Bodycount was influenced by Lady Gaga @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on April 27, 2010

News: I'll bet there's a sentence you never thought you'd read.

When Stuart Black was at Criterion Games, he created Black, his "gun porn" shooter that has earned something of a cult following.

Nowadays, Black is employed by Codemasters, where he's working on Bodycount, a shooter for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Scheduled for release in early 2011, Black recently shared some of the game's more interesting influences with The Guardian:

What's the thing that makes everyone go, 'what the fuck?' That for me right now is Lady Gaga. I saw her at Glastonbury last year Ц it blew my fucking socks off. From the moment she popped out of her dress at the start, I just thought, wow this is important, this matters this changesЕ I didn't know what the fuck it changes, but it felt like it changed everything.

It certainly changed me, changed the way I looked at things Ц I just felt really fucking old, and I felt our industry was really old and inward looking and boring. She just came in across genres Ц it was her attitude more than anything else. So I started to talk to people about that, and there was a lot of 'what the fuck do you mean?' I didn't really know what I meant, I just know it meant something and I had to dive in and find out what it meant for us. And over the last few weeks we've been building on that, and she's being doing stuff like dressing in guns Ц and I thought, Jesus, this has fallen right into my lap!

I never thought I'd hear a developer tell the world that Lady Gaga influenced their shooter game, but Black has always been a bit of a character.

He goes on to explain that Gaga's apocalypse mentality (and that "the only left to do is party") is something the team at Codemasters has taken to heart.

Not limiting himself to possibly mentally unstable pop stars, Black also cites The Hurt Locker, the films of Michael Mann and Black Hawk Down as further influences on Bodycount.

We'll have more on Bodycount soon and be sure to read the rest of the two-part interview at the Guardian, it's a doozy.