The history of the Blade Runner
In assessing the value of "Blade Runner" for the world of video games is difficult to keep from epithets like the "holy grail" and the like. This gloomy film noir, bringing together geniuses of such science fiction masters as writer Philip Dick, artist Sid Meade, director Ridley Scott and innovator in the field of special effects Douglas Trumbull, actually served as a prototype for many modern virtual worlds.
The overpopulated Los Angeles in the near future, with its highly developed architecture, industry and technology, remains a source of inspiration for many artists. Nevertheless, as we approach 2019, we can only feel regret - the problems of isolation, privatization and destruction of nature are too familiar to us, but before flying machines, settling extraterrestrial colonies and building skyscrapers towering above the clouds. It is not surprising that artists try to create such a future themselves.
')
Commercial success to "Blade Runner" did not come immediately, as his creative potential went far beyond the standard Hollywood system with its eternal squabbles and limitations. In terms of richness, the history of the creation of this anarchic, spontaneous and colossal work can compete with all of its one hundred and sixteen minutes. Or one hundred and thirteen, one hundred and fourteen, one hundred and seventeen, depending on which version is considered to be “the most-most”. “To call it a single whole is difficult,” said Louis Castle, co-founder of the already defunct Westwood Studios. - Rather crumpled.
Who better to know how not to him. When Blade Runner Partnership offered Virgin to create an official game (already after negotiations with EA, Sierra and Mediagenic, now known as Activision), few people were aware of all the difficulties of the Blade Runner production process. We learned about them later from Paul Sammon’s Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (The Future in Noir, or How the Blade Runner was created). Scott's film insatiably demanded more and more investment, exhausting the pockets of investors, and eventually passed into the hands of The Ladd Company, which was led by media mogul Sir Shao Ife, and Tandem Productions, which was represented by Bad Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio. And even from them, he squeezed all the juice, to the point that in the end the whole project kept only on promises and honest word.
“Ridley had to sign many contracts with actors for secondary copyrights,” Castle says about his favorite film. - It was all very confusing, because the contracts of different people were different. To make matters worse, by the end of the filming, everyone had fought, and many of the recordings were lost. We were afraid that at any time anyone could claim their rights to the film or its parts. Therefore, we were forbidden to use all the cinema and audio materials, as we could violate someone's rights. ”
However, it was because of such a disastrous situation that Westwood got a job. In his concept for the future game, Castle actually actually described the “creation, not borrowing” approach before the concept itself. His idea was that the player had to take part in events that unfolded in parallel with the film’s action. “You have to play a role in a story about which only guesses used to go, and stay behind the scenes of the film,” says Castle.
Westwood knew that the partnership with Yorkin was tightly limited in time. They did not know that this was one of the many agreements between the publisher and the studio, but nevertheless had to submit their proposal during the week.
“We put together a demo based on the first few minutes of the film, since the spinner landed,” recalls Castle. - We worked hard all weekend, after which I presented our concept to the producers. It was as follows: you play as a character who does not know whether he is a replicant or a person; moreover, one cannot be completely sure of one thing. As you progress, the player must feel that he is achieving his goal, regardless of the chosen path, so the game will not need to start over. As a result, your idea of ​​the protagonist may differ significantly from the impressions of other players.
The presentation ended with the words: “This is our concept. And now we will demonstrate how it might look. ” And we showed them a video compressed using the technology originally created for the original games of the Command & Conquer series. She allowed to display high resolution graphics (640x480 at the time) in full screen mode and full color. Bud said then: "I wanted to ask which fragments of the film you were going to use, but now I don’t understand why it was given to you at all." So it was decided that each scene in the game will be created from scratch in 3D.
About how many studios offered to develop the game, Westwood learned only a few months after its announcement. Some even thought their candidacy was still being considered. "They called us and said:" We are doing it! ". “I had no idea that we had any competitors,” says Castle. - Probably, many things determined our unique approach. In my discourse on the concept of the game, I stressed that the fans of "Blade Runner" will not be enough to shoot at replicants. It seems that this (as well as the high quality of visual materials that we created in a very short time) played a decisive role. ”
Westwood could not use any footage from the film, nor the wonderful soundtrack of Vangelis. At the very least, they could involve people who took part in making the film, although two of them could be immediately struck off the list. “Ridley almost quarreled with everyone, and we couldn’t contact him or Harrison Ford,” said Castle. “You may not be aware of Ford’s attitude to the video game industry, but he believes that she is too free to deal with licenses.” So Harrison is strongly opposed to participating in game development. Therefore, I don’t know if he was really very busy, or we simply could not break through his prejudice. But with almost all the other participants of the film, we were able to work. "
Sid Meade did a great job on the 2019 Los Angeles concepts (we asked the Mead agents to provide materials for this article, but according to them, his participation in the design was short-lived). And although the performance was “accurate”, the team soon realized that something was missing. After all, the picture of the movie "Blade Runner" was quite different from the wonderful concept art of Mead. Yes, the new version was accurate, but relatively wrong source.
“So I sought out the guy who was in charge of the scenery for the film. Not a designer, but an engineer, says Castle. “We took him as a consultant and asked him the following question:“ Here are concept drawings of scenery for, for example, the office or house of Dekard. But what happened in the film. How did you make one of the other? ”
To which he replied: “We got acquainted with the work of Mead and said that we would be happy to implement his concepts, but we do not have a million dollars for each decoration. So we went to the dump, to the warehouse with props, and collected all sorts of things that were at least minimally similar to what we needed. And then they just fixed them, painted them and so on, so that everything was as similar as possible. ” With such revelations, I went back to our 3D artists and told them: “You have access to all these 3D libraries with a lot of everything, so now there’s no creation from scratch. Select the appropriate resources and only change them - trim, repaint, resize, but do not redo it. ” With this approach, we were able to make the game very much like a movie. ”
And this was a huge achievement for a game released at a time when 3D technology was just beginning to conquer the PC market. During the filming of the film, quite a few decorations were used, which were altered or rearranged so as to give them the desired look. The game required creating hundreds of scenes, many of which the player could fully explore, while “their level of detail could be estimated at millions of polygons. At that time, video cards could handle, at best, a couple of hundred polygons per frame. Even the most productive cards could hardly cope even with drawing one character, not to mention the detailed levels with lighting effects. ”
Westwood created a new technology based on one of the most interesting concepts in the history of games - voxels. They were used in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun to display units that could be resized and rotated, but in Blade Runner, this technology became a companion to another newfangled invention. In the mid-90s, a game that had 1000 episodes shot with motion capture would rightfully be considered a reckless fad. There were 20,000 such episodes in Blade Runner.
Each game scene is a mini-movie, and the extraction and compression of visual and geometric data is performed for each frame. This made it possible to create a primitive but effective dynamic lighting system, thanks to which game voxel objects — characters and spinners — could add light sources to fully rendered levels. In fact, it was a kind of deferred rendering, implemented many years before its promotion by games such as Killzone 2.
“But existing technologies have proven very inefficient when processing motion capture,” says Castle. “The capture took place at a speed of 60 frames per second, and the characters in the voxel space occupied such a large volume that for each of them we had to manually delete the frame by frame, leaving only the key ones.” Initially, voxel objects weighed about seven megabytes, while iron at that time could only process about one hundred kilobytes. Automatic optimization could significantly degrade the quality, which forced Westwood to resort to manual processing. Of course, the studio did not have time for all 20,000 episodes, so some objects in the game look very strange. Castle sighs: "It took too much time."
Was it possible to use specialized iron? “People often ask me about this,” says Castle. “Why didn't you use 3D?” Now it's easy to say that when there are graphics pipelines for rendering and complex shaders, but at the time they didn't even exist. Only a few polygons with vertex shaders were available, and texel mapping on most maps was inaccurate. Now I would do everything in 3D. But I want to tell you that in the future, voxels and raytracing will become relevant again, because graphic pipelines are already so detailed that we return to the processing of each pixel again. Such a rise and fall off of interest is the fate of any technology. ”
And this is especially true of game design. Few games could even come close to what we see in Blade Runner - with the exception of Police Quest, and strange RPG hybrids and quests like Microprose's BloodNET or BAT from Esprit Software. Detective work on the locations and in the menu, occasional use of the Voith-Kampf test and ESPER devices and even more episodic use of weapons ... The game perfectly knows what adventure should be - in order to be extremely interesting, sometimes you have to be quite boring.
“Blade Runner creates a kind of atmosphere — not fear or menace, but real horror,” says Castle. - The film itself is rather poor in action, but when it comes to it, we see cruelty, danger and death. I wanted to make a game in which your nerves will be constantly at the limit due to what can happen after the next mouse click. Something terrible may happen, but often this does not happen - everything is calm and simple. ”
Indeed, most of the time the hero, Ray McCoy, spends in the point'n'click-search, visiting people and locations time after time and wondering what kind of missing action will help open the next chapter. Most of the shots you have to do at the shooting range, as part of your daily routine, which also includes documenting the evidence on the police mainframe, riding the elevator, feeding the dog, again driving the elevator and sometimes a short sleep. “The player should not feel an excess of action. Then the sudden violence will shock, says Castle. And then he tells how he would apply the same principle to another fiction classic - “Alien”: - Most of the time, you just repair Nostromo or try to determine who the team is android. But with the appearance of the Alien, the struggle with him will be fierce. "
The basis of the plot of "Blade Runner" - is, of course, the mystery of who is actually an android. And this question is especially relevant for the protagonist himself. Westwood did not want to spend time and money on a four-disc game, which will be held only once, so it was decided to cut off everything that created uncertainty. But how can you ensure that the player completed the investigation, identified the fugitives and delved into the plot, while preserving the essence of the game? According to Castle, it was very simple - to create a “plot simulation” with a scenario unpredictable for the authors themselves. “It would seem,” he laughs, “that I already have enough experience to resist adventurous ideas. A vibrant, changing city that responds to your every action? Easier said than done".
In the early prototypes, the game randomly determined who would become the replicant, but the testers were not enthusiastic about such an idea. "Have you ever killed a person by mistake?" “Yes,” they answered, flogging the investigation at the earliest opportunity. Therefore, Westwood made a healthy chef Zuben and a representative, but mentally unstable Clovis (the first and last suspect) replicants by default, which made it possible to lay the foundation for the plot of the game. But the quality control department still had to stoically analyze all 2500 passes. The script, written by Bud Yorkin’s son David and lead designer David Leary, swelled from 80 to 500 pages.
According to the memoirs of Castle, the first version of the script for the authorship of Yorkin simply was no good at all. Therefore, he was asked to write a script for a hypothetical sequel to the film. The characters created by Yorkin and Liri fit so well into the bitter world of the film that fans now consider them part of a canon. Among them, animal smuggler Ransiter, teenage girl Lucy (a potential replicant), steep blade-rampant Crystal Steele, and a new group of fugitive replicants, some of whom are eager for revenge, while others simply hope to find a new life for themselves.
"David [Yorkin] could have such a line in the dialogue:" Brown townhouses looked especially strange, since they disappeared in the 1950s. And based on this observation alone, we had to conduct relevant research and create scenery for the stage, ”Castle recalls. And if the locations were so close that it was not practical to insert a video to switch between them, the team created several more scenes to connect them. - The main work on the locations we did in Los Angeles, at the sites that were used for filming the Bradbury building and the like. In the game you can see a lot more [scenes in this building] than shown in the film. ”
The Blade Runner itself has become a colossal enterprise. Castle admits: “It took significantly more time and money than we expected. Sometimes we had to make hard decisions and cut the game. But I would say that perseverance and the desire to do everything correctly helped us go through these tests. Even before the development, we had a wonderful project, and as our ideas came to life we ​​fell in love with the game so much that we were ready to spend any money on it. But time was not on our side - we just did not have time to do everything we wanted. ”
In a sense, the game suffered the fate of the film, but we did not see the “final” or “directorial” version. Only “designer” is actually an option in the menu, with the help of which it was possible to reduce the dialogues. There were "long negotiations" about the development of a sequel, and the success of "Blade Runner" - it sold out three times better than The Curse of Monkey Island of 1997 - seemed to guarantee its appearance. “Although the circulation was high, it was difficult to forget that the game included four discs. And it made her very expensive. In addition, under the terms of the contract that we had with the Blade Runner Partnership, we did not receive much profit. It didn't turn out as good as one might think. ”
Blade Runner Partnership was not interested in the costs of developing and especially publishing such a phenomenal creation. They saw only sales figures, and therefore wanted to get an even bigger piece from the sequel. As a result, Castle himself blocked the oxygen to this idea. “It was irrational, too big risks. We considered that they would hire someone else, but it seems that no one agreed to their “honest” conditions. ” Do not believe? Ask Gearbox.
Westwood under the command of Lewis Castle (front center) was eliminated by EA in 2003. Some employees moved to EA LA, and the rest founded Petroglyph and Jet Set Games.
In 2009, the creators of Borderlands told how they were offered a license. According to their estimates, the creation of the game would have cost $ 35 million, and there would be no question of any payback. Castle agrees: “It would be a game that challenges the traditional view of smart business. You will not make a profit if the game does not turn out great, and this is impossible without a great team with a very large amount of money. And do not forget about the partner to whom you must give a fair share just because he does not want to take risks. Nothing good will come of this approach. ”
And although we have already seen the rebirth of such games as Beneath a Steel Sky and The Secret of Monkey Island, unfortunately, in the case of Blade Runner, we don’t even have to hope for a remake. Only in order to restore almost a terabyte of materials to recreate the pre-rendering backs or even high-grade 3D, several tens of millions of dollars will be needed. The matter is complicated by the fact that the materials themselves will still have to be found, which is almost impossible without a time machine. Most of the Blade Runner, stored on hard drives, disappeared when EA liquidated Westwood in 2003. As a mad Dutchman would say: it dissolved like tears in the rain.
Authors translation: drk_patr1ck , Virgil , Dimouse from the site www.old-games.ru . See also our magazine and podcast on the history of old games and industry .
The original was published in E222 in November 2010.
The overpopulated Los Angeles in the near future, with its highly developed architecture, industry and technology, remains a source of inspiration for many artists. Nevertheless, as we approach 2019, we can only feel regret - the problems of isolation, privatization and destruction of nature are too familiar to us, but before flying machines, settling extraterrestrial colonies and building skyscrapers towering above the clouds. It is not surprising that artists try to create such a future themselves.
')
Commercial success to "Blade Runner" did not come immediately, as his creative potential went far beyond the standard Hollywood system with its eternal squabbles and limitations. In terms of richness, the history of the creation of this anarchic, spontaneous and colossal work can compete with all of its one hundred and sixteen minutes. Or one hundred and thirteen, one hundred and fourteen, one hundred and seventeen, depending on which version is considered to be “the most-most”. “To call it a single whole is difficult,” said Louis Castle, co-founder of the already defunct Westwood Studios. - Rather crumpled.
Who better to know how not to him. When Blade Runner Partnership offered Virgin to create an official game (already after negotiations with EA, Sierra and Mediagenic, now known as Activision), few people were aware of all the difficulties of the Blade Runner production process. We learned about them later from Paul Sammon’s Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (The Future in Noir, or How the Blade Runner was created). Scott's film insatiably demanded more and more investment, exhausting the pockets of investors, and eventually passed into the hands of The Ladd Company, which was led by media mogul Sir Shao Ife, and Tandem Productions, which was represented by Bad Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio. And even from them, he squeezed all the juice, to the point that in the end the whole project kept only on promises and honest word.
“Ridley had to sign many contracts with actors for secondary copyrights,” Castle says about his favorite film. - It was all very confusing, because the contracts of different people were different. To make matters worse, by the end of the filming, everyone had fought, and many of the recordings were lost. We were afraid that at any time anyone could claim their rights to the film or its parts. Therefore, we were forbidden to use all the cinema and audio materials, as we could violate someone's rights. ”
However, it was because of such a disastrous situation that Westwood got a job. In his concept for the future game, Castle actually actually described the “creation, not borrowing” approach before the concept itself. His idea was that the player had to take part in events that unfolded in parallel with the film’s action. “You have to play a role in a story about which only guesses used to go, and stay behind the scenes of the film,” says Castle.
Westwood knew that the partnership with Yorkin was tightly limited in time. They did not know that this was one of the many agreements between the publisher and the studio, but nevertheless had to submit their proposal during the week.
“We put together a demo based on the first few minutes of the film, since the spinner landed,” recalls Castle. - We worked hard all weekend, after which I presented our concept to the producers. It was as follows: you play as a character who does not know whether he is a replicant or a person; moreover, one cannot be completely sure of one thing. As you progress, the player must feel that he is achieving his goal, regardless of the chosen path, so the game will not need to start over. As a result, your idea of ​​the protagonist may differ significantly from the impressions of other players.
The presentation ended with the words: “This is our concept. And now we will demonstrate how it might look. ” And we showed them a video compressed using the technology originally created for the original games of the Command & Conquer series. She allowed to display high resolution graphics (640x480 at the time) in full screen mode and full color. Bud said then: "I wanted to ask which fragments of the film you were going to use, but now I don’t understand why it was given to you at all." So it was decided that each scene in the game will be created from scratch in 3D.
About how many studios offered to develop the game, Westwood learned only a few months after its announcement. Some even thought their candidacy was still being considered. "They called us and said:" We are doing it! ". “I had no idea that we had any competitors,” says Castle. - Probably, many things determined our unique approach. In my discourse on the concept of the game, I stressed that the fans of "Blade Runner" will not be enough to shoot at replicants. It seems that this (as well as the high quality of visual materials that we created in a very short time) played a decisive role. ”
Westwood could not use any footage from the film, nor the wonderful soundtrack of Vangelis. At the very least, they could involve people who took part in making the film, although two of them could be immediately struck off the list. “Ridley almost quarreled with everyone, and we couldn’t contact him or Harrison Ford,” said Castle. “You may not be aware of Ford’s attitude to the video game industry, but he believes that she is too free to deal with licenses.” So Harrison is strongly opposed to participating in game development. Therefore, I don’t know if he was really very busy, or we simply could not break through his prejudice. But with almost all the other participants of the film, we were able to work. "
Sid Meade did a great job on the 2019 Los Angeles concepts (we asked the Mead agents to provide materials for this article, but according to them, his participation in the design was short-lived). And although the performance was “accurate”, the team soon realized that something was missing. After all, the picture of the movie "Blade Runner" was quite different from the wonderful concept art of Mead. Yes, the new version was accurate, but relatively wrong source.
“So I sought out the guy who was in charge of the scenery for the film. Not a designer, but an engineer, says Castle. “We took him as a consultant and asked him the following question:“ Here are concept drawings of scenery for, for example, the office or house of Dekard. But what happened in the film. How did you make one of the other? ”
To which he replied: “We got acquainted with the work of Mead and said that we would be happy to implement his concepts, but we do not have a million dollars for each decoration. So we went to the dump, to the warehouse with props, and collected all sorts of things that were at least minimally similar to what we needed. And then they just fixed them, painted them and so on, so that everything was as similar as possible. ” With such revelations, I went back to our 3D artists and told them: “You have access to all these 3D libraries with a lot of everything, so now there’s no creation from scratch. Select the appropriate resources and only change them - trim, repaint, resize, but do not redo it. ” With this approach, we were able to make the game very much like a movie. ”
And this was a huge achievement for a game released at a time when 3D technology was just beginning to conquer the PC market. During the filming of the film, quite a few decorations were used, which were altered or rearranged so as to give them the desired look. The game required creating hundreds of scenes, many of which the player could fully explore, while “their level of detail could be estimated at millions of polygons. At that time, video cards could handle, at best, a couple of hundred polygons per frame. Even the most productive cards could hardly cope even with drawing one character, not to mention the detailed levels with lighting effects. ”
Westwood created a new technology based on one of the most interesting concepts in the history of games - voxels. They were used in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun to display units that could be resized and rotated, but in Blade Runner, this technology became a companion to another newfangled invention. In the mid-90s, a game that had 1000 episodes shot with motion capture would rightfully be considered a reckless fad. There were 20,000 such episodes in Blade Runner.
Each game scene is a mini-movie, and the extraction and compression of visual and geometric data is performed for each frame. This made it possible to create a primitive but effective dynamic lighting system, thanks to which game voxel objects — characters and spinners — could add light sources to fully rendered levels. In fact, it was a kind of deferred rendering, implemented many years before its promotion by games such as Killzone 2.
“But existing technologies have proven very inefficient when processing motion capture,” says Castle. “The capture took place at a speed of 60 frames per second, and the characters in the voxel space occupied such a large volume that for each of them we had to manually delete the frame by frame, leaving only the key ones.” Initially, voxel objects weighed about seven megabytes, while iron at that time could only process about one hundred kilobytes. Automatic optimization could significantly degrade the quality, which forced Westwood to resort to manual processing. Of course, the studio did not have time for all 20,000 episodes, so some objects in the game look very strange. Castle sighs: "It took too much time."
Was it possible to use specialized iron? “People often ask me about this,” says Castle. “Why didn't you use 3D?” Now it's easy to say that when there are graphics pipelines for rendering and complex shaders, but at the time they didn't even exist. Only a few polygons with vertex shaders were available, and texel mapping on most maps was inaccurate. Now I would do everything in 3D. But I want to tell you that in the future, voxels and raytracing will become relevant again, because graphic pipelines are already so detailed that we return to the processing of each pixel again. Such a rise and fall off of interest is the fate of any technology. ”
And this is especially true of game design. Few games could even come close to what we see in Blade Runner - with the exception of Police Quest, and strange RPG hybrids and quests like Microprose's BloodNET or BAT from Esprit Software. Detective work on the locations and in the menu, occasional use of the Voith-Kampf test and ESPER devices and even more episodic use of weapons ... The game perfectly knows what adventure should be - in order to be extremely interesting, sometimes you have to be quite boring.
“Blade Runner creates a kind of atmosphere — not fear or menace, but real horror,” says Castle. - The film itself is rather poor in action, but when it comes to it, we see cruelty, danger and death. I wanted to make a game in which your nerves will be constantly at the limit due to what can happen after the next mouse click. Something terrible may happen, but often this does not happen - everything is calm and simple. ”
Indeed, most of the time the hero, Ray McCoy, spends in the point'n'click-search, visiting people and locations time after time and wondering what kind of missing action will help open the next chapter. Most of the shots you have to do at the shooting range, as part of your daily routine, which also includes documenting the evidence on the police mainframe, riding the elevator, feeding the dog, again driving the elevator and sometimes a short sleep. “The player should not feel an excess of action. Then the sudden violence will shock, says Castle. And then he tells how he would apply the same principle to another fiction classic - “Alien”: - Most of the time, you just repair Nostromo or try to determine who the team is android. But with the appearance of the Alien, the struggle with him will be fierce. "
The basis of the plot of "Blade Runner" - is, of course, the mystery of who is actually an android. And this question is especially relevant for the protagonist himself. Westwood did not want to spend time and money on a four-disc game, which will be held only once, so it was decided to cut off everything that created uncertainty. But how can you ensure that the player completed the investigation, identified the fugitives and delved into the plot, while preserving the essence of the game? According to Castle, it was very simple - to create a “plot simulation” with a scenario unpredictable for the authors themselves. “It would seem,” he laughs, “that I already have enough experience to resist adventurous ideas. A vibrant, changing city that responds to your every action? Easier said than done".
In the early prototypes, the game randomly determined who would become the replicant, but the testers were not enthusiastic about such an idea. "Have you ever killed a person by mistake?" “Yes,” they answered, flogging the investigation at the earliest opportunity. Therefore, Westwood made a healthy chef Zuben and a representative, but mentally unstable Clovis (the first and last suspect) replicants by default, which made it possible to lay the foundation for the plot of the game. But the quality control department still had to stoically analyze all 2500 passes. The script, written by Bud Yorkin’s son David and lead designer David Leary, swelled from 80 to 500 pages.
According to the memoirs of Castle, the first version of the script for the authorship of Yorkin simply was no good at all. Therefore, he was asked to write a script for a hypothetical sequel to the film. The characters created by Yorkin and Liri fit so well into the bitter world of the film that fans now consider them part of a canon. Among them, animal smuggler Ransiter, teenage girl Lucy (a potential replicant), steep blade-rampant Crystal Steele, and a new group of fugitive replicants, some of whom are eager for revenge, while others simply hope to find a new life for themselves.
"David [Yorkin] could have such a line in the dialogue:" Brown townhouses looked especially strange, since they disappeared in the 1950s. And based on this observation alone, we had to conduct relevant research and create scenery for the stage, ”Castle recalls. And if the locations were so close that it was not practical to insert a video to switch between them, the team created several more scenes to connect them. - The main work on the locations we did in Los Angeles, at the sites that were used for filming the Bradbury building and the like. In the game you can see a lot more [scenes in this building] than shown in the film. ”
The Blade Runner itself has become a colossal enterprise. Castle admits: “It took significantly more time and money than we expected. Sometimes we had to make hard decisions and cut the game. But I would say that perseverance and the desire to do everything correctly helped us go through these tests. Even before the development, we had a wonderful project, and as our ideas came to life we ​​fell in love with the game so much that we were ready to spend any money on it. But time was not on our side - we just did not have time to do everything we wanted. ”
In a sense, the game suffered the fate of the film, but we did not see the “final” or “directorial” version. Only “designer” is actually an option in the menu, with the help of which it was possible to reduce the dialogues. There were "long negotiations" about the development of a sequel, and the success of "Blade Runner" - it sold out three times better than The Curse of Monkey Island of 1997 - seemed to guarantee its appearance. “Although the circulation was high, it was difficult to forget that the game included four discs. And it made her very expensive. In addition, under the terms of the contract that we had with the Blade Runner Partnership, we did not receive much profit. It didn't turn out as good as one might think. ”
Blade Runner Partnership was not interested in the costs of developing and especially publishing such a phenomenal creation. They saw only sales figures, and therefore wanted to get an even bigger piece from the sequel. As a result, Castle himself blocked the oxygen to this idea. “It was irrational, too big risks. We considered that they would hire someone else, but it seems that no one agreed to their “honest” conditions. ” Do not believe? Ask Gearbox.
Westwood under the command of Lewis Castle (front center) was eliminated by EA in 2003. Some employees moved to EA LA, and the rest founded Petroglyph and Jet Set Games.
In 2009, the creators of Borderlands told how they were offered a license. According to their estimates, the creation of the game would have cost $ 35 million, and there would be no question of any payback. Castle agrees: “It would be a game that challenges the traditional view of smart business. You will not make a profit if the game does not turn out great, and this is impossible without a great team with a very large amount of money. And do not forget about the partner to whom you must give a fair share just because he does not want to take risks. Nothing good will come of this approach. ”
And although we have already seen the rebirth of such games as Beneath a Steel Sky and The Secret of Monkey Island, unfortunately, in the case of Blade Runner, we don’t even have to hope for a remake. Only in order to restore almost a terabyte of materials to recreate the pre-rendering backs or even high-grade 3D, several tens of millions of dollars will be needed. The matter is complicated by the fact that the materials themselves will still have to be found, which is almost impossible without a time machine. Most of the Blade Runner, stored on hard drives, disappeared when EA liquidated Westwood in 2003. As a mad Dutchman would say: it dissolved like tears in the rain.
Authors translation: drk_patr1ck , Virgil , Dimouse from the site www.old-games.ru . See also our magazine and podcast on the history of old games and industry .
The original was published in E222 in November 2010.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/221043/
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