KILL SWITCH

BEFORE GEARS OF WAR CEMENTED COVER-SHOOTING AS THE INDUSTRY'S STANDARD, THERE WAS KILL.SWITCH - A BOLD EXPERIMENT THAT MADE DUCKING BEHIND WALLS AS VITAL AS PULLING THE TRIGGER. DEVELOPED FAST AND ON A TIGHT BUDGET, IT QUIETLY BIRTHED MECHANICS THAT WOULD GO ON TO DEFINE MODERN SHOOTERS

- WORDS BY YASSINE BAKRIM

You probably remember kill.switch as a distant, hazy memory – late nights spent popping out from behind cover, avoiding the risk of being shot in the face and blind-firing at goons. However, few players know how this obscure title came into existence.

The roots of kill.switch trace back to Namco Hometek's earlier title, Dead To Rights. Producers Matt Sentell and Chris Esaki were dissatisfied with its cover mechanics. That game embraced a hard-boiled cop ethos: run headlong into danger, guns blazing and pay no mind to cover. Chris and Matt envisioned the opposite. They wanted something different. Instead of another gung-ho hero spraying bullets, why not make cover the heart of the action?'

Gil had been tinkering with a Dead To Rights prototype when he realised: what if cover wasn't optional? "Since the Dead To Rights character had one puzzle where he could take cover, I had an animation where he took cover behind a wall, and could shoot out, so I used it," he explains. The producers instantly loved this mechanic. "We riffed off from there and made kill.switch."

Meanwhile, Chris explains to us how the idea played out. "Players could pop in and out of cover and trigger bullet time, diving in slow motion to target enemies. Using Dead To Rights assets, we threw this together in about a week." Matt Sentell later clarified that, while kill.switch may have been born after Dead To Rights, its true purpose was to reinvent the third-person shooter genre altogether.'