Rockstar not trying to make "interactive movies," but "video games that are cinematic"

Rockstar told attendees at the Tribecca Film Festival that it took inspiration from movies like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as well as fiction fromJames Cain and Raymond Chandler when creating L.A. Noire.

However, the studio also insisted that just because it looked to other forms of media, especially film for the game, it's not "trying to make interactive movies," but "video games that are cinematic."

"There's a visual language that people who play games just understand," Rockstar's Rob Nelson told IGN. "It's always a tricky thing to do that in open world games. It was tricky setting up crime scenes. We didn't want to have a bunch of distracting, game-y kind of things on the screen. We wanted it to feel fairly clean and it was tricky to make something that would catch your eye and you would just know instinctively that you could interact with it.

"The interrogation scenes were always a leap of faith until we got the MotionScan tech working. For a long time they just played out as a text adventure, and then we brought in some amateur actors to record placeholder performances, some better than others. You'd be like, 'Oh man, I don't know.' But you really have to put that aside and trust that when you get the right person for the role it will feel right."

L.A. Noire has over 400 characters, 20 main cases, and 2,200 pages of script, which is around the equivalent of two full seasons of a television series, according to IGN.

Game's out in a couple of weeks.