Gun: The Randall Jahnson Interview

Colton, especially. He has to grow over the course of the game. At the end he is not the same dude he was at the beginning. He has changed. His journey is as much a quest for identity as it is an epic adventure.

I also wanted to play with expectations by turning classic Western types on their heads: lawmen who are corrupt instead of good and stalwart; white soldiers who are more savage than the "savages" they're fighting.... IGN: Why is the game's lead character from Montana? Why not Texas, Missouri, or Kansas? Those are big name Western states, too. Did Neversoft President Joel Jewett put a knife to your throat forcing you to pick Montana (since he grew up there)? He did that to us to give the game a good score…

Randall: Fortunately, I've yet to be on the business end of a blade or barrel held in Joel's capable hands, but I can testify that one glance from those steely eyes of his can be rather... well, persuasive. Let's put it this way: If you're gonna play poker with Joel, you'll lose.

The fact that Joel is from Montana impressed me. Right off I could see that he was the real deal and that his interest in all things Western sprang from first-hand experience as opposed to some Hollywood studio exec whose idea of the West is skiing in Aspen.

But, no, he never insisted or even suggested that Montana play the location role it does.

Joel aside, Montana's cool! Kansas is too flat, Missouri too far East, and Texas... well, hell, let's face it -- Texas gets plenty of press.

Montana's called Big Sky Country for a reason. I've had a couple of great sweeps through there and I'm kind of in awe of it, actually. And its history is so rich: The Lewis & Clark Expedition explored it; Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull rubbed out Custer there; the Missouri River was crawling with steamboats; and it's home to the Blackfeet who were arguably the most ferocious fighters of all the nations on the Northern Plains.

But beware: Colton isn't really from Montana; it's just the place he and Ned happen to be at the start of our story. (They've probably ranged all over the Rockies and into Canada as well). Colton's real heritage is at the core of Gun's mystery.

IGN: How did you decide to develop the characters, Ned and Colton? Do the characters have mixed backgrounds and hidden pasts that are likely to shock people like in Chinatown? Or were Sergio Leone's 1960s spaghetti westerns more of an impetus for the story of Gun?

Randall: They came about a bit by accident. I'd been sending ideas for characters and scenarios to the guys for a while; they were lukewarm about a lot of it because it was stuff they had seen before in other games or films. On a whim, I sent them this one-page description of the main character which I titled "What You're Made Of." It was written in the second person: "Your given name is Colton. That much you know. You reckon you're somewhere north of 20 years, but can't say for a fact...."

"You" went on to describe your mentor, Uncle Ned White, and what little you knew about your past and a traumatic encounter with a cougar....

The Neversoft guys really responded to that, and that's what got the ball rolling. Curiously, I never dropped the "You" point of view. The whole cutscene script was written that way: "You jump on a horse and yank your rifle from its scabbard," etc....