DESPELOTE Interview: Developers Julián Cordero and Ian Berman on courting chaos to bring Ecuador to life.

"The less instructions we gave, the better performances we got from people"

No game I've played has spoken dialogue quite as natural as that of Despelote's. Characters ramble and interrupt one another, speaking in a relaxed, tossed-off way familiar from life but rarely heard in a video game world. The setting is Quito, Ecuador, and you play as an eight-year-old boy—an alter ego of the game's designer, Julián Codero—freely exploring a neighbourhood full of overlapping chatter and activity. Rowdy school friends blurt out excitable nonsense, kicking a ball as they cut class; simultaneously, the teacher bellyaches at length to a street vendor selling cevichochos nearby. In a park scene, we wander amongst a mingling soundscape that includes animal noises, music played from CD players, amorous picnickers, an elderly man nattering to pigeons, and a performing guitarist. The country is on the verge of qualifying for the 2002 World Cup, and soccer mania is in the air.

Much of the dialogue gains its vitality by being broken out of the enclosed diving bell of the recording booth. The game's cast—largely made up of Ecuadorian friends and family—were encouraged to improvise and bounce off each other, contributing not just their voices but their own memories and personalities. The boy's cinephile parents, for example—played by Cordero's mother and father—make filmchat discussing the releases of the day, just as they might have at the time. Important here is the careful work of sound designer Ian Berman—credited on films such as The Sweet East and Ecuadorian short Ñaños—who recorded the game's dynamic vocal takes along with its extensive environmental sounds.

Despelote's effects (though simpler) might be compared to those New Hollywood director Robert Altman pioneered in the 1970s; where, in films like M.A.S.H., California Split and Nashville, the viewer's attention is diverted away from the central action towards peripheral characters, emphasising fragments over linear clarity and involving the viewer as an active listener.

Particular interest is taken in recreating experiences distinctive of childhood: the held hand of an adult; the fragmented eavesdropping on a world that feels large and barely understood; and a soccer-fueled dream—one of those ecstatic dreams of omnipotence, like those of flying, which disappear with age. The cliché of 'childhood innocence' is avoided: the player might misbehave and feel the guilt of being chided by a carer. We experience, too, the glue-like stickiness of a video game played at the expense of all else—achieved through a simple soccer game played within the diegesis of Despelote's world. (It was created on spec by producer Gabe Cuzzillo, also credited for level design and terapia—therapy.) Narrating, Cordero admits that he doesn't remember the period that well (he was in fact four at the time, not eight.) Near the game's end, a provocative coup de jeux vidéo effect ruptures the world's fabric, a transition that replaces its art with a raw 3D scan taken from the same Quito neighbourhood. As we walk around this altered environment, Cordero comments on the making of the game; things now look smeared and corrupted, like a vague, melty recollection.

Despelote, then, draws together two seemingly contradictory currents felt in the last decade of game design's vanguard: the painstaking recreation of quotidian space found in works such as Gone Home and My Summer Car; along with the questioning, mirrored mise en abyme of the likes of Cibele and The Beginner's Guide. In May last year, Codero and Berman spoke to me via video call, further peeling back the layers of their unique process.

I really loved Despelote's approach to its conversations and being in the world. Often in games, I'm compulsively trying to click through the dialogue options to get some sort of benefit or progress from them. But here, it's more relaxed because everything's happening in real time—you just sort of catch what you catch, like in life.

Julian Cordero: Yeah. The thing is, we've been making this game for a long time, and at the beginning I had this whole idea that there would be no dialogue. There would be no conversations. There would be no language because kicking a ball would be this universal language. For a long time, I was like, "If we put any other language in the game, it's going to undermine that idea."

But then I realised that the game wasn't really about that. Our producer [Gabe Cuzzillio] really pushed me to incorporate voices because it would be much easier to communicate. We were trying to communicate more complicated ideas about the location and the place, and what it was like to be in Ecuador during that time.

At first we tried a lot of different approaches. We were doing interviews and putting them in the game, more documentary style. I don't think that worked, but it did give us a lot of ideas for what thematically we wanted the game to be about. Then I remember doing a conversation over Zoom with friends I grew up with in Ecuador. They just improvised it, and it was a nice chat, like a chill vibe, and we put that in. It felt like that was exactly what being a kid is like—you're running around and then you're sort of absorbing these conversations, but you're not really fully engaged. You don't really understand where they start and end and what they're talking about, but you're getting glimpses that inform your worldview somehow.

So we liked it and then decided okay, we're going to fill the park with these conversations, the idea being that no conversation is crucial to the plot.

Ian Bergman: Yeah, it reflects the experience of being a kid in a nice way, where you're not necessarily the driver of the plot. So it wasn't super essential to have the sort of conversations that are driving the plot forward. It's like you're picking up a vibe of being in a place. We're trying to capture the real people who live there to give it the right character.

JC: A big part of it was that all the conversations would be improvised. Because that way it felt like we could have this shared history of the place. Everybody would remember what it was like in that time—but also, I don't know, it just felt more natural that we were working with people that have never acted before.

That kind of naturalistic quality—I don't think it's very common in games. Usually everything is so handcrafted, constructed, and artificial. We really liked the idea of recording the conversation and then having to change the game a little to fit the conversation, rather than changing the conversations to fit the game.

What were some of the things that were changed in response to the improvisations?

IB: Before we added the conversations, the art style, and the gameplay were pretty much the same as it is now. After we decided to have talking, we had to scope out a story and we redesigned the level at least two or three times. A good example is changing around the level design to make things the right size. At different points we were struggling with too many people in the same place, or too big of a place and not enough people to fill it.

JC: Yeah, we were moving stuff around constantly.

There's this couple that's having a picnic in the park—maybe you saw them—they get into fights. Those were just two of my friends. I really enjoyed just hearing them fight because they were in a relationship where they fought, so it was just listening to them having real fights in their life. So we created more scenarios like that, different dates. They're always bickering a little and we love that. We love that vibe. So that then influenced us and we incorporated it into the world.

How would you set up these kinds of scenarios with the actors?

JC: So basically we told them, "Okay, you're having a picnic in the park. It's your anniversary, and there's going to be a kid who comes and breaks your picnic." We just tell them, "It's 2001. The national team is close to qualifying to the World Cup. Don't mention anything new." We didn't give them many more instructions. That worked pretty well. I think the less instructions we gave the better kind of performance we got from people, because it allowed them to be more loose.

There are some bits that are quite funny, like the teacher arguing with the guy selling the food. He's saying, "I'm not an angry person!" but he sounds really angry.

JC: Yeah. As I said, I had been against putting dialogue in the game originally—but then we had so much fun doing that stuff. That also influenced the rest of how we're making the game. Looking forward, it's how I want to continue making games: trying to incorporate a lot of real world and improvised elements.

The process of making a game is so rational and so logical, because you have programming. Incorporating these more improvised, raw elements really, really felt good. It was just fun, going out and recording my friends. Even when they're just having a conversation over food or beer, we would recreate those environments in real life. We never recorded in the studio. I guess this is where having Ian helped—

IB: —I would yell to everyone, "Don't slam your bottle on the table!"

JC: I think that was really important to capture this vibe. I was always like, "I'd rather it not sound great, but feel more natural compared to if we tried to record it in a studio with perfect sound." I think Ian saw that there was a challenge, which was great.

IB: Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of recording. I'm still editing it. We spent about a month recording every day. It was my first time in South America, much less Ecuador, so I was super psyched to be there. But also, we're doing at least one recording trip most days... I feel like yesterday I got to the point where I'm like, "Okay, I'm done editing everything."

There's some great lines from the kids—"You're the cousin of Nicholas Tesla". It just sounds like kid's nonsense.

IB: Yeah, a lot of that was totally improvised. They're really funny. I don't think we could come up with that.

JC: I don't know why they said that, the Nicholas Tesla thing? (Laughs)

They're looking over at Quito and they're like, "You can see New York from here!"

JC: That was a great thing—they didn't even know that Ian and I lived in New York. We found the kids through [Maya Villacreces], who acted as a producer. She usually worked in film sets and film production, so she set it up like a film shoot.

IB: So she kept us on schedule and everything.

JC: Exactly. She was in charge of finding missing characters, some of them were the kids. We wanted to find a group of eight year olds—all friends, who like soccer and had this vibe. I didn't know any eight year olds.

IB: They were actually the second set of kids we had. We had already scoped out a lot of the behaviours from an earlier group. We brought a soccer ball and told them to kick it around. I had lapel mics on their shirts and we just recorded them. A lot of it came from that as well.

JC: Yeah, we were just playing around with the kids. They were running around and playing with the mics, and it was a little bit chaotic. But it was kind of what we needed. At times I did have a lot of things I needed them to say like, "Come here." You know, all those things. But we did want to create these scenarios, and have them just play around like they're just having conversations. With that one I told them, "Okay, imagine you can see Quito from this big view." They're like, "Oh, you can see New York!" That was perfect. Fantastic.

IB: Yeah. Kids are so game to just make stuff up like that. More than the adults.

What other performances from the actors did you find interesting?

JC: Well, another thing is the parents—they're my parents. They're divorced now actually. So I was asking them to recreate a time when they were married, and that was a weird thing. Which I feel very lucky about. They're on good terms. They're friends.

I was going to ask about the discussions in the game that your parents have about film.

JC: Yeah, my parents are filmmakers. They made a movie in the ’90s that was somewhat successful, Ratas ratones rateros. They also had a video rental shop, and were bringing in all these weird movies, not the usual Hollywood stuff. A community formed around it, some of whom my parents are still friends with.

How did you recreate the physical environment?

We had a lot of models and were using a lot of 3D scans that I had just made with my phone. Then our artist [Sebastián Valbuena] cleaned them up. So we were using those and placing them in the world. I think there is a parallel between the conversations and how we were building the world. Using models taken from these real world elements, I felt they already had so much personality embedded into them. So we were putting those into the world and then doing the same kind of thing for the voices.

With this naturalism that you're going for—I wonder if you think film has influenced your sensibility?

JC: I always grew up watching a lot of movies. That's been my way of relating to my parents in a lot of ways. When I was a kid, I thought I would also make movies. But I ended up being more interested in making games because, I don't know, it feels like you can do more with less. You don't need a big budget or a big film crew and all of that. That just feels like a headache. We can just make a game.

IB: It's occurred to me that I also accidentally come from a film background—actually via this project—because some of the mics I bought for this project four years ago ended up qualifying me for recording films. I spent a couple of years recording films in New York as my main income stream, so I learned how to record movies that are in theaters and stuff. Then after learning on the job doing that, it circled back around to this project. So by the time we were doing the main recording session, I already had a fully movie-ready kit and the experience of how to wire people.

JC: I had some friends in New York from Ecuador who were making a short film [Ñaños], and they asked me to help them. I was like, "I can help you as a production assistant, running whatever errands you want, but I don't actually know any of the technical skills." But they were looking for a sound recordist, and I knew that Ian—who was working on Despelote already—wanted to get into film, so I asked him. That was the first time that we recorded together.

By the way, that short was basically no budget. We were just shooting everywhere, running around in the subway in New York—

IB: —during the pandemic.

JC: Yeah. Like very, very chaotic. That kind of style, to me, is a really cool way of making stuff. I feel like maybe that had some influence in how we then went and recorded the game.

IB: Yeah, I've never thought about it like that, but it makes sense. There's a lot of energy you get from being on a set. I mean, Despelote is obviously a lot chiller than the 14 to 16-hour days on a real film set. We're going to behave more normally because we're not burning thousands of dollars every time that we hit record on the film stock—they had to be very crazy.

Working on Despelote, I realised that every type of recording is voice, basically. In a game, [one person] can kind of do everything, where on a film set you have all of these specialised roles to make things really efficient, with all of these experts in their very specific areas: a gaffer versus a grip versus a lighting technician—you know, all these things. The way we're making this game, it can be quite fun, because it's like, "Today I'm going to do lighting, tomorrow I'm going to do behaviours, and the day after that I'm going to work on the map a little bit."

JC: Yeah. I think what's super cool—what I am really interested in—is that there are a lot of ways of capturing the world nowadays. Just weird ways, for example 3D scans, or micing people up in weird ways, whatever. Whatever makes sense for what we're trying to say. And I feel like video games are the perfect fit to hold all of those. That to me, is really exciting. ◼️