LA Noire

Re-opening the investigation into Rockstar’s extravagant, cinematic ode to noir fiction

- Chris Burke

As it swaggered onto consoles in 2011, LA Noire did so on a red carpet laid down by Tinseltown itself. This was a game that wanted to be a movie star, with a glamorous cinematic ambition that held a mirror up to its Hollywood setting. Seven years in the making, Rockstar’s detective drama was one of the most expensive games ever created, with investment enough to fund a modest movie, and with a cast of 400 actors, every nuance of whose performances were captured by 32 cameras via the same MotionScan technology used in Avatar and Lord Of The Rings. It was as close to a movie as any videogame had ever come.

The pitch was LA Confidential meets Grand Theft Auto. ‘Proper’ actors were cast, many of them stars of Mad Men – most notably, Aaron Staton playing protagonist Cole Phelps. Actors’ performances were integral to the game’s interrogation mechanic: everyone, no matter how small, designed to be relatable, believable, unbelievable, as only humans can be. This headline feature relies on the player being able to tell a liar from, to paraphrase Christopher Walken’s chilling mafioso in True Romance, ‘pantomimes’ of unwitting facial movements and nervous ticks. In theory, so realistic are the faces in LA Noire that it should be possible to spot the difference between a fibbing toerag and an honest John just by observing the actor’s performance. In reality, despite all the expensive MotionScan tech behind it, it was often impossible to tell a guilty smirk from a Mona Lisa smile.