Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of Suggestive Gaming's 'In RETRO-spect',
where we examine a game or franchise that you may have missed, and take a deeper look
at it's development, key individuals involved, and its impact on the video game landscape.
Today, we're going to look at the 1997 PC game Blade Runner, but to do that, we have
to take a step or two back…
In 1968, science fiction writer Phillip K Dick released his novel Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sleep, a post-apocalyptic story of a bounty-hunter named Rick Deckard who
is tasked with eliminating, or "retiring" a group of escaped androids, called Nexus-6
models.
The novel later made its way around Hollywood, catching the interest of directors such as
Martin Scorsese, before an adaptation written by Hampton Fancer came across producer Michael
Deeley, who then took it to Alien director Ridley Scott.
Scott was reluctant to take the project, as he just fell out of a very lengthy and daunting
process of adapting another novel, Dune, which was scrapped and later picked up by director
David Lynch.
Scott eventually agreed, wanting to work on something to take his mind off of mourning
the unfortunate passing of his older brother.
Scott brought his own changes to the script, including changing the title to Blade Runner,
borrowing it from an unrelated film adaptation of an Alan E. Nourse novel.
The title was chosen simply because the production team liked the way it sounded, and Scott incorporated
it into the film by calling the main character, Deckard's group of android hunters: Blade
Runners.
The film was released in 1982 with Star Wars and Indiana Jones star Harrison Ford portraying
the main character, Rick Deckard.
Despite the big names attached to it, the film underperformed at the box office, and
critics were mixed on it.
The film's studio, Warner Bros., stepped in after filming completed, and demanded changes
that both Scott and Ford felt damaged the final product.
Because of this, the studio took Scott's notes on the project, and nearly ten years
later, released Blade Runner: The Director's Cut, on home video in 1991.
Staying more true to the director's original vision, the Director's Cut sold fairly well,
and reinvigorated audience interest in the film, causing it to achieve cult classic status.
Perhaps due to this slight re-surge in popularity, the company that had obtained the rights to
the film and it's intellectual property, called The Blade Runner partnership (composed
of producers Bud Yorkin, and Jerry Perenchio), began to pitch the idea of a Blade Runner
video game adaptation to several companies.
After being denied by EA, Sierra, and Activision, the project was eventually taken by Virgin
Interactive, and after several years of skirting around copyright issues, the game was given
to the developer of the Command and Conquer series: Westwood Studios to begin work.
Because of the aforementioned copyright issues, the developer was not able to strictly adapt
the story of the original film.
Instead, the game's director Louis Castle opted to create a new story that took place
along-side the plot of the film, with characters and events overlapping to give the player
an alternate view of the film's events.
This move was slightly unorthodox for movie games of the time, as most video game adaptations
of movie franchises generally took their plot and setpieces directly from their source material,
often using clips from them as cutscenes in-between the games' stages.
Virgin and the Blade Runner Partnership were thrilled by this idea, as well as early cutscenes
that were pitched to them, since they could still release a game with the Blade Runner
aesthetic and atmosphere, without using any copywritten story, audio, or visuals.
With this plan in motion, the team set out to create an adventure game, akin to Sierra
and LucasArts games, such as Space Quest, and the Indiana Jones games, respectively.
To greater encapsulate the Blade Runner look and feel, the team decided to create the game
in full 3D, unlike other adventure games of the time that were 2D and used sprite art.
Unlike nearly every 3D game, which used polygonal models rendered in real-time, Westwood instead
created their own engine which rendered character models using "voxels", or pixels with
height, width, and depth.
To go into more detail on the differences between these styles, polygonal rendering
sees models that are made up by connected points in 3D space, with each point connected
by a line.
This means that polygons can take on many different shapes and sizes, and when combined
together, can make up many detailed models, especially when the number of polygons is
very high.
Most every 3D rendered game, or film, you see today uses polygonal models.
The voxel engine by Westwood followed a similar concept, but instead of using polygons in
3D space that could consist of any shape, they simply used cubes of differing sizes
and color.
This means that every model in the Blade Runner game was created by stacking a bunch of blocks
on top of each other.
Think of every character or object in the game being created in Minecraft, and you'll
have a good idea of how the system works.
These models were then placed over pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, to give the environments more
detail without taking more processing power.
Despite using this unorthodox rendering style, the game's animations were still motion-captured
by actors, and the game had around 20,000 motion captured animations, an unprecedented
number at the time.
The game's story, while not being a straight adaptation of the film, still follows a very
similar plot of a Blade Runner, this time named Ray McCoy, following an investigation
involving Nexus-6 replicants.
Like intended by director Louis Castle, the story runs parallel to the film, with several
characters and plot points crossing over into the game.
Most characters who appear from the film are even played by their live-action counterparts,
such as Sean Young as Rachel and Joe Turkel as Dr. Eldon Tyrell.
The game also featured a very unique and interesting aspect to it's storytelling: random events,
encounters, and outcomes to situations, making every playthrough potentially different, and,
along with the game's thirteen different endings, gives the player many reasons for
replaying.
The game's story also runs in real-time, with other characters playing out their investigations
and side-stories as the player does theirs.
These aspects of the game also made it very ahead of its time in the adventure-game landscape,
with many games even today not taking that level of flexibility to their story-telling.
Blade Runner was released October 31, 1997, head-to-head with a new installment in the
acclaimed LucasArts adventure series, Monkey Island.
Despite the competition of The Curse of Monkey Island, Blade Runner was very successful,
selling over 1 million copies.
It was also well received by gaming critics, being nominated for several "Best Adventure
Game" awards, and winning the Interactive Achievement Award for "Computer Adventure
Game of the Year".
Despite selling well, Westwood saw little profits from the game, due to its high development
cost.
The game was also expensive to produce, since it's size caused it to span across four
discs.
In addition, the Blade Runner Partnership took a large portion of the sales as part
of their development deal.
Virgin Interactive and Westwood were interested in making a sequel to the game, but the Blade
Runner Partnership agreed only on the condition that their licensing fee was increased even
more.
Virgin and Westwood predicted that the sequel would have to sell double or more what the
original did to turn a profit, so the decision was to walk away from the Blade Runner franchise,
as it was now financially unfeasable to work on.
In August, 1998, less than a year after Blade Runner's release, Westwood studios was sold
by Virgin Interactive to Electronic Arts, with all of the rights of Westwood's games
transferring to the new parent company.
Westwood continued to develop games, namely under the Command and Conquer series, until
EA folded the company in 2003 to consolidate the studio into its other branches.
Director Louis Castle went on to work on EA projects such as the Steven Spielberg designed
"Boom Blox" series, until 2009, when he left to work in other areas in the industry.
Like many PC games of it's time, Blade Runner later became what's known as "abandonware",
or software that became ignored and unsupported by its manufacturer.
While EA owns the rights to the game, it has not seen a digital release on any platform,
presumably due to licensing issues.
As such, playing the game today requires you to have the original discs, either by purchasing
them or by more nefarious means.
Finding the game may be difficult, but playing it on a modern PC is even more-so.
Because the game's installer was written for 16-bit Windows operating systems, it is
incompatible with most modern PC's running 64-bit Windows or Macintosh.
Therefore, playing the game requires either a virtual machine, or a fan-made installer
by "replaying.de" which allows you to use the original discs to install the game,
as well as provides necessary patches to play the game without issue.
This solution still isn't perfect, however, as some bugs do exist, such as cutscenes not
playing.
In 2015, Louis Castle explained that when Westwood was disbanded by EA, the original
source code and assets for the game were lost, making a proper re-release of the game nearly
impossible, unless it was rebuilt from the ground up, costing an estimated tens of millions
of dollars.
Much like the film it is based on, the Blade Runner video game went on to become a cult
classic, with many of its players remembering it fondly, but without an easy way to play
it today.
Despite this, you can still see it's impact in the video game industry today.
The 3D adventure game style it ushered in is still in use today by companies such as
Sierra and Telltale games.
The concept of creating a video game that expands on a film's story instead of directly
adapting it was also used later in such games as Enter the Matrix and Tron: Evolution, among
others.
While many have likely never heard of the game, upon playing it, it's easy to see
how it's seeds were planted in the adventure game landscape, and despite it's visuals,
the game has stood the test of time and still feels modern despite being over twenty years
old.
While today, the Blade Runner video game doesn't get as much recognition as other adventure
games of it's time, it is hard to ignore the sheer ambitiousness and long-lasting effects
of the project.
With 2017's sequel to the original film, Blade Runner 2049, interest in the franchise
rose once again, so maybe, someday, we'll see another video game in the universe.
As late as 2009, The Blade Runner Partnership was shopping around a new game to companies
such as Borderlands creator Gearbox, so the idea isn't out of the question.
Still though, as software preservation becomes harder and harder with growing technology,
this game is not one that will soon be forgotten...or should I say, retired.
Thanks for watching the first episode of Suggestive Gaming's In RETRO-spect.
We hope you learned something, and if you liked the video, please click the like button
below, and go ahead and leave a comment suggesting a game you'd like us to cover on the show.
Also, make sure you click that subscribe button to see more of these videos as well as our
other series.
See you next time!
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