Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

The shock factor in K&L is quite high - how far are you going to push that?
It's not a design philosophy to say "how can we make this game shocking?" The philosophy is that we're going to make a game about a traitor and a psychopath, and they've been painted into a corner and they need to react. How are those guys going to react in that scenario? There's no point in us going "this level's too tame, we need to make it more violent".

If you put a guy in a khaki uniform and you put him in a military setting and he shoots another guy dressed in a khaki uniform then it's acceptable because it's war. But when you take a guy in a suit and give him a semi-automatic rifle and he starts firing away in the middle of the street, it's the actual location that's shocking rather than "let's add some more blood".

Above: During the Tokyo high-rise level, Kane takes time out to slice up a dead man's face

Same thing with the nightclub. A guy going loose with a gun in a nightclub would be bloody scary because you might not be able to hear the gunshot, people would be panicking. It's the location that's disturbing, that's shocking. That's the philosophy behind the game, rather than just "let's make something really shocking". Are guys like this going to swear? Of course they're going to swear.

Do you see it ever emerging on PS3?
I think it's an option. The detail of the exclusivity deal, I think it's more a time-based thing.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.