Dark 5ythe over at the Terror Drome has posted a terrific in depth interview with one of the folks with Double Helix, who worked on the upcoming G.I. Joe: The Rise of COBRA video game.  He asked some great questions and got some pretty interesting answers.  Check the interview out right here, and I’ve also mirrored the text below the jump.

AD, What can you tell me about Cobra Commander, Destro and Snake eyes?

Oh no a Joe fan! *laughs* It’s been nonstop GI JOE for 18 months!

Really? How was it? You must be sick of GI JOE by now then.

I’m absolutely tired of it. I didn’t grow up with it; I was more Star wars and BSG. But GI JOE is a very cool franchise. Apart from myself, everyone else on the team are huge huge Fans of GI JOE

What can you tell me about the Game, or its development? Thousands of GI JOE fans are early waiting for this game and the future of the franchise

We did tremendous amounts of research into it. Everything from the toy bios and designs to the comics. We had clips of the cartoons, toys and comics scattered about, anything we could get our hands on. Normally, the publisher is very hard to work with, but EA has been awesome and totally backed us up on all our decisions. It was Hasbro that has been a real pain in the ass to work with. Normally the Licensee is easy to work with. But Hasbro, man they were horrible.

Really? How so? What happened?

Well the team had these great ideas and models and textures going and Hasbro rejected them. They were too vintage inspired they said. It didn’t match the movie. They literally told us, more black. We had scarlet running around in her movie outfit but in her original colors, it really looked great. And they told us no. They really had their heads up their ass. It was literally only 2 guys at Hasbro making all the decisions, and they didn’t seem to know how to handle their own product and they don’t seem to listen to the fans.
After all the research we had done, it was very odd to have Hasbro crush that style.

Wow, yeah…..that sounds about right. Any other cool tidbits of information you can give me?

Agent Helix. That’s our creation. One of the art department guys created her.

She became an instantly popular character as soon as we got pictures of her action figure and packaging. Very attractive woman.

Yeah she was an awesome character. Sorry fellas, she’s spoken for! She is literally a drawing of the artists Fiancé. We had her as this bad ass techno pixie soldier. Very famine but a strong soldier. Hasbro stepped in and totally changed out some of her armor and gave her these little weird looking makeup pouches. Changed her bio completely. I fought tooth and nail it seemed like, everyday about something with Hasbro.

Who is in the game?

Well there’s a lot of NPC’s (non playable characters) who come to your aid and help you out. Snow Job, Wild Bill, Dusty……..watch out for a lot of their faces lol, you may recognize a few at work….

You guys didn’t……..lol…….

*laughing* Hasbro left us no choice! We would say, we need reference for such and such character, and they would send us these little tiny pictures of the action figures. That doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t know what this character looks like, who he is, where he has been. So we did our research and used some faces around the office lol.

Rumor had it that Brandon Frasier had been cast as Gung Ho……

Yeah Gung Ho is in the game, a lot of fun to play as. But no one gave us any pictures of Brandon Frasier so I don’t think he is Gung Ho if he is in the movie. At least, no one told us he was.

Did you see Resolute? That cartoon that came out? That’s what they told us to make him look like.
Resolute was a big influence that Hasbro pushed on us. It really influenced the vehicles a lot. But there are some vintage designs in there. The hisstank in its classic form is in there.
Dialtone. Dialtone is a woman. I was pretty surprised they wanted us to keep that aspect.

What can you tell me about the gameplay, has anything changed since I played it at E3?

What level did you play? We had the snow the desert and one other there…

I played the desert.

Did you like what you played? The game has only gotten better as we’ve tweaked a few things after E3. It’s a fun game, and fans will like it alot. We tried a lot to get in attention to small details that fans would enjoy spotting.

AD, I’d like to thanks you very much on behalf of all GI JOE Fans out there for taking the time to talk to me!

Anytime! Thanks for the interest, I hadnt realized that people were so actively watching our steps lol.