There are some buzzwords, like ‘multimedia’ that dominated the gaming culture in the Nineties. But the one word that was even more ubiquitous than that was ‘interactive’ – absolutely everything just had to be interactive and, if possible, an ‘interactive movie’. Which in reality usually meant cheaply produced postage-stamp-sized, direct-to-video quality level clips on CD-ROM, giving the player only the lowest possible level of actual interaction.
Ken Demarest, who started work at Origin in 1990, had a different point of view on the matter, as he came from the technological side of things: as a coder on Wing Commander and the lead programmer on Ultima VII: The Black Gate, he saw interactive movies as a chance to create games that were as movie-like as possible without reducing the players to mere spectators. The key element for him were ‘synthetic actors’ – virtual characters who behaved like their realworld counterparts, only exactly when the players wanted them to. Logically, the game’s working title was Interactive Movie 1 – later to be changed to Green Guns and ultimately BioForge, with Ken taking on the roles of director, chief programmer and motion-capture model.
This story is from the Issue 248 edition of Retro Gamer.
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This story is from the Issue 248 edition of Retro Gamer.
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