Take command of the Special Weapons And Tactics squad as you bust LA's worst criminals--or play the bad guy and go on the ultimate crime spree!
Letter from the Designer:
"In the few weeks since we shipped SWAT 2, I'm glad to see so many favorable reviews like this one from Gamers Edge. I'm proud to quote them here in this letter because they indicate that we successfully met one of our main goals for SWAT 2… to create a realistic, detailed simulation of the SWAT experience that is simultaneously fun and addictive.
This designer's newsletter is a post mortem of sorts, a summary of the development process. First of all I would like to take this chance to thank everybody who was involved with the game. My special thanks goes out to the entire SWAT 2 team, the independent SWAT 2 fan site webmasters, and the patient fans. In particular, I would like to thank Matthew Giovannangelo, Hadi Ghandour, Tino (Agent Cooper), and Jerry (skydiver60) for their continued support and encouragement during the design process.
For the readers who haven't been us from the start, here's a rundown of the last two years.
I began writing the design documentation on June 1, 1996. Lead programmer Victor Sadauskas, Art Director Michael Hutchison, and Project Manager Oliver Brelsford cam onboard in mid-September. This division had never done an action-strategy game before, so the software engine had to be built from scratch. This gave Victor the opportunity to build the isometric, tile-based engine in parallel development with the actual game design. With Mike providing the specs, the artists began to create the characters and graphic elements that would form the tile sets (artistic building blocks) for the maps.
Many of the SWAT game scenarios were modeled after actual police call-ups (refer to the SWAT 2 manual for complete descriptions). One example is the North Hollywood Bank of America robbery in SWAT Mission #5. This high-profile call-up, most LAPD SWAT cases involve a single armed and barricaded suspect. When I first mapped out the missions, it didn't seem like much fun for one bad guy to face a score of highly trained SWAT officers, so I invented a fictional terrorist organization to even the odds and heighten the drama. Then I decided to let the player play as a terrorist as well, just because it's fun to be bad.
On the other hand, SWAT 2's terrorist missions were built with the intention of creating interesting scenarios and challenging gameplay. In most actual terrorist situations, such as the Oklahoma City or World Trade Center bombing, there wasn't the level of immediate conflict, adversity, or risk that is necessary for the game. Usually real terrorists go in, kill a lot of people, and are far away by the time the police show up. There wouldn't be any point to reenacting such acts of supreme cowardice and evil.
Playing as a SWAT officer means following the rules and shooting protocol, moving carefully and cautiously. Playing as a terrorist means adopting a different philosophy altogether. Instead of being a life-preserving organization, our terrorists are primarily concerned with achieving their goals of propaganda and increasing their ranks. For example, you don't get points for shooting innocents, but you can try to brainwash the hostages and recruit them as terrorists in future missions. The trade-off is while terrorists have cooler toys to play with (such as grenades or booby traps) their skills are a lot weaker than SWAT's. The result is that when you're playing as a terrorist, you can get a neat feeling of paranoia and persecution when the ace SWAT officers start closing in. The challenge was making the terrorist game challenging and fun without lapsing into bad taste or offensive behavior.
After the engine framework was built, the programmers went to work coding the missions. The artists built the mission maps and began the cut scene movies. I went up to Seattle to record the thousands of lines of dialogue. Composer Jason Hayes wrote SWAT 2's score and sound editor Jason Ramirez began laying down sound effects. In January 1998, we finally had a version that QA (Quality Assurance) could begin testing. Many long hours of play balancing and interface tweaking followed.
As we got deeper into the development of the game, it became more obvious just how ambitious this project was. In particular, my design included some fairly sophisticated ideas for character interaction. The task of building an artificial intelligence model complicated enough to simulate real human behavior and then testing the model under every circumstance was more involved than anyone expected but I think the results were worth the time and effort.
Victor's programming staff did an exemplary job making the vision into reality. The SWAT 2 art team created a world that captured the urban grit, suburban sprawl, and rural open spaces of Los Angeles County in realistic high-resolution detail. Jason Hayes overcame the disadvantage of working long-distance (he's at Blizzard now) to provide our dramatic soundtrack, and Jason Ramirez handled the momentous job as sound editor. I don't think anyone on the team took a full two-day weekend once during the past year, and the programmers basically gave up their lives to work 16-hour days, seven days a week! We sincerely hope that your enjoyment of the game makes all the hard work and personal sacrifices worth it."
