Celebrity Byte

Carlton Cuse: "Rock Band is like crack cocaine"

What types of video games did you play over the years?

Damon Lindelof: My father was a huge gamer and we started playing board games at a very early age. He bought me my first Atari and then the Commodore Vic 20 and Commodore 64 computers. That's where I was introduced tot he Infocom games like Zork, Planetfall and those basic text-based adventures, where you could only type in a few words. Then the graphic adventures came from that. From when I was very young to when I got into high school and college when PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were introduced, I've been a pretty solid gamer throughout my life. And then I got married and I had to give up my console.

Carlton Cuse: I played a lot of console games over the years like Pac-Man and BattleZone when I was in college. I play a lot of sports games today like Madden with my kids. I have two sons and they love the sports games. I also play Rock Band, which is like crack cocaine. I have to be very careful about picking up the microphone because I'm kind of a vocal kind of guy so I don't play the drums or guitar in that game.

Did your background in gaming help when Ubisoft came to you with the Lost video game project?

CC: I think it was less about our background in gaming and more about we're the guys who make "Lost" every week and trying to find that place where "Lost" the TV show and Lost the game could merge. Obviously, it's two distinct things. We realized early on that the game was not going to be in canon, it would have been too restrictive and perhaps take away from what we're doing with the mother ship, which is the TV show. It became about infusing this game with a sense that our viewers can get onto our island and feel like they're a part of our show.

DL: We also didn't want it to feel like The Matrix game, which made it almost necessary to play the game to get a better understanding of the movies. We wanted the game to be an island unto itself, pun intended. My gaming experience impacted the writing of the show long before Ubisoft came into the picture because the show functions in a way as a role-playing game or a first-person shooter. The show explores a piece of the island at a time and the portion that's unexplored are under the fog of war and it plays like an adventure game because you have to get the X to access the Z and you have to ally with this character to achieve this. In many ways, the show, itself, is a game.

CC: One of the things that we felt the audience would really enjoy was to explore some of the locations that were introduced in the show but were never fully explored.

Were you able to reveal secrets from the first three seasons of "Lost" through this new video game?

CC: Yeah. One of the things that we felt the audience would really enjoy was to explore some of the locations that were introduced in the show but were never fully explored. For instance, the swan hatch, which was really the focus of the second season of the show, there was a big wall there and there was some type of electro-magnetic incident and there's stuff behind that wall. We had one episode where Sayid was crawling around underneath it, but we never saw what was behind the wall. The game allows fans to go behind the wall.

"Lost" cast members Yunjin Kim (Sun) and Emilie de Ravin (Claire) also star in the video game

And what's behind the wall?

DL: You get a gander at what is creating the magnetism in that space.

CC: There's a big centrifugal device that's attempting to harness the electromagnetic force and you can see that it's been destroyed in some sort of incident. It illustrates more specifically that the Dharma Initiative was trying to generate power from the huge unharnessed electrical-magnetic forces that just happen to be located in that region of the island.

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