A Drop of Water/Transcript

This is the transcript of "A Drop of Water," the first episode of Heavy Rain: Ten Years Later.

Transcript
(The PEGI 18 rating appears, followed by the Quantic Dream logo and David Cage sitting in a chair. Video footage of Cage is interspersed with video footage of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, and Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

David Cage: So our first game was called Nomad Soul in Europe and Omikron in the U.S. because we love to have different titles in different countries. It was a sci-fi open world and of course the soundtrack was by David Bowie himself.

Boz: Thank you for all you have done for us, Nomad Soul.

Cage: Fahrenheit was a big shift in my vision of game design. I really wanted to find out if we could tell a story through gameplay and not through cutscenes.

Agatha: We were right to have chosen you.

Cage: We didn't have a clue what the reception would be, because we thought this game is so bizarre...it's not really an adventure game, but it's definitely story-driven, but it's not an RPG...we didn't know how to call it, so we invented this word called "interactive drama," this genre. I wanted to see how I could take this genre to the next stage. How I could tell a better story that would be more interactive, more emotional, with more consequences to your actions and that was the beginning of Heavy Rain.

("HEAVY RAIN: TEN YEARS LATER" appears on a black background, followed by "PART 1: A DROP OF WATER." It fades out and is replaced by video footage of Heavy Rain, which is interspersed with video footage of Jean Zeid as he speaks.)

Jean Zeid: (In French.) Heavy Rain is the story of a father of two children, one of whom will disappear in a tragic accident. This is in the first few minutes of the game, at the beginning when everything is going well. We are in the footsteps of a man for whom everything is amazing. He's an architect with a beautiful house, magnificent lawn, in short, an idyllic life... A life which will be turned upside down. After the accident he moves to a city on the American east coast where the rain is permanent, there he tries to reconnect with his remaining son, but this son, unfortunately, he too will disappear.

Ethan: So, do you want to talk a little?

Shaun: Talk about what?

(The video fades out and is replaced by video footage of Pierre Lacombe, which is interspersed with video footage of Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Pierre Lacombe: (In French.) For the duration of the story we will then alternate between playing a curious journalist, a private detective and an FBI agent. What's most interesting is that the player leads this investigation himself. Almost co-directing it because it's an interactive story in which we will be the co-author of events. By our actions we will be able to generate short, medium, and long term consequences that will have a genuine impact on the whole web of the story. And that's the real exploration of Heavy Rain, this rich, unparalleled narrative exploration.

Scott: Don't panic, let's just stay calm. Nobody here wants to hurt you.

(The video fades out and is replaced by video footage of David Cage, which is interspersed with video footage of Heavy Rain, Seven, and Memories of Murder as he speaks.)

Cage: It was like a narrative Rubik's Cube, you know, you play with it and it never works because there's always a color that is not the one you want. The inspirations behind the script were many. Seven by David Fincher was definitely one of them. Memories of Murder was also an interesting one because it was a version of Seven where there's no resolution in the end. They would never find who did it, and that was incredibly inspiring to me because it showed me, okay, it's possible to have a story that-that has no resolution.

(The video fades out and is replaced by video footage of Jean Zeid, which is interspersed with video footage of Tales of Monkey Island and Heavy Rain as he speaks.)

Zeid: (In French.) When Heavy Rain was released it was totally in opposition to what came before. Up until then we were accustomed to, for example via LucasArts, very funny, wacky scenarios and here we find ourselves with an extremely dark game, a tragic game, and a very mature one. It was radical to deal with these big moral issues. I don't mean that it's a game that's moralizing, not at all, it doesn't say to you, be careful this is good and that is evil... It's that your choices have real moral implications and you might do the wrong thing. It could be that there are no good choices... Like in life, maybe there are only bad choices...

Madison: Crap! That's disinfectant. Not terribly good for burns...

Zeid: (In French.) It was revolutionary at the time. People tried to caricature the game by saying that it was interactive cinema and therefore "but it's not a real video game" but it definitely is, it's a real, radical video game, one that I think continues to be radical even today.

(The video fades out and is replaced by video footage of David Cage, which is interspersed with images of Heavy Rain concept art and video footage as he speaks.)

Cage: I didn't know if these kind of games existed, but I knew what I wanted to do and I felt, if this is something that I get interested in, if this is something that can move me, it's going to move other people around the world. What fascinated me when I started was this concept that I could tell a story with millions of people that I never met. And that's something incredible, it's absolutely unique, 'cause when you are a-a novel writer or when you are a film writer, you write your story on your own and then people can watch it or read it. But in this case, I write the potential for stories, but the final story is really told with the player. It's the result of narrative space that I created, but their choices and their paths within this narrative space. And that's so unique and so fascinating. That's really something that, 23 years later, I'm-I'm still fascinated by this.

Ethan: Shauuun!

(The video fades out and is replaced by an advertisement for the Steam version of Heavy Rain.)