Bringing Comic Characters to Life in ‘The Punisher: No Mercy’

What’s up, True Believers? My name is Chris Baker. If you used to check out the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (ca. 2000-2004), this probably isn’t the first time we’ve met. And if you were a regular reader, you might even remember that I was the one always writing about Marvel games. Well, now I actually work for Marvel, and instead of just writing about Marvel games (which definitely still happens on the Marvel games blog and on Twitter), I’m doing my part to help them get made.

The next Marvel game coming your way is Zen Studios’ The Punisher: No Mercy – and as you probably know, it’s a PSN exclusive…and it’s coming very soon. If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few months, you know the basics. But here’s something about the game you might not know…

As an arena-style first-person shooter built on the Unreal engine, No Mercy sports a lot of in-game taunts and other dialogue from all eight characters — close to 400 in total. Many of these lines were written exclusively for the game, but the rest? Well, one of the most important responsibilities we have here at Marvel is making sure our characters are, well, in character — and what better way to ensure this than to rip them straight from the comics?

So, that’s what we did. I can personally attest that work isn’t so bad when your job is to pour through hundreds of pages of comics.

Want some examples? Well, here you go. Just click on the images to hear the words on the page come to life — just like you’ll hear them in the game.

A defining character line from Silver Sable (Ultimate Spider-Man #87).

You’ll hear Finn Cooley tell you this if he kills you (Punisher MAX #12).

Jigsaw does his best Rambo imitation (The Punisher, Vol. 2 #38).

As if those lines weren’t enough, I challenged the guys at Zen Studios to create situational taunts. For example, if it’s the Punisher against Bushwacker, the guy with the skull on his chest has a thing or two he only tells the assassin with a gun-arm who used to be a priest. Something like this from War Journal #13:

There’s all kinds of stuff like that.

I leave you with our favorite foul-mouthed Punisher enemy, Barracuda. In order to keep this a family blog entry, this panel from issue 34 in the MAX series is one of the few I can show you (it’s heavily cropped), and it’s attached to one of the few sound clips we can play for you.