Christ! This thing's heavy!

There was one thing that made working on The Godfather: The Game by Electronic Arts worth the obstacles I struggled through: using the garrote wire to strangle victims to death, clamping down on L2 and R2, clicking in L3 and R3 on the Playstation Dual Shock controller and feeling the dwindling strength of the victim's heartbeat rumble through the controller. Like some sort of macabre vampiric Game Design ritual, strangling the menagerie of intentionally staged guards one by one, over and over, day after day, tuning and tweaking the timing of their animations, their paths, their turns and lines of dialog gave me true undead strength that made the long nights bearable.

I pioneered the design work behind stealth mechanics in The Godfather game with the tentative assistance of one AI Designer and a few AI engineers. The mission has the player filling in the back-story of how the horse's head appears in Mr. Woltz's bed in The Godfather movie. The mission is broken into two parts. In the first segment the player follows Rocco, in the second, Rocco follows the player with 'the package'.

You can watch the whole mission from beginning to end in two parts in these YouTube videos: YouTube - Horseplay Part 1. YouTube - Horseplay Part 2.

I was forced to draw on the life force of my digital victims time and time again to help me endure through the lack of support from Design and Engineering for this stealth mission. Let's face it, compared to the entirety of The Godfather: The Game, 99% of the time, the player's Modus Operandi for any task is: grab the biggest guns and fire them until everyone is dead. The Horseplay mission relies entirely on the player (AND the croissant-carrying Rocco. See below) not being seen or heard by any other human being in the Woltz compound.

In the first segment of the mission, the guards and Rocco are expertly choreographed to never intersect paths and Rocco is scripted to never cross their lines of sight. Additionally, the whole scenario is reliant on the player following Rocco from hiding spot to hiding spot to advance the dance step by step. The best course of action is for the player to stick closely behind Rocco although there is a miniscule chance that the player can decipher the guard patterns and leave Rocco to murder EVERY guard in the compound.

After reaching the stables, Rocco enters Khartoum's stall and removes the horse's head from its body with his bare hands. This is implied behind the gigantic opaque stall door with grisly sound effects and the fact that Rocco doesn't carry any sort of tools into the stall with him.

A guard comes rushing into the stables right on cue and the player must defeat him there to advance the plot. Rocco emerges from Khartoum's stall carrying a humongous 'croissant' which supposedly is Khartoum's head wrapped in bandages.

At this point, the player has to 'lead the way' by following the bread crumbs of backwards-turned cigarette smoking guards to the blue pulsing, spinning, and hovering Corleone crest located just outside Mr. Woltz's bedroom. There are a couple of civilians who add flavor to the otherwise lukewarm-tap-water-task of garroting your way to victory. Again, Rocco and the other NPCs waltz through the Woltz mansion with precision timing in order to miss seeing each other and again, there is a slight chance that a player with the patience that only the undead possess could eliminate every other living being in the level besides Rocco undetected.

Rocco, we made it my friend. Finally!

I pitched in my Design skills in other missions, carefully scripting Clemenza, Tom Hagen, Sonny, Dons Cuneo and Stracci, Willie Cicci, and all of the other major players like pawns. I earned the respect from the other developers on The Godfather team at Electronic Arts, Redwood Shores, earning a Capo ring for quietly delivering horse's heads into beds.

Then I was laid off. It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business. I was buried in The Godfather game as Baron Von Riesenberger, owner of the Colonial Club. At least once, I had to experience killing myself.

And to prove it truly was nothing personal, I was welcomed back into the EA 'family' in Los Angeles a few months later.