recreations of the world, so too did the stories become more complex, often taking inspiration from the movies themselves. Film tie-ins were all the rage for almost two decades, giving players the opportunity to play their favourite characters, from adaptations of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to obscure video game versions of Scarface and Ju-On: The Grudge.

Outside of those tie-ins, which were often rushed jobs, it was apparent that video games wanted to be taken as seriously as movies. One genre that was rather easy to transpose from screen to consoles was action. After all, no-nonsense films like Commando and Die Hard seemed tailor-made to become high-octane shooters. While video game developers like Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear), John Carmack (Doom, Quake), and Gabe Newell (Half-Life) clearly took a lot of inspiration from classic Hollywood productions; from John Carpenter to Ridley Scott, there are two filmmakers that ended up defining the modern landscape of video games: Tony Scott and Michael Mann.

Both directors have become synonymous with the action genre: the former brought the look and flair of commercial and music videos with films like Top Gun and Days of Thunder, while the latter brought a level of ultra-realism to crime films with Thief and Heat. These are two very different directors who influenced gaming in very different ways, especially after both converted to digital filmmaking in the early 2000s, heightening the immediacy of the action and experimenting with camerawork and editing unlike anything they made previously.

Michael Mann arguably had the biggest footprint between the two, going back to the grandaddy of first-person shooters: 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D. Set in an alternative World War II, the journey through the Nazi-infested dungeons of B.J. Blazkowicz not only bears strong resemblance to war classics such as Where Eagles Dare or The Guns of Navarone, but its use of supernatural elements, with the Germans trying to build an army of undead zombies and taking possessions of powerful relics, shares an eerie resemblance to Mann’s The Keep. The 1983 horror film is the only attempt at the genre from the Chicago-born auteur. Though often seen as a misfire, The Keep has a strong cult following, and it is clear that both the original and more recent entries in the Wolfenstein franchise owe a debt to the movie.

Although he only executive-produced it, one of Michael Mann’s biggest creations was the TV show Miami Vice, which ran from 1984 to 1989. This was the epitome of the 1980s in popular culture: sleek vehicles, neon-lit streets, Phil Collins on the radio, and Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas dressed to kill as they cruise through the streets of Miami capturing cocaine traffickers. The general aesthetic is still being homaged to this day, but the biggest tip of the hat of all came from Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The 2002 open-world game featured many nods to other crime films like Scarface, The Godfather and Goodfellas (Ray Liotta voices protagonist Tommy Vercetti), but Miami Vice was clearly the main inspiration. Not only does Vice City look identical to the show’s version of Miami, but the central relationship between Vercetti and Lance Vance bears many similarities to that of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (and Vance is voiced by Michael Thomas himself). Plus, not only does the in-game radio feature many songs that became popular thanks to the show, but Emotion 98.3 also plays “Crockett’s Theme” by Jan Hammer!

Of course, Heat was Michael Mann’s magnum opus, especially for its realistic chase scenes and shootouts. The Driver series of games took major influence from it, especially the hilariously stylised DRIV3R. But arguably the series that most shamelessly embraced the look and style of Michael Mann was Kane & Lynch. While both its entries were received with mixed reviews upon release, they have achieved cult status precisely because of the Mann connection. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men came out in 2007, right after the feature adaptation of Miami Vice, and its tale of two criminals forced to commit high-stakes heists looks and feels just like Heat, especially with its centre-piece bank robbery. However, its 2010 sequel, Kane & Lynch: Dog Days, is a blood cousin of Mann’s digital period: adopting a strong digital aesthetic, with nauseating camera shakes, intentional video glitches, and big pixels covering graphic headshots and genitalia, developer IO Interactive went even further than anything Michael Mann made with 2006’s Miami Vice or Public Enemies. In a way, this also predates Blackhat, as the game is set in Shanghai while the film is in Hong Kong and Malaysia. Everything comes full circle in the final chapter, set in an airport, where the opening shot directly references the ending of Heat.

But enough of Michael Mann, who has gotten more than enough focus. Tony Scott’s influence is apparently less clear, given that he was a precursor of the MTV look that would later be adopted by the skateboarding games of Tony Hawk or racing games like Need for Speed and Burnout. When Scott started to experiment more with digital, he started crafting even more mesmerising and spectacular pieces of entertainment, distorting the sense of time and space and having an absolute ball through all of it. This sense of heightened reality can be felt in the fantastical Driver: San Francisco or the hectic, sweaty gunfights in Battlefield: Hardline and Call of Juarez: The Cartel.

There is, however, one video game that is not just a pastiche of one of Scott’s signature films, but rather a borderline remake: 2012’s Max Payne 3. The first two entries in the Rockstar series were neo-noirs that drew heavily on both hardboiled stories and John Woo’s slow-motion heavy shootouts. While these two elements are still present in the final chapter of the trilogy, the story and iconography are taken straight out of Man on Fire, arguably Scott’s finest film. See if any of this sounds familiar: a disgruntled, jaded and alcoholic ex-cop is hired by a private family in a South American country to protect their young daughter. She is kidnapped by members of a gang, and the man goes on a violent rampage that brings him face to face with police and political corruption, as he uncovers a mystery bigger than himself that leads to a bloody carnage.

The developers at Rockstar stated that Man on Fire was a direct point of reference when developing the game in both script and gameplay. Of course, while the screenplay of Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries is structured in exactly the same way as Brian Helgeland’s, there is a higher level of bitterness in Max Payne 3, and the central relationship between Payne and Fabiana Branco is very surface-level – nothing more than an excuse for increasingly more bombastic set-pieces and a far cry from the sparse action of the film. However, the sequences where Max is in his apartment of São Paulo, high on painkillers, and drifting in and out of consciousness are equally as strong visually and narratively as John Creasy attempting suicide during a nightmarish night. The game utilises the same style of shifting camera angles, alternating slow-motion with speed ramps, and utilising double exposure to evoke the protagonist’s erratic state of mind. There is also a game mechanic, called “Last Man Standing”, where time slows to a crawl when Max is nearly dead, giving him a few seconds to identify and kill his shooter, resembling the move Denzel Washington makes when he is shot during the kidnapping of young Dakota Fanning.

It is fascinating to look at the landscape of both video games and cinema in 2021, since they have taken so much from one another. Movies are tapping more and more into elements of video games to deliver sometimes clever, sometimes derivative twists on age-old formulas, while games are able to revamp the style of certain directors to create wholly immersive experiences for players. Michael Mann and Tony Scott have already inspired so many filmmakers, it only makes sense that they will now keep on inspiring game developers too.