Vanity Fair Q&A Unleashed

Yesterday, Vanity Fair posted their feature article on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on their website, alongside several exclusive photos and a video clip. Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Frank DiGiacomo chats briefly about his article.

You don't generally think of Vanity Fair as having a video game beat.

I'm not really sure of the genesis for the article -- my editor, Bruce Handy, might have been at Lucasfilm for something else -- but I know he sat down and talked to some of the LucasArts people about their plans for the game. When he heard about it, he thought of me. We both have sons, and whenever he and I have lunch, we tend to talk about what we do with our sons. I tended to talk about video games I'd play with my boy, and I guess he thought this would be a good assignment for me. And I'm totally psyched I got to do it.

Have you ever written about video games before in this capacity?

Certainly not in the depth that I write about The Force Unleashed in this story.

From an outsider's perspective invited to look behind the scenes at LucasArts, what surprised you?

When they showed me the Euphoria and the DMM "sandbox" presentations, to watch a stormtrooper try to keep his balance on a surface that was tilting and rolling was, to me, amazing. In playing games, you could see that the development is happening fast and furious as things are going, but I had never seen anything close to that. They would drop the stormtroopers, using the Force, in different ways, and the uniqueness with which he reacted every time... I found it to be mindblowing.

The DMM as well -- it was so cool to see things break the way you expect them break. When I play that is one of the things that throws me out of the game: when a door kind of cracks like, I think I wrote in the piece "like a jigsaw puzzle," it comes apart in these large clunky pieces.

When I started to understand the variables that these guys at LucasArts are working with -- not even using Euphoria and DMM -- and then when they introduced these two technologies, the levels of unknowns were raised exponentially. Then you realize the kind of cool stuff these guys are doing and how smart they are to fit this all together into something you and I can play.

Did your son know where you were going?

Yes. He was very jealous. He wanted me to take him with him. I said, well, you know I really can't do that. He was really bummed about that.

He's been playing games since he was three or four. We started with Pikmin and Luigi's Mansion. I don't know how, but he got into Star Wars really early. He saw Episode I four or five times. I had to keep taking him! He was really young, and he would fall asleep -- kids that age fall asleep -- at different times in the movie, so I think I had to take him four or five times before he saw the whole movie.

We played Bounty Hunter. Later we were both hooked on Republic Commando. Those games were just so much fun. I was dropping hints that I'd love to see LucasArts put out another Republic Commando. He plays Knights of the Old Republic, too, and the Episode III games, he loves the Star Wars LEGO games. He and I play Battlefront a lot. There's endless amusement there.

I can't wait to play The Force Unleashed, and I can't wait to punt a Jawa. It's one of the things I'm most looking forward to.