When Monolith Productions released the 1960s-inspired first-person shoot 'em up The Operative: No One Lives Forever on Windows PCs back in the year 2000, it ended up receiving a ton of praise (even awards) from outlets at the time, including Computer Games Magazine, IGN, and Gamespot (to name just a few).
As a result, it was a bit of no-brainer for both the publisher Fox Interactive and the developer Monolith to want to bring the game to other platforms in the hopes of potentially capitalising on the game's success, and potentially drum up some further excitement ahead of the release of its sequel No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way. This, however, ended up presenting a ton of issues for the Washington-based developer, with the most pressing of these being the studio's complete lack of experience with console development.
Up until that point, the developer had exclusively developed and published games for computers, with its proprietary engine LithTech having yet to be used on a game for a PlayStation system.
Because of this a small and scrappy team at Monolith was brought together to take on this act of frontier-ship, with the idea being to port all of the content fromthe popular PC title over to the second-generation Sony hardware and lay the groundwork for further console ports. Recently, while speaking to Matthew Allen, a former lead artist at Monolith Productions, about games such as Sanity: Aiken's Artifact and Tron 2.0, we ended up talking about this version of the cult classic shooter, with Allen giving his surprisingly honest opinion on the quality of the title, and explaining why it turned out the way it did.
To start off, he gave us an explanation for how the project came to be. "NOLF had been sort of a hit," Allen says. "And at the same time, the LithTech group had brought in a set of folks to work on a PlayStation 2 port of the LithTech engine and they had a tech demo running with one of the mechs and the player model from Shogo and then billions of particles. What they needed was a project to try to push the technology and so they wanted to use No One Lives Forever so they asked me.
"Sanity did awful," he continues. "Like it sold probably about six units. And so I was left with this little bit of a rag tag team. And they were like, 'Remake all the content for this high-end PC game'. No One Lives Forever didn't run on everybody's machine. The software renderer was awful. Like, you had to have a really high end 3D card and a ton of video RAM to run it, which the PS2 had neither. And so they said, 'Matt, you're really technical. Here's a team of folks we don't know what the fuck to do with. Make a port of No One Lives Forever for the PS2'".
They said, 'Matt, you're really technical. Here's a team of folks we don't know what the fuck to do with. Make a port of No One Lives Forever for the PS2'"
According to Allen, this was about as nightmarish as it sounds, but there were some genuine moments that he does look back on with fondness today — not least having the opportunity to work alongside the talented LithTech engineers, including Matthew Scott, who ended up being a huge help in getting the game to run.
"I remember one of the first meetings we had with the engineers where they were meeting with me and the rest of the team," he tells us. "And somebody on my team was like, 'The engineers are gonna have to write tools to break up the PC content.' And the two engineers said, 'Wait, what?' I told them, 'No, that's our job! We'll figure it out.' And I recall afterwards, the engineers coming up to me and they were like, 'We love you. What do you need from us?'
"So yeah, we spent nine months to a year porting. And we did it, and the game was awful on the PS2. Like I wouldn't wish that version on my worst enemies. But we made it run and we actually shipped it."
During the conversion process, the PS2 version of No One Lives Forever ended up making a ton of changes from the original game. Not only did it add three additional scenes exclusive to this version and replace Guy Whitmore's original soundtrack with a brand new score, but it also cut out the multiplayer from the PC version, removed the PC game's quick save and its customisable HUD, and made several other alterations, with many of the more negative updates being the result of adapting the game to work on the new hardware.
Because of these somewhat challenging development conditions, as you might expect, the initial reviews for No One Lives Forever on PS2 were not anywhere near as complimentary of the game as the PC version.
Gamespot, which had given the original a 9.3/10 gave the PS2 port just 4.6, for example, complaining about the lack of the autosave feature, and suggesting its removal changed "the game into a frustrating exercise in trial and error." Meanwhile, IGN scored the game a 6.9 and noted that the "porting [...] has taken its toll on poor Cate Archer and her comedic '60s underworld of cheesy code words and dumb American contacts", criticising its "ancient looking graphics and poor framerate", among other features.
Despite what Allen thinks, though, the general consensus among the game's press seemed to be that the port was just disappointing, not an outright disaster, with publications like PLAY summarizing, "This is certainly no award winner, but No One Lives Forever gets the job done: I was entertained from the first level’s deliberate sniping sequence to the last’s balls-out chaos."