For some reason HBO and Starz are on a Dirty Harry kick in their programming, and I have absolutely no problem with that. I think that Harry Callahan is one of the best on-screen creations in decades and it saddens me that we only have five movies. Clint Eastwood owns this character of course, as he’s got the right type of toughness. I remember being excited in the mid 2000s when I heard the rumblings of a Dirty Harry game being developed by The Collective. Warner Brothers was set to publish the game, and Dirty Harry himself–Clint Eastwood–was involved in the entire process, which makes me wonder why the game got shelved.
The game was to take place between Dirty Harry and Magnum Force and should have given the player a better look at Detective Callahan and what makes him tick. These movies are over 40 years old, so expect spoilers ahead. At the end of Dirty Harry, Callahan throws his badge into the water and walks away, ending his time with the SFPD. I’m assuming they had penned a story that drove Callahan back to the police force, some sort of villain that only a man of Callahan’s caliber could handle. This would explain why there was no mention of him leaving the SFPD in Magnum Force, and would answer a few questions for the huge Dirty Harry buffs like myself.
The Collective announced this title in 2006 with a trailer that was later found to be doctored by Warner Brothers. Instead of showing actual in-game cut scenes and gameplay footage, they went to an in-house animation studio to simulate a working game. Had we known this then, we probably would have figured that the title was doomed from the start. Development plagued The Collective for some reason, and less than a year later, there was a restructuring of the studio that heavily impacted the Dirty Harry team. According to Warner Brothers, the game was changing studios, supposedly to Monolith, but that was way back in 2007. I haven’t heard of a sequel to Shadow of Mordor yet, so maybe they finally decided to dust off the Dirty Harry title.
What made the title interesting was the fact that The Collective was working on some specialized A.I. for the title. Seeing as Dirty Harry always walked the line of a psychopath, the game was to capitalize on that aspect. Should you treat the criminals too nicely they would know and take advantage of you on the streets, but if you would just shoot them indiscriminately, you would be in trouble with the police chief. The game was also touted as having a living, breathing version of a 1970s San Francisco. That’s something I would have liked to have seen since I only got to see the city during the 80s when I lived around there. The game could have been the Warner Brothers version of Grand Theft Auto had they achieved the proper open-world feel. The Collective had a glut of great ideas–sadly the development team just couldn’t seem to get them all to work. I really wish they had, though, or that some other Warner Brothers owned developer would pick up the baton and carry on.
Huge stars were also signed on to do the voice-over work for the main characters. Clint Eastwood was ready to reprise his role as Harry Callahan, albeit in digital form. Gene Hackman, one of Eastwood’s friends, was all set to voice Al Bressler, one of Callahan’s supervisors. Laurence Fishburne was also signed on to play the Reverend Carlton Clay. In 2006 there really weren’t many big name actors that wanted to voluntarily put their name on a video game. However, I’m sure some big names did get roped into sub-par licensed games because they didn’t read their movie contract properly, but none of them got to be in a game of the caliber of one starring the voices of two Oscar winners.
I truly believe that this title had some huge potential and could have been a huge moneymaker for Warner Brothers. A real-life San Francisco in much need of justice, top notch voice-over talent, and a story that is canon and ties two movies together would have been in my Xbox 360 faster than Clint could have drawn his gun. If The Collective pulled it off, it may very well have spawned a few sequels and even another game they were rumored to be working on called Harker. Yes, Dracula’s Harker, sounds pretty cool right? Well, that game got shelved as well and probably sits next to Harry Callahan on a shelf in a room of games I’m dying to play. Let’s hope someone at Warner Brothers realizes what they are sitting on and throws it to Rocksteady or Monolith for some polishing and then onto publishing.