Ride to Hell First Look Preview

"I would like to apologize up front about any troubles we run into during the presentation," says Martin Filipp in the charmingly off-kilter phrasing of a non-native English speaker. Red-bearded and ponytailed, he stands at the front of a stage in a biker bar, obviously out of place, addressing an audience of heavy drinking bikers in tight leather pants and heavy drinking games reporters in sloppy promo sweatshirts. Game developers have a habit of apologizing for the roughness of their early demos. They often give the impression of being forced against their will to show unfinished work, compromised by the necessities of marketing. In the case of Filipp, I keep imagining someone standing behind him in the shadows holding his children at gunpoint. "You obviously saw that we have visual issues still. All of the facial animations are still missing. The eye work is still missing. The hair still needs to be done..." He struggles to convey the unseen details of his team's creative vision as the demo runs headlong into embarrassment. I can't help feeling sorry for the guy.

Ride to Hell is a great idea. A sandbox game currently under construction by a group of former Rockstar Vienna employees, it marries the vast open world of GTA: San Andreas (Ride to Hell is also set in a fictionalized chunk of California) to the biker culture of the 1960s. Easy Rider, "Born to be Wild," the murder at Altamont, Hunter S. Thompson stomped by the Hells Angels -- a wealth of great material has long sat unused, waiting for any gamemaker with the balls to forgo space marines and mafiosos for hippies and Vietnam vets. The Summer of Love, a time and place so thoroughly strip-mined by Hollywood that its image in films has long since replaced any actual memories in the American mind, has never had its own game. Ride to Hell wants to be that game, and it very well could be. At the moment, though, it feels unfortunate to see Deep Silver -- a European publisher upstart whose first big North American release was last year's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky -- pull the cake out of the oven half-raw and pass it around for the world to taste.

Filipp walks the audience through a confrontation between Ray Kaminsky, the game's Vietnam vet/biker protagonist, and a bar patron. The barfly is drunk and belligerent, blaming "limp dick" soldiers like Ray for losing the war. A brawl erupts, which should have been an opportunity to show off the game's hand-to-hand fighting combat. Unfortunately, the build is in such a rough state, chugging erratically through haymakers and bike chain swings, that it's difficult to tell what the fighting mechanics are all about. It's simply not fair to judge a game in such a state. Ride to Hell could very well be polished into something excellent, but the fact that Deep Silver was eager to show it, warts and all, troubles me somewhat. At this point, I'm hoping that Deep Silver will properly invest the time and money it will take to make the game Filipp and company are trying to make.

"There will be a rich environment in the final game," says Filipp, cruising through miles of barren hills somewhere outside the game's version of San Francisco. "This is still not there. We have work to do." The radio plays the Kenny Rogers version of "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town," a song about a disabled Vietnam veteran's cheating wife. It's a personal favorite of mine and an interesting sonic flavor to feature in a videogame. Deep Silver, according to Filipp, has already secured 300 era-appropriate songs for the game. "Born to be Wild" is what they're pushing in the marketing, but I'll take "Ruby" any day. And for the moment, it's the only interesting thing happening. Ride to Hell's world is very big and, for now at least, very empty. Filipp won't give any specifics, but he says: "The world is really massive. If you were to take a vehicle and drive from one end of the world to the other, it would be very time consuming." I believe it.

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