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A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 2: A Series of Unfortunate Events


This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.

Coming out of 1998, the folks at Looking Glass Studios believed they had pretty good reason to feel optimistic about their future. With Thief, they had delivered not just their first profitable original game since 1995’s Flight Unlimited but their biggest single commercial success ever. They had no fewer than four more games slated for release within the next fifteen months, a positively blistering pace for them. Yes, all of said games were sequels and iterations on existing brands, but that was just the nature of the industry by now, wasn’t it? As long-running franchises like Ultima had first begun to demonstrate fifteen years ago, there was no reason you couldn’t continue to innovate under a well-known and -loved banner headline. Looking Glass closed their Austin office that had done so much to pay the bills in the past by taking on porting contracts. In the wake of Thief, they felt ready to concentrate entirely on their own games.

Then, just as they thought they had finally found their footing, the ground started to shift beneath Looking Glass once again. Less than a year and a half after the high point of Thief’s strong reviews and almost equally strong sales, Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner would be forced to shutter their studio forever.

We can date the beginning of the cascading series of difficulties that ultimately undid Looking Glass to March of 1999, when their current corporate parent decided to divest from games, which in turn meant divesting from them. Intermetrics had been on a roller-coaster ride of its own since being purchased by Michael Alexander in 1995. In 1998, the former television executive belatedly recognized the truth of what Mike Dornbrook had tried to tell him some time ago: that his dreams and schemes for turning Intermetrics into a games or multimedia studio made no sense whatsoever. He deigned to allow the company to return to its core competencies — indeed, to double-down on them. Late in the year, Intermetrics merged with Pacer InfoTec, another perennial recipient of government and military contracts. The new entity took the name of AverStar. When one looked through its collection of active endeavors — making an “Enterprise Information Portal” for the Army Chief of Staff; developing drainage-modeling software for the U.S. Geological Survey; providing “testing and quality-support services” for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; writing and maintaining software for the Space Shuttle and other NASA vehicles — the games of Looking Glass stood out as decidedly unlike the others. Michael Alexander and his reconstituted team of managers, most of them grizzled veterans of the Beltway military-industrial complex, saw no point in continuing to dabble in games. In the words of Looking Glass programmer Mark LeBlanc, “AverStar threw us back into the sea.”

Just as is the case with Intermetrics’s acquisition of Looking Glass barely a year and a half earlier, the precise terms under which Alexander threw his once-prized catch back have never surfaced to my knowledge. It’s clear enough, however, that Looking Glass’s immediate financial position at this juncture was not quite so dire as it had been, thanks to the success of Thief if nothing else. Still, none of the systemic problems of being a small fish in the big pond of the games industry had been solved. Their recent success notwithstanding, without a deeper-pocketed parent or partner to negotiate for them, Looking Glass was destined to have a harder time getting their games into stores and selling them on their own terms.

The next unfortunate event — unfortunate for Looking Glass, but deeply tragic for some others — came about a month later. On April 20, 1999, two deeply troubled, DOOM-loving teenagers walked into their high school in the town of Columbine, Colorado, carrying multiple firearms each, and proceeded to kill thirteen of their fellow students and teachers and wound or terrorize hundreds more before turning their guns on themselves. This horrific event, occurring as it did before the American public had been somewhat desensitized to such massacres by the sheer numbing power of repetition, placed the subject of violence in videogames under the mass-media spotlight in a way it hadn’t been since Joseph Lieberman’s Senate hearings of 1993. Now Lieberman, a politician with mounting presidential ambitions, was back to point the finger more accusingly than ever.

This is not the place to attempt to address the fraught subject of what actual links there might be between violence in games and violence in the real world, links which hundreds of sociological and psychological studies have never managed to conclusively prove or disprove. Suffice to say that attributing direct causality to any human behavior outside the controlled setting of a laboratory is really, really hard, even before one factors in the distortions that can arise from motivated reasoning when the subject being studied is as charged as this one. Setting all of that aside, however, this was not a form of attention to which your average gaming executive of 1999 had any wish to expose himself. First-person action games that looked even vaguely like DOOM — such as most of the games of Looking Glass — were cancelled, delayed, or de-prioritized in an effort to avoid seeming completely insensitive to tragedy. De-prioritization rather than something worse was the fate of Looking Glass’s System Shock 2, but that would prove plenty bad enough for a studio with little margin for error.

The story of System Shock 2′s creation is yet another of those “only at Looking Glass” tales. In 1994, a 27-year-old Boston computer consultant named Ken Levine played System Shock 1 and was bowled over by the experience. A year or so later, he saw a want ad from the maker of his favorite game in a magazine. He applied and was hired. He contributed a great deal to Thief during that project’s formative period of groping in the dark — he is credited in the finished game for “initial design and story concepts” — and then was given a plum role indeed. Looking Glass had just won a contract to make an adventure game based on the popular new television series Star Trek: Voyager, and Levine was placed in charge of it.

Alas, that project fell apart within a year or so, when Viacom, the media conglomerate that owned the property, took note of the lackluster commercial performance of another recent Star Trek adventure game — and of recent adventure games in general — and pulled the plug. Understandably enough, Levine was devastated at having thus wasted a year of his life. Somewhat less understandably, he blamed the management of Looking Glass as much as Viacom for the fiasco. He left to start his own studio, taking with him two other Looking Glass employees, by the names of Jon Chey and Rob Fermier.

This is where the story gets weird, in an oh, so Looking Glass sort of way. Once they were out on their own, trading under the name of Irrational Games, the trio found that contracts and capital were not as easy to come by as they had believed they would be. At his wit’s end, facing the prospect of a return to his former life as an ordinary computer consultant, Levine came crawling back to his old bosses Lerner and Neurath. But rather than ask for his old job back, he asked to make a game with them, as a partnership between Irrational and Looking Glass that made use of the same Dark Engine that was to power Thief. Most bosses would have laughed in the face of someone who had poached two of their people in a bid to show them up and show them how it was done, only to get his comeuppance in such deserving fashion. But not Lerner and Neurath. They agreed to help Levine and his friends make a game in the spirit of System Shock, Levine’s whole reason for joining the industry in the first place. In fact, they even let them move back into Looking Glass’s offices for a while in order to do it. They soon succeeded in capturing the interest of Electronic Arts, the corporate parent of Origin Systems and thus the owner of the System Shock brand. Just like that, Levine’s homage became a direct sequel, an officially anointed System Shock 2.

The ironic capstone to this tale is that Warren Spector had recently left Looking Glass because he had been unable to secure permission to do exactly what the unproven and questionably loyal young Ken Levine was now going to get to do: to make a spiritual heir to System Shock. Spector ended up at Ion Storm, a new studio founded by John Romero of DOOM fame, where he set to work on what would become Deus Ex.

In the course of making System Shock 2, the Irrational staff grew to about fifteen people, who did eventually move into their own office. Nonetheless, the line separating their contributions from those of Looking Glass proper remained murky at best. As a postmortem written by Jon Chey would later put it, “the project was a collaborative effort between two companies based on a contract that only loosely defined the responsibilities of each organization.” It’s for this reason that I’ll be talking about System Shock 2 from here on like I might any other Looking Glass game.

The sequel isn’t shy about embracing its heritage. Once again, it casts you into an outer-space complex gone badly, horrifyingly haywire; this time you find yourself in humanity’s first faster-than-light starship instead of a mere space station. Once again, the game begins with you waking up disoriented, not knowing how you got here, forced to rely on narrations of the backstory that may or may not be reliable. Once again, your first and most obvious antagonists are the zombified corpses of the people who used to crew the ship. Once again, you slowly learn what really went down here through the emails and logbooks you stumble across. Once again, you have a variety of cybernetic hardware to help you stay alive, presented via a relentlessly diegetic interface. Once again, you meet SHODAN, the disembodied, deliciously evil artificial intelligence who was arguably the most memorable single aspect of the very memorable first game. And once again, she is brought to iconic life by the voice of Terri Brosius. In these ways and countless others, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But even as it embraces its heritage in the broad strokes, System Shock 2 isn’t averse to tinkering with the formula, through both subtraction and addition. The most significant edit is the elimination of a separate, embodied cyberspace, which was already beginning to feel dated in 1994, having been parachuted in straight out of William Gibson’s 1984-vintage Neuromancer. Cyberspace has its charms in System Shock 1, but few would deny that it’s the roughest part of the game in terms of implementation; it was probably a wise choice for Ken Levine and company to focus their efforts elsewhere. More debatable are their decisions to simplify the hacking mini-games that you sometimes need to play to open locked doors and the like, and to eliminate the unique multi-variant difficulty settings of the first game, which let you turn it into whatever kind of experience you desire, from a walking simulator to an exercise in non-stop carnage to a cerebral pseudo-adventure game. System Shock 2 settles for letting you choose a single setting of “Easy,” “Normal,” “Hard,” or “Impossible,” like any standard-issue shooter of the era.

In fact, at first glance this game looks very much like a standard shooter. If you try to play it as one, however, you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion when you die… and die and die and die. This isn’t a stealth game to the same extent as Thief, but it does demand that you proceed with caution, looking for ways to outwit enemies whom you can’t overcome through firepower. If you can’t see your way to noticing and disabling the security cameras that lurk in many a corner, for example, you’re going to find yourself overwhelmed, no matter how fast and accurate a trigger finger you happen to possess.

By way of a partial replacement for the multi-variant difficulty settings of its predecessor, Irrational chose to graft onto System Shock 2 more CRPG elements. Theoretically at least, these give you almost as much control over what kind of game you end up playing. You can go for a combat-oriented build if you want more of a shooter experience — within reason, that is! — or you can become a hardcore tech-head or even a sort of Jedi who makes use of “psi” powers. Or you can judiciously mix and match your abilities, as most players doubtless wind up doing. After choosing an initial slate of skills at the outset, you are given the opportunity to learn more — or to improve the ones you already have — at certain milestones in the plot.

You create your character in System Shock 2 in a similar way to the old Traveller tabletop RPG, by sending him off on three tours of duty with different service branches — or the same one, if you prefer. (I fancy I can see some traces of the Star Trek: Voyager game which Ken Levine once set out to make in the vibe and the iconography here.) This is an example of how System Shock 2 can sometimes feel like it has a few too many ideas for its own good. It seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to establish a character who is about to get his memories erased anyway.

System Shock 2 is an almost universally acclaimed game today, perhaps even more so than its uglier low-res predecessor. There are good reasons for this. The atmosphere of dread builds and builds as you explore the starship, thanks not least to masterful environmental sound design; if anything, this game is more memorable for its soundscape than for its visuals. Although its emergent qualities are certainly nothing to sneeze at, in my opinion the peak moment of the game is actually pre-scripted. A jaw-dropping plot twist arrives about halfway through, one of the most shocking I’ve ever encountered in a game. I hesitate to say much more here, but will just reveal that nothing and no one turn out to be what you thought they were, and that SHODAN is involved. Because of course she is…

For all its increased resolution and equal mastery of atmosphere, however, System Shock 2 doesn’t strike me as quite so fully realized as the first System Shock. It suffers by comparison with Warren Spector’s own System Shock successor Deus Ex, which was released about nine months later. System Shock 2 never seems entirely sure how to balance its CRPG elements, which are dependent on character skill, with its action elements, which are dependent on player skill. Increasing your character’s skill in gunnery, for example, somehow makes your guns do more damage when you shoot someone with them; this is not exactly intuitive or realistic. Deus Ex just does so much of this sort of thing so much better. In that game, a higher skill level lets your character hold the gun steadier when you’re trying to shoot with it; this makes a lot more sense.

Unusually for Looking Glass, who seldom released a game before its time, System Shock 2 shows all the signs of having been yanked out of its creators’ hands a few months too early. The level design declines dramatically during the final third of the game, becoming downright sketchy by the time you get to the underwhelming finale. The overall balance of the gameplay systems is somewhat out of whack as well. It’s really, really hard to gain traction as a psi-focused character in particular, and dismayingly easy to end up with a character that isn’t tenable by choosing the wrong skills early on. I found a lot of the design choices in System Shock 2 to be tedious and annoying, such that I wished for a way to just turn them off: the scarcity of ammunition (another way to find yourself in an unwinnable cul de sac), the way that weapons degrade at an absurd pace and constantly need to be repaired, the endlessly respawning enemies that make hard-won firefights feel kind of pointless, the decision to arbitrarily deprive you of your trusty auto-map just at the point when you need it most.

Granted, some of this was also in System Shock 1, but it irritated me much more here. In the end, the two games provide very similar subjective experiences. Perchance this was just a ride I was only interested in going on once; perchance I would have a very different reaction to System Shock 2 if I had met it before its older sibling. Or maybe I’m just getting more protective of my time as I get older and have less and less of it left. (Ach… hold that morbid thought!)

Whatever its ratio of strengths to weaknesses, System Shock 2 didn’t do very well at all upon its release in June of 1999. Many folks from both Looking Glass and Irrational attribute this disappointment entirely to the tragic occurrence of two months earlier in Columbine, Colorado. Although the full picture is surely more nuanced — it always is, isn’t it? — we have no reason doubt that the fallout from the massacre was a major factor in the game’s commercial failure. According to Paul Neurath, Electronic Arts pondered for a while whether it was wise to put System Shock 2 out at all. He remembers EA’s CEO Larry Probst telling him that “we may just want to walk away from doing shooters because there’s talk of these shooters causing these kinds of events.” “We convinced them to release the game,” says Neurath, “but they did almost zero marketing and they put it in the bargain discount $9.95 bin 45 days after the game launched. It never stood a chance to make any money. That really hurt us financially.”

If System Shock 2 was to some extent a victim of circumstances, Looking Glass’s next game was a more foreseeable failure. For some reason, they just couldn’t stop beating the dead horse of flight simulation, even though it had long since become clear that this wasn’t what their primary audience wanted from them at all. Flight Unlimited III wasn’t a bad flight simulator, but the changes it introduced to the formula were nowhere near as dramatic as those that marked Flight Unlimited II. The most notable new development was a shift from the San Francisco Bay to Washington State, a much larger geographical area depicted in even greater detail. (Owners of the second game were given the privilege of loading their old scenery into the new engine as well.) Innovation or the lack thereof aside, the same old problem remained, in the form of Microsoft’s 800-pound-gorilla of a flight-simulation franchise, which was ready with its own “2000” update at the same time. Published by Electronic Arts in late 1999, Flight Unlimited III stiffed even more abjectly than had System Shock II.

On the left, we see Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as depicted in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2000. On the right, we see the same airport in Flight Unlimited III. The former modeled the whole world, including more than 20,000 airports; the latter tried to compete by modeling a comparatively small area better. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of the two approaches, Looking Glass’s did not prove a formula for marketplace success.

A comparatively bright spot that holiday season was Thief Gold, which added three new missions to the original’s twelve and tweaked and polished the existing ones. It did decently well as a mid-tier product with a street price of about $25, plus a $10 rebate for owners of the previous version of Thief and the promise of a $10 discount off the upcoming Thief II. But a product like this was never going to offset Looking Glass’s two big failures of 1999.

In truth, the Looking Glass goose was probably already more or less cooked as Y2K began. The only thing that might have saved them was Thief 2: The Metal Age turning into a massive hit right out of the gate. Sadly, there was little likelihood of that happening; the best that Looking Glass could realistically hope for was another solid half-million seller. There was already a sense in the studio as the final touches were being put on Thief 2 that, barring a miracle, this game was likely to be their swansong.

As swansongs go, Thief II acquits itself pretty darn well. It comes off as far more self-assured than its predecessor, being focused almost exclusively on stealth rather than monster-slaying through its fifteen cunningy crafted levels. Some of these spaces — a huge central bank, a sprawling warehouse complex, a rich art collector’s country estate — are intricate and beautiful enough that you almost wish there was an option to just wander around and admire them, without having to worry about guards and traps and all the rest. There’s a greater willingness here to use gameplay to advance the larger story: plot twists sometimes arrive in the midst of a mission, and you can often learn more about what’s really going on, if you’re interested, by listening carefully to the conversations that drift around the outskirts of the darkness in which you cloak yourself. Indeed, Thief II is positively bursting with little Easter eggs for the observant. Some of them are even funny, such as a sad-sack pair of guards who have by now been victimized by Garrett several times in other places, who complain to one another, Laurel and Hardy style, about their lot in life of constantly being outsmarted.

The subtitle pays tribute to the fact that the milieu of Thief has now taken on a distinct steampunk edge, with clanking iron robots and gun turrets for Garrett to contend with in addition to the ever-present human guards. Garrett now has a mechanical eye which he can use to zoom in on things, or even to receive the visual signal from a “scouting orb” that he’s toss out into an exposed space to get a better picture of his surroundings. I must confess that I’m somewhat of two minds about this stuff: it’s certainly more interesting than zombies, but I do still kind of long for the purist neo-Renaissance milieu I thought I was getting when I played the first level of Thief I.

The “faces” on the robots look a bit like SHODAN, don’t they? Some of the code governing their behavior was also lifted directly from that game. But unlike your mechanical enemies in System Shock 2, these robots have steam boilers on their posteriors which you can douse with water arrows to disable them.

Beyond this highly debatable point, though, there’s very little to complain about here, unless it be that Thief II, for all its manifest strengths, doesn’t quite manage to stand on its own. Oddly in light of what a make-or-break title this was for them, Looking Glass seems not to have given much thought to easing new players into this very different way of approaching a first-person action game; they didn’t even bother to rehash the rudimentary tutorial that kicks off Thief I. As a result, and as a number of otherwise positively disposed contemporary reviewers noted, Thief II has more the flavor of an expansion pack — a really, really well-done one, mind you — than a full-fledged sequel. It probably isn’t the best place to start, but anyone who enjoyed the first game will definitely enjoy this one.

Looking Glass’s problem, of course, was that none of what I’ve just written sounds like a ticket to id- or Blizzard-level success, which was what they needed by this point to save the company. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, Thief II “is a ’boutique’ game: a gamer’s game. It pays its dividends in persistent tension rather than in bursts of fear. It still pumps as much adrenaline, but it works on a subtler level. It’s the difference between Strangers on a Train and Armageddon, between the intimated and the explicit.”

Having thus delivered another cult classic rather than a blockbuster, Looking Glass’s fate was sealed. By March of 2000, when Eidos published Thief 2, Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner had been trying to sell their studio for a second time for the better part of a year. Sony was seriously interested for a while, until a management shakeup there killed the deal. Then Eidos was on the verge of pulling the trigger, only to have its bankers refuse to loan the necessary funds after a rather disappointing year for the company, in which the Tomb Raider train seemed to finally be running out of steam and John Romero’s would-be magnum opus Daikatana, which Eidos was funding and publishing for Ion Storm, ran way over time and budget. Not wanting to risk depriving their employees of their last paychecks, Neurath and Lerner decided to shut their studio down with dignity. On May 24, 2000, they called everyone together to thank them for their efforts and to tell them that Thief II had been Looking Glass’s last game. “We’re closing,” said Paul Neurath. What else was there to say?

Plenty, as it turned out. The news of the shuttering prompted paroxysms of grief throughout gaming’s burgeoning online ecosystem, frequently accompanied by a full measure of self-loathing. Looking Glass had been just too smart for a public that wasn’t worthy of them, so the story went. Many a gamer who had always meant to pick up this or that subtly subversive Looking Glass masterstroke, but had kept delaying in favor of easier, more straightforward fare, blamed himself for being a part of the problem. But no amount of hand-wringing or self-flagellation could change the fact that Looking Glass was no more. The most it could do was to turn having worked for the studio into a badge of honor and one hell of a line item on anyone’s CV, as a Looking Glass diaspora spread out across the industry to influence its future.

To wit: the tearful tributes were still pouring in when Ion Storm’s Warren Spector-led Deus Ex reached store shelves in June of 2000. Cruel irony of ironies: Deus Ex became a hit on a scale that Thief, Looking Glass’s biggest game ever, could scarcely have dreamed of approaching. Right to the end, Looking Glass was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.


Looking Glass was a cool group, and a lot of us put a lot of time and energy and a large part of our lives into it, and it’s sad when that doesn’t work out. So there’s some part of me that says, oh, that sucks, that’s not fair, but it’s the real world and it had a pretty good run.

— Doug Church

Without consciously intending to, I’ve found myself writing quite a lot of obituaries of gaming icons recently: TSR, Sierra On-Line, MicroProse, Bullfrog, the adventure-making arm of Legend Entertainment. Call it a sign of the millennial times, a period of constant, churning acquisition and consolidation in which it began to seem that just half a dozen or so many-tendriled conglomerates were destined to divide the entirety of digital gaming among themselves. Now, we can add Looking Glass to our list of victims of this dubious idea of progress.

A lot of hyperbole has been thrown around about Looking Glass over the past quarter-century. A goodly portion of it is amply justified. That said, I do think there is some room for additional nuance. (There always is, isn’t there?) At the risk of coming off like the soulless curmudgeon in the room, I’m not going to write about Looking Glass here as if they were a bunch of tortured artists starving in a garret somewhere. Instead I’m going to put on my pragmatist’s hat and go off on in search of some more concrete reasons why these remarkable games didn’t resonate as much as they may have deserved to back in the day.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner made some fairly baffling business decisions over the years. Their disastrous choice to try to make a go of it as an independent publisher against gale-force headwinds in 1995 can be all too easily seen as the precipitating event that sent Looking Glass down the road to closure five years later. Then, too, their insistence on persisting with the Flight Unlimited series must stand high on their list of mistakes. Incredibly, at the time Looking Glass was shut down, they were still at the flight-simulation thing, having spent a reported $3 million already on a fourth one, which was finally to add guns and enemy aircraft to the mix; this was half a million more than they had spent to make Thief 2, a game with a far more secure customer base. [1]After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.

Then again, this isn’t a Harvard Business School case study. What final words are there to say about the games themselves, the real legacy of this company that failed rather spectacularly at its business-school ambition of making a lot of — okay, any — money? How should we understand them in their full historical context?

As you probably know, historical context is kind of my jam. Writing for this site is for me a form of time travel. I don’t play modern games for lack of hours in the day, and I’ve long since settled into a more or less one-to-one correspondence between present time and historical time; that’s to say, it takes me about one year worth of articles on this site to fully cover one year of gaming history and matters adjacent. We’ve by now moved out of the era when I was playing a lot of games in my previous life, so most of what I encounter is new to me. I think this puts me in a privileged position. I can come pretty close to experiencing and appreciating games — and the evolution of the medium as a whole — as a contemporary player might have done. When I read in the year 2025 that Looking Glass was poorly rewarded for their uncompromising spirit of innovation, I can understand and even to a large extent agree. And yet, in my role as a time traveler, I can also kind of understand why a lot of gamers ended up voting with their wallets for something else.

The decade after Looking Glass’s demise saw the rise of what gaming scholar Jesper Juul has dubbed the Casual Revolution; this was the heyday of BejeweledZumaDiner Dash, and the Big Fish portal, which brought gaming to whole new, previously untapped demographics who dwarfed the hardcore old guard in numbers. In 2010, when this revolution was at its peak, Juul put forth five characteristics that define casual gaming: “emotionally positive fictions”; “little presupposed knowledge” on the player’s part; a tolerance for being played in “short bursts”; “lenient punishments for failing”; and “positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.” The games of Looking Glass are the polar opposite of this list. At times, they seem almost defiantly so; witness the lack of an “easy” setting in Thief, as if to emphasize that anyone who might wish for such a thing is not welcome here. Looking Glass’s games are the ultimate “gamer’s games,” as Computer Gaming World put it, unabashedly demanding a serious commitment of time, focus, energy, and effort from their players. But daily life demands plenty of those things from most of us already, doesn’t it? In this light, it doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of people decided to just go play something more welcoming and less demanding. This didn’t make them ingrates; it just made them people who weren’t quite sure that there was enough space in their life to work that hard for their entertainment. I sympathize because I often felt the same in the course of my time-traveling; when I saw a new Looking Glass game on the syllabus, it was always a little bit harder than it ought to have been for me to muster the motivation to take the plunge. And this is part of what I do for a living!

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with gamer’s games. But they are by definition niche pursuits. The tragedy of Looking Glass (if I can presume to frame it in those terms in an article which has previously mentioned the real tragedy that took place at Columbine High School) is that they were making niche games at a time when the economics of the industry were militating against the long tail, pushing everyone toward a handful of tried-and-true mainstream gameplay formulas. After the millennium, the rise of digital distribution would give studios the luxury of being loudly and proudly niche, if that was where their hearts were. (Ironically, this happened at the same instant that ultra-mainstream casual gaming took off, and was enabled by the same transformative technology of broadband in the home.) But digital distribution of games as asset-heavy as those of Looking Glass was a non-starter throughout the 1990s. C’est la vie.

This situation being what it was, I do feel that Looking Glass could have made a bit more of an effort to be accessible, to provide those real or metaphorical easy modes, if only in the hope and expectation that their customers would eventually want to lose the training wheels and play the games as they were meant to be played. On-ramping is a vital part of the game designer’s craft, one at which Looking Glass, for all their strengths in other areas, wasn’t all that accomplished.

Another thing that Looking Glass was not at all good at, or seemingly even all that interested in, was multiplayer, which became a bigger and bigger part of gaming culture as the 1990s wore on. (They did add a co-operative multiplayer mode to System Shock 2 via a patch, but it always felt like the afterthought it was.) This was a problem in itself. Just to compound it, Looking Glass’s games were in some ways the most single-player games of them all. “Immersion” was their watchword: they played best in a darkened room with headphones on, almost requiring of their players that they deliberately isolate themselves from the real world and its inhabitants. Again, this is a perfectly valid design choice, but it’s an inherently niche one.

Speaking only for myself now I think this is another reason that the games of Looking Glass proved a struggle for me at times. At this point in my life at least, I’m just not that excited about isolating myself inside hermetically sealed digital spaces. If I want total immersion, I take a walk and immerse myself in nature. Games I prefer to play on the sofa next to my wife. My favorite Looking Glass game, for what it’s worth, is System Shock, which I played at an earlier time in my life when immersion was perhaps more of a draw than it is today. Historical context is one thing, personal context another: it’s damnably difficult to separate our judgments of games from the circumstances in which we played them.

Of course, this is one of the reasons that I always encourage you not to take my judgments as the final word on anything, to check out the games I write about for yourself if they sound remotely interesting. It’s actually not that hard to get a handle on Looking Glass’s legacy for yourself. Considering the aura of near-divinity that cloaks the studio today, the canon of widely remembered Looking Glass classics is surprisingly small. They seem to have had a thing for duologies: their place in history boils down to the two Ultima Underworld games, the two System Shock games, and the two Thief games. The rest of their output has been pretty much forgotten, with the partial exception of Terra Nova on the part of the really dedicated.

Still, three bold and groundbreaking concepts that each found ways to advance the medium on multiple fronts is more than enough of a legacy for any studio, isn’t it? So, let us wave a fondly respectful farewell to Looking Glass, satisfied as we do so that we will be meeting many of their innovations and approaches, sometimes presented in more accessible packages, again and again as we continue to travel through time.



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SourcesThe books Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul, and the Prima strategy guide to Thief II by Howard A. Jones; Computer Gaming World of January 1999, November 1999, January 2000, February 2000, and June 2000;  Retro Gamer 60, 177, and 260; Game Developer of November 1999; Boston Globe of May 26 2000; Boston Magazine of December 2013.

Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” and “Without Looking Glass, There was No Irrational Games” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios,” GameSpy featurette by John “Warrior” Keefer, Christian Nutt’s interview with Ken Levine on the old Gamasutra site, AverStar’s millennial-era corporate site,

Where to Get Them: System Shock 2 is available for purchase in original or remastered form at GOG.com. Thief 2: The Metal Age is also available.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.
 
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Posted by on October 17, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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This Week on The Analog Antiquarian

Chapter 5: The New Star

 
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Posted by on October 10, 2025 in Uncategorized

 

A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 1: Just Lookin’ for a Hit


This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.

There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.

— Doug Church, Looking Glass Studios

Late in 1994, after their rather brilliant game System Shock had debuted to a reception most kindly described as constrained, the Boston-based studio Looking Glass Technologies sent their star producer Warren Spector down to Austin, Texas. There he was to visit the offices of Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems, whose lack of promotional enthusiasm they largely blamed for their latest game’s lukewarm commercial performance. Until recently, Spector had been directly employed by Origin. The thinking, then, was that he might still be able to pull some strings in Austin to move the games of Looking Glass a little higher up in the priority rankings. The upshot of his visit was not encouraging. “What do I have to do to get a hit around here?” Spector remembers pleading to his old colleagues. The answer was “very quiet, very calm: ‘Sign Mark Hamill to star in your game.‘ That was the thinking at the time.” But interactive movies were not at all what Looking Glass wanted to be doing, nor where they felt the long-term future of the games industry lay.

So, founders Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner decided to make some major changes in their business model in the hope of raising their studio’s profile. They accepted $3.8 million in venture capital and cut ties with Origin, announcing that henceforward Looking Glass would publish as well as create their games for themselves. Jerry Wolosenko, a new executive vice president whom they hired to help steer the company into its future of abundance, told The Boston Globe in May of 1995 that “we expect to do six original titles per year. We are just beginning.” This was an ambitious goal indeed for a studio that, in its five and a half years of existence to date, had managed to turn out just three original games alongside a handful of porting jobs.

Even more ambitious, if not brazen, was the product that Looking Glass thought would provide them with their entrée into the ranks of the big-time publishers. They intended to mount a head-on challenge to that noted tech monopolist Microsoft, whose venerable, archetypally entitled Flight Simulator was the last word — in fact, very nearly the only word — in civilian flight simulation. David-versus-Goliath contests in the business of media didn’t come much more pronounced than this one, but Looking Glass thought they had a strategy that might allow them to break at least this particular Microsoft monopoly.

Flight Unlimited was the brainchild of a high-energy physicist, glider pilot, and amateur jazz pianist named Seamus Blackley, who had arrived at Looking Glass by way of the legendary Fermi Laboratory. His guiding principle was that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as it had evolved over the last decade and a half had become less a simulation of flight itself than a simulation of the humdrum routine of civil aviation — of takeoff permissions and holding patterns, of navigational transponders and instrument landing systems. He wanted to return the focus to the simple joy of soaring through the air in a flying machine, something that, for all the technological progress that had been made since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, could still seem closer to magic than science. The emphasis would be on free-form aerobatics rather than getting from Airport A to Airport B. “I want people to see that flying is beautiful, exciting, and see the thrill you can get from six degrees of freedom when you control an airplane,” Blackley said. “That’s why we’ve focused on the experience of flying. There is no fuel gauge.”

The result really was oddly beautiful, being arguably as close to interactive art as a product that bills itself as a vehicular simulation can possibility get. Its only real concession to structure took the form of a 33-lesson flying course, which brought you from just being able to hold the airplane straight and level to executing gravity-denying Immelman rolls, Cuban eights, hammerheads, and inverted spins. Any time that your coursework became too intense, you always had the option to just bin the lesson plans and, you know, go out and fly, maybe to try some improvisational skywriting.

In one sense, Flight Unlimited was a dramatic departure from the two Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, all of which were embodied first-person, narrative-oriented designs that relied on 3D graphics of a very different stripe. In another sense, though, it was business as usual, another example of Looking Glass not only pushing boundaries of technology in a purist sense — the flight model of Flight Unlimited really was second to none — but using it in the service of a game that was equally aesthetically innovative, and just a little bit more thoughtful all the way around than was the norm.

Upon its release in May of 1995, Flight Unlimited garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World magazine:

It’s just you, the sky, and a plane that does just about anything you ask it to. Anything aerobatic, that is. Flight Unlimited is missing many of the staple elements of flight simulations. There are no missiles, guns, or enemy aircraft. You can’t learn IFR navigation or practice for your cross-country solo. You can’t even land at a different airport than the one you took off from. But unless you’re just never happy without something to shoot at, you won’t care. You’ll be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff.

Flight Unlimited sold far better than System Shock: a third of a million copies, more even than Looking Glass’s previous best-seller Ultima Underworld, enough to put itself solidly in the black and justify a sequel. Still, it seems safe to say that it didn’t cause any sleepless nights for anyone at Microsoft. Over the years, Flight Simulator had become less a game than a whole cottage industry unto itself, filled with armchair pilots who often weren’t quite gamers in the conventional sense, who often played nothing else. It wasn’t all that easy to make inroads with a crowd such as that. Like a lot of Looking Glass’s games, Flight Unlimited was a fundamentally niche product to which was attached the burden of mainstream sales expectations.

That said, the fact remained that Flight Unlimited had made money for Looking Glass, which allowed them to continue to live the dream for a while longer. Neurath and Lerner sent a homesick Warren Spector back down to Austin to open a second branch there, to take advantage of an abundance of talent surrounding the University of Texas that the Wing Commander-addled Origin Systems was believed to be neglecting.

Then Looking Glass hit a wall. Its name was Terra Nova.

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri had had the most protracted development cycle of any Looking Glass game, dating almost all the way back to the very beginning of the company and passing through dozens of hands before it finally came to fruition in the spring of 1996. At its heart, it was an ultra-tactical first-person shooter vaguely inspired by the old Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, tasking you with leading teams of fellow soldiers through a series of missions, clad in your high-tech combat gear that turned you more than halfway into a sentient robot. But it was also as close as Looking Glass would ever come to their own stab at a Wing Commander: the story was advanced via filmed cutscenes featuring real human actors, and a lot of attention was paid to the goings-on back at the ranch when you weren’t dressed up in your robot suit. This sort of thing worked in Wing Commander, to whatever extent it did, because the gameplay that took place between the movie segments was fairly quick and simple. Terra Nova was not like that, which could make it feel like an even more awkward mélange of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s difficult to say whether Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, the biggest computer game of 1995, helped it or hurt it in the marketplace: on the one hand, that game showed that there was a strong appetite for tactical combat involving robots, but, on the other, said demand was already being fed by a glut of copycats. Terra Nova got lost in the shuffle. A game that had been expected to sell at least half a million copies didn’t reach one-fifth of that total.

Looking Glass’s next game didn’t do any better. Like Flight Unlimited, British Open Championship Golf cut against the dark, gritty, and violent stereotype that tended to hold sway when people thought of Looking Glass, or for that matter of the games industry writ large. It was another direct challenge to an established behemoth: in this case, Access Software’s Links franchise, which, like Flight Simulator, had its own unique customer base, being the only line of boxed computer games that sold better to middle-aged corporate executives than they did to high-school and university students. Looking Glass’s golf project was led by one Rex Bradford, whose own history with simulating the sport went all the way back to Mean 18, a hit for Accolade in 1986. This time around, though, the upstart challenger to the status quo never even got a sniff. By way of damning with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called British Open Championship Golf “solid,” but “somewhat unspectacular.” Looking Glass could only wish that its sales could have been described in the same way.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly that Neurath and Lerner crossed the line that separates ambition from hubris when they decided to try to set Looking Glass up as a publisher. At the very time they were doing so, many another boutique publisher was doing the opposite, looking for a larger partner or purchaser to serve as shelter from the gale-force winds that were beginning to blow through the industry. More games were being made than ever, even as shelf space at retail wasn’t growing at anything like the same pace, and digital distribution for most types of games remained a nonstarter in an era in which almost everyone was still accessing the Internet via a slow, unstable dial-up connection. This turned the fight over retail space into a free-for-all worthy of the most ultra-violent beat-em-up. Sharp elbows alone weren’t enough to win at this game; you had to have deep pockets as well, had to either be a big publisher yourself or have one of them on your side. In deciding to strike out on their own, Neurath and Lerner may have been inspired by the story of Interplay Productions, a development studio which in 1988 had broken free of the grasp of Electronic Arts — now Origin System’s corporate parent, as it happened — and gone on to itself become one of the aforementioned big publishers who were increasingly dominating at retail. But 1988 had been a very different time in gaming.

In short, Neurath and Lerner had chosen just about the worst possible instant to try to seize full control of their own destiny. “Game distribution isn’t always based on quality,” noted Warren Spector at the end of 1996. Having thus stated the obvious, he elaborated:

The business has changed radically in the last year, and it’s depressing. The competition for shelf space is ridiculous and puts retailers in charge. If you don’t buy an end-cap from retailers for, say, $50,000 a month, they won’t buy many copies.

Products once had three to six months. The average life is now 30 days. If you’re not a hit in 30 days, you’re gone. This is predicated on your association with a publisher who gets your title on shelves. It’s a nightmare.

With just three games shipped in the last two and a half years — a long way off their projected pace of “six original titles per year” — and with the last two of them having flopped like a wet tuna on a gymnastics court, Looking Glass was now in dire straits. The only thing that had allowed them to keep the doors open this long had been a series of workaday porting jobs that Warren Spector had been relegated to supervising down in Austin, while he waited for the company to establish itself on a sound enough financial footing to support game development from whole cloth in both locations. Ten years on, after Looking Glass had been enshrined in gaming lore as one of the most forward-thinking studios of all time and Spector as the ultimate creative producer, the idea of them wasting their collective talents on anonymous console ports would seem surreal. But such was the reality circa 1997, when Looking Glass, having burnt through all of their venture capital, was left holding on by a thread. “I remember people walking into the office to take back the [rented] plants which the studio was no longer able to pay for,” says programmer and designer Randy Smith.

As for Neurath and Lerner, they had swallowed the hubris of 1995 and were now doing what the managers of all independent games studios do when they find themselves unable to pay the bills anymore: looking for a buyer who would be able to pay them instead. But because Looking Glass could never seem to do anything in the conventional way even when they tried to, the buyer they found was one of the strangest ever.

The Boston firm known as Intermetrics, Inc., was far from a household name, but it had a proud history that long predated the personal-computer era. Intermetrics had grown out of the fecund soil of Project Apollo, having been founded in March of 1969 by some of the engineers and programmers behind the Apollo Guidance Computer that would soon help to place astronauts on the Moon. After that epochal achievement, Intermetrics continued to do a lot of work for NASA, providing much of the software that was used to control the Space Shuttle. Other government and aerospace-industry contracts filled out most of the balance of its order sheets.

In August of 1995, however, a group of investors led by a television executive bought the firm for $28 million, with the intention of turning it into something altogether different. Michael Alexander came from the media conglomerate MCA, where he had been credited with turning around the fortunes of the cable-television channel USA. Witnessing the transformation that high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound, and the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM were wreaking on personal computing, he had joined dozens of his peers in deciding that the future of mass-market entertainment and infotainment lay with interactive multimedia. Deeming most of the companies who were already in that space to be “overvalued,” and apparently assuming that one type of computer programming was more or less the same as any other, he bought Intermetrics, whose uniform of white shirts, ties, and crew cuts had changed little since the heyday of the Space Race, to ride the hottest wave in 1990s consumer electronics.

“This is a company that has the skills and expertise to be in the multimedia business, but is not perceived as being in that business,” he told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. (It was not a question of perception; Intermetrics was not in the multimedia business prior to the acquisition.) “And that is its strength.” (He failed to elaborate on exactly why this should be the case.) Even the journalist to whom he spoke seemed skeptical. “Ponytailed, black-clad, twenty-something multimedia developers beware,” she wrote, almost palpably smirking between the lines. “Graying engineers with pocket protectors and a dozen years of experience are starting to compete.” Likewise, it is hard not to suspect Brian Fargo of Interplay of trolling the poor rube when he said that “I think it’s great that the defense guys are doing this. It’s where the job security is now. It used to be in defense. Now it’s in the videogame business.” (Through good times and bad, one thing the videogame business has never, ever been noted for is its job security.)

Alas, Michael Alexander was not just a bandwagon jumper; he was a late bandwagon jumper. By the time he bought Intermetrics, the multimedia bubble was already close to popping under the pressure of a more sustained Internet bubble that would end the era of the non-game multimedia CD-ROM almost before it had begun. As this harsh reality became clear in the months that followed, Alexander had no choice but to push Intermetrics more and more in the direction of games, the only kind of CD-ROM product that was making anyone any money. The culture clash that resulted was intractable, as pretty much anyone who knew anything about the various cultures of computing could have predicted. Among these someones was Mike Dornbrook, a games-industry stalwart who had gotten his start with Infocom in the early 1980s. Seeking his next gig after Boffo Games, a studio he had founded with his old Infocom colleague Steve Meretzky, went down in flames, Dornbrook briefly kicked the tires at Intermetrics, but quickly concluded that what he saw “made no sense whatsoever”: “They were mostly COBOL programmers in their fifties and sixties. I remember looking around and saying, ‘You’re going to turn these guys into game programmers? What in the world are you thinking?'” [1]Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.

Belatedly realizing that all types of programming were perhaps not quite so interchangeable as he had believed, Michael Alexander set out in search of youngsters to teach his old dogs some new tricks. The Intermetrics rank and file must have shuddered at the advertisements he started to run in gaming magazines. “We are rocket scientists!” the ads trumpeted. “Even our games are mission-critical!” When these efforts failed to surface a critical mass of game-development talent, Alexander reluctantly moved on to doing what he should have done back in 1995: looking for an extant studio that already knew how to make games. It so happened that Looking Glass was right there in Boston, and, thanks to its troubled circumstances, was not as “overvalued” as most of its peers. Any port in a storm, as they say.

On August 14, 1997, a joint press release was issued: “Intermetrics, Inc., a 28-year-old leading software developer, and Looking Glass Studios, one of the computer gaming industry’s foremost developers, today announce the merger of the two companies’ gaming operations to form Intermetrics/Looking Glass Studios, LLC. Through the shared strengths of the two entities, the new company is strategically positioned to be a major force in the computer-game, console and online-gaming industries.” Evidently on a quest to find out how much meaningless corporate-speak he could shoehorn into one document, Michael Alexander went on to add that “Looking Glass Studios immediately catapults Intermetrics into a leading position in the gaming industry by giving us additional credentials and assets to compete in the market. Our business plan is to maintain and grow our core contract-services business while at the same time leveraging our expertise and financial resources to be a major player in the booming interactive-entertainment industry.” The price paid by the rocket scientists for their second-stage booster has to my knowledge never been publicly revealed.

The acquiring party may have been weird as all get-out, but it could have worked out far worse for Looking Glass, all things considered. In addition to the obvious benefit of being able to keep the doors open, at least a couple of other really good things came directly out of the acquisition. One was a change in name, from Looking Glass Technologies to Looking Glass Studios, emphasizing the creative dimension of their work. Another was a distribution deal with Eidos, a British publisher that had serious retail clout in both North America and Europe. Riding high on the back of the massive international hit Tomb Raider, Eidos could ensure that Looking Glass’s games got prominent placement in stores. Meanwhile this idea of the Looking Glass people serving as mentors to those who were struggling to make games at Intermetrics proper — an excruciating proposition for both parties — would prove to mostly be a polite, face-saving fiction for Michael Alexander; in practice, the new parent company would prove largely content to leave its subsidiary alone to do its own thing. Now the folks at Looking Glass just needed to deliver a hit to firmly establish themselves in their new situation. That was always the sticky wicket for them.

The first game that Looking Glass released under their new ownership was Flight Unlimited II, which appeared just a few months after the big announcement. Created without the input of Seamus Blackley, who had left the company, Flight Unlimited II sought simultaneously to capitalize on the relative success of Looking Glass’s first flight simulator and to adjust that game’s priorities to better coincide with the real or perceived desires of the market. Looking Glass paired the extant flight model with an impressively detailed depiction of the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then they added a lot more structure to the whole affair, in the form of a set of missions to fly after you finished your training. The biggest innovation, a first for any civilian flight simulator, was the addition of other aircraft, turning San Francisco International Airport into the same tangle of congested flight lanes it was in the real world. These changes moved the game away from being such a purist simulation of flight as an end unto itself. Still, there was a logic to the additions; one can easily imagine them making Flight Unlimited II more appealing to the sorts of gamers who don’t tend to thrive in goal-less sandboxes. Be that as it may, though, it didn’t show up in the sales figures. Flight Unlimited II sold better than Terra Nova or British Open Championship Golf, but not as well as its series predecessor, just barely managing to break even.

This disappointment put that much more pressure on Looking Glass’s next game to please the new boss and show that the studio could deliver a solid, unqualified hit. In a triumph of hope over experience, everyone had high expectations for The Dark Project, which had been described in the press release announcing the acquisition as “a next-generation fantasy role-playing game.” Such a description might have left gamers wondering if Looking Glass was returning to the territory of Ultima Underworld. As things worked out, the game that they would come to know as simply Thief would not be that at all, but would instead break new ground in a completely different way. It stands today alongside Ultima Underworld in another sense: as one of the three principal legs — the last one being System Shock, of course — that hold up Looking Glass’s towering modern-day reputation for relentless, high-concept innovation.

The off-kilter masterstroke that is Thief started with a new first-person 3D engine known as The Dark Engine. It could have powered a “low-brain shooter,” as the Looking Glass folks called the likes of the mega-hit Quake, with perfect equanimity. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to make one.

It took a goodly while for them to decide what they did want to do with The Dark Engine. Doug Church, the iconoclastic programmer and designer who had taken the leading role on System Shock, didn’t want to be out-front to the same extent on this project. The initial result of this lack of a strong authority figure was an awful lot of creative churn. There was talk of making a game called Better Red than Undead, mixing a Cold War-era spy caper with a zombie invasion. Almost as bizarre was Dark Camelot, an inverted Arthurian tale in which you played the Black Knight against King Arthur and his cronies, who were depicted as a bunch of insufferable holier-than-thou prigs. “Our marketing department wasn’t really into that one,” laughs Church.

Yet the core sensibility of that concept — of an amoral protagonist set against the corrupt establishment and all of its pretensions — is all over the game that did finally get made. Doug Church:

The missions [in Dark Camelot] that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. Paul [Neurath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part, and why not just do a thief game?

And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market stuff, we just kept focusing on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganizing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked into doing some other project work on Flight [Unlimited] and stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge of the project and we agreed we were going to call it Thief and we were going to focus much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “let’s make this Thief game.”

It surely comes as no revelation to anyone reading this article that most game stories are power fantasies at bottom, in which you get to take on the identity of a larger-than-life protagonist who just keeps on growing stronger as you progress. Games which took a different approach were, although by no means unknown by the late 1990s, in the decided minority even outside of the testosterone-drenched ghetto of the first-person shooter. The most obvious exponents of the ordinary-mortal protagonist were to be found in the budding survival-horror genre, as pioneered by Alone in the Dark and its sequels on computers and Resident Evil on the consoles. But these games cast you as nearly powerless prey, being stalked through dark corridors by zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Thief makes you a stealthy predator, the unwanted visitor rifling through cupboards and striking without warning out of the darkness, yet most definitely not in any condition to mow down dozens of his enemies in full-frontal combat, Quake-style. If you’re indiscreet in your predations, you can become the cornered prey with head-snapping speed. This was something new at the time.

Or almost so. Coincidentally, two Japanese stealthy-predator games hit the Sony PlayStation in 1998, the same year as Thief’s release. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins cast you as a ninja, while Metal Gear Solid cast you as an agent of the American government on a top-secret commando mission. The latter in particular caused quite a stir, by combining its unusual gameplay style with the sort of operatically melodramatic storytelling that was more commonly associated with the JRPG genre. That said, Thief is a far more sophisticated affair than either of these games, in terms of both its gameplay and its fiction.

The titular thief and protagonist is a man known only as Garrett, who learned his trade on the streets of The City, a mixture of urban squalor and splendor that is best described as Renaissance Florence with magic — a welcome alternative to more typical fantasy settings. Over the course of a twelve-act campaign, Garrett is given a succession of increasingly daunting assignments, during which a larger plot that involves more than the acquisition of wealth by alternative methods does gradually take shape.

Although the mission tree is linear, nothing else about your experience in Thief is set in stone. It was extremely important to Looking Glass that Thief not turn into a puzzle game, a series of set-piece challenges with set-piece solutions. They wanted to offer up truly dynamic environments, environments that were in their own way every bit as much simulations as Flight Unlimited. They wanted to make you believe you were really in these spaces. Artist Daniel Thron speaks of the “deep sense of trust we had in the player. There isn’t a single solution to Thief. It’s up to you to figure out how to steal the thing. It’s letting you tell that story through gameplay. And that sense of ownership makes it unique. It becomes yours.” In the spirit of all that, the levels are big, with no clearly delineated through-line. These dynamic virtual spaces full of autonomous actors demand constant improvisation on your part even if you’ve explored them before.

Looking Glass understood that, in order for Thief to work as a vehicle for emergent narrative, all of the other actors on the stage have to respond believably to your actions. It’s a given that guards ought to hunt you down if you blatantly give away your presence to them. Thief distinguishes itself by the way it responds to more subtle stimuli. An ill-judged footstep on a creaky floor tile might cause a guard to stop and mutter to himself: “Wait! Did I just hear something?” Stand stock still and don’t make a sound, and maybe — maybe — he’ll shrug his shoulders and move on without bothering to investigate. If you do decide to take a shot at him with your trusty bow or blackjack, you best not miss, to steal a phrase from Omar Little. And you best hide the body carefully afterward, before one of his comrades comes wandering along the same corridor to stumble over it.

These types of situations and the split-second decisions they force upon you are the beating heart of Thief. Bringing them off was a massive technical challenge, one that made the creation of 3D-graphics engine itself seem like child’s play. The state of awareness of dozens of non-player characters had to be tracked, as did sound and proximity, light and shadow, to an extent that no shooter — no, not even Half-Life — had ever come close to doing before. Remarkably, Looking Glass largely pulled it off, whilst making sure that the more conventional parts of the engine worked equally well. Garrett’s three principal weapons — a blackjack for clubbing unsuspecting victims in the back of the head, a rapier for hand-to-hand combat, and a bow which can be used to shoot a variety of different types of arrows — are all immensely satisfying to use, having just the right feeling of weight in your virtual hands. The bow is a special delight: the arrows arc through the air exactly as one feels they ought to. You actually get to use your bow in all sorts of clever ways that go beyond killing, such as shooting water arrows to extinguish pesky torches — needless to say, darkness is your best friend and light your eternal enemy in this game — and firing rope arrows that serve Garrett as grappling hooks would a more conventional protagonist.

Looking Glass being Looking Glass, even the difficulty setting in Thief is more than it first appears to be. It’s wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Thief is really three games in one, depending on whether you play it on Normal, Hard, or Expert. (Looking Glass apparently wasn’t interested in the sorts of players who might be tempted by an “easy” mode.) Not only do the harder settings require you to collect more loot to score a passing grade on each mission, but the environments themselves become substantially larger. Most strikingly, in a brave subversion of the standard shooter formula, each successive difficulty setting requires you to kill fewer rather than more people; at the Expert level, you’re not allowed to kill anyone at all.

Regardless of the difficulty setting you choose, Thief will provide a stiff challenge. Its commitment to verisimilitude extends to all of its facets. In lieu of a conventional auto-map, it provides you only with whatever scribbled paper map Garrett has been able to scrounge from his co-conspirators, or sometimes not even that much. If your innate sense of direction isn’t great — mine certainly isn’t — you can spend a long time just trying to find your way in these big, twisty, murky spaces.

When it’s at its best, Thief is as amazing as it is uncompromising. It oozes atmosphere and tension; it’s the sort of game that demands to be played in a dark room behind a big monitor, with the phone shut off and a pair of headphones planted firmly over the ears. Sadly, though, it isn’t always this best version of itself. In comparison to Ultima Underworld or System Shock, both of which I enjoyed from first to last, Thief strikes me as a lumpy creation, a game of soaring highs but also some noteworthy lows. I was all-in during the first mission, a heist taking place in the mansion of a decadent nobleman. Having recently read Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus and written quite a lot about Renaissance Florence, my receptors were well primed for this Neo-Renaissance setting. Then I came to the second mission, and suddenly I was being asked to fight my way through a bunch of zombies in an anonymous cave complex. Suddenly Thief felt like dozens of other first-person action games.

This odd schizophrenia persists throughout the game. The stealthy experience I’ve just been describing — the boldly innovative experience that everyone thinks of today when they think of Thief — is regularly interspersed with splatterfests against enemies who wouldn’t have been out of place in Quake: zombies, rat men, giant exploding frogs, for Pete’s sake. (Because these enemies aren’t human, they’re generally exempt from the prohibition against killing at the Expert level.) All told, it’s a jarring failure to stick to its guns from a studio that has gone down in gaming lore for refusing to sacrifice its artistic integrity, to its own great commercial detriment.

As happens so often in these cases, the reality behind the legend of Looking Glass is more nuanced. Almost to a person, the team who made Thief attribute the inconsistency in the level design to outside pressure, especially from their publisher Eidos, who had agreed to partially fund the project. “Eidos never believed in it and until the end told us to put in more monsters and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth, and I’m not sure there was ever a point [when] they got it,” claims Doug Church. “I mean, the trailers Eidos did for Thief were all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at people charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in the idea.”

And yet one can make the ironic case that Eidos knew what they were doing when they pushed Looking Glass to play up the carnage a little more. Released in November of 1998, Thief finally garnered Looking Glass some sales figures that were almost commensurate with their positive reviews. (“If you’re tired of DOOM clones and hungry for challenge, give this fresh perspective a try,” said Computer Gaming World.) The game sold about half a million copies — not a huge hit by the standards of an id Software or Blizzard Entertainment, but by far the most copies Looking Glass had ever sold of anything. It gave them some much-needed positive cash flow, which allowed them to pay down some debts and to revel in some good vibes for a change when they looked at the bottom line. But most importantly for the people who had made Thief, its success gave them the runway they needed to make a sequel that would be more confident in its stealthy identity.



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SourcesThe book Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Next Generation of March 1997 and June 1997; PC Zone of December 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1995, June 1996, August 1997, April 1998, and March 1999; Retro Gamer 117, 177, and 260; Los Angeles Times of September 15 1995; Boston Globe of May 3 1995.

Online sources include the announcement of the Intermetrics acquisition on Looking Glass’s old website, InterMetrics’s own vintage website, “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, and James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios.”

Where to Get Them: Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri and Thief Gold are available for digital purchase at GOG.com. The other Looking Glass games mentioned this article are unfortunately not.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.
 
 

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DOS Game Club

I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get your other podcasts. My thanks to the hosts for their kind invitation, and to the other guests for their patience with my historical rambling! (I’m told that this is the longest episode of the podcast ever.)

See you tomorrow with some fresh written content!

 

Outcast

The Outcast box was styled to look like a movie poster. Riffing on the same theme, Infogrames’s head Bruno Bonnell called it “the first videogame that really tries to be an interactive movie,” leaving one to wonder whether he had somehow missed the first nine years of the 1990s, during which countless games tried desperately to be just that. Ironically, Outcast actually has very few of the characteristics that had become associated with the phrase: no rigidly linear plot, no digitized human actors, no out-of-engine cutscenes after the obligatory opening one. It’s a game rather than a movie through and through, and all the better for it.

As longtime readers of these histories know already, I’ve never been overly enamored with the so-called “French Touch” in vintage computer games, that blending of elevated aesthetic and thematic aspirations — some might prefer to use the word “pretensions” — with a, shall we say, less thoroughgoing commitment to the details of gameplay and mechanics. So, I approached Outcast, a 1999 game by the Francophone Belgian studio Appeal, with my prejudices held out in front of me like a shield. The descriptions I read of Outcast were full of things that set my spider sense tingling: a blending of wildly divergent, usually mutually exclusive gameplay genres (it’s hard enough to get one type of game right, much less multiple types); a relentlessly diegetic interface that embraces even such typically meta-activities as saving state (it’s hard enough to get an interface right without also trying to extend it into the world of the game); a fiendishly and seemingly needlessly convoluted premise (whereas bad Anglophone games make Donald Duck seem like Shakespeare, bad French ones all seem to be trying to be Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust rolled into one). In fact, I did my level best to avoid writing about Outcast at all, even though I knew it to be one of the better remembered cult classics of the millennial era. But when my reader Deckard asked me to cover it with “big pleading puss-in-boots eyes,” I felt like I owed it to him and all of you to at least give it a look.

Well, then, there’s no point in burying the lede any deeper than I already have: I did play Outcast. Much to my own surprise, I wound up playing it all the way through, and kind of loving it. By no means was I left without nitpicks and niggles, but on the whole it proved to be not just one of the more interesting games I’ve encountered recently but one of the more fun as well. It succeeds on most of the divergent vectors it dares to venture down, delivering a unique, evocative, even moving experience that I won’t soon forget. I owe Deckard a hearty thank you for giving me the push I needed. Read on to find out all the reasons I have to be grateful, plus a little something about where Outcast came from.


Yves Grolet, Yann Robert, and Franck Sauer.

At bottom, Outcast was a labor of love by three fast friends who had been working and playing together for years by the time they started to make it. One of the trio, named Franck Sauer, was a visual artist, sound designer, and rudimentary musician, while the other two, named Yves Grolet and Yann Robert, were accomplished programmers who specialized in high-performance graphics. When they were first coming up in the industry, the Commodore Amiga was still Europe’s premier gaming platform. They first made a reputation for themselves via two audiovisually innovative, mechanically rote shoot-em-ups of the sort that were a dime a dozen on the Amiga at the time: 1990’s Unreal (no, not that one) and 1992’s Agony. Each sold around 20,000 copies in a crowded market.

Worried about the Amiga’s long-term future as a platform — and justifiably so, as it would turn out — the friends then decided to look elsewhere. They applied and were approved for a business-development grant from the government of France — this was made possible by the fact that Yann Robert was a citizen of that country rather than Belgium — and embarked on an ambitious plan to make standup-arcade games, a branch of the industry that was enjoying its last flash of rude health before the unceasing evolution of digital technology for the home rendered it moot. Art & Magic, as they called their company, succeeded in shipping four such games during 1993 and 1994; the actual hardware was manufactured by a Belgian firm known as Deltatec. The first of their games, Ultimate Tennis, performed the best, with some 5000 cabinets sold. Those that followed did steadily less well, and soon the friends decided to jump ship from the softening arcade market just as they had from the Amiga.

Determined to continue making games despite the lukewarm financial rewards their efforts thus far had yielded, they started another company, which they called Appeal, and considered where to go next. With DOOM having recently swept the world, 3D graphics were all the rage in gaming circles. Unconvinced that they could compete head-on with John Carmack and the other talented programmers at id Software, who were already hard at work on Quake, Grolet and Robert opted to try something different on the same Intel-based personal computers that id was targeting. Instead of embracing polygonal 3D rendering, as id and everyone else were doing, they thought to make an engine powered by voxels: essentially, individual pixels that each came complete with an X, Y, and Z coordinate to place it in a 3D space independently, untethered to any polygons. The approach had its limitations — it was less efficient than polygonal graphics in many applications, and far less amenable to hardware acceleration — but it had some notable advantages as well. In particular, it ought to be good at rendering large, open, sun-drenched landscapes, something that the polygonal engines all struggled with. Whereas they favored symmetrical straight lines that were best suited for buildings and other human-made scenery, voxels could do a credible job of rendering the more chaotic, convex splendors of nature.

The friends made a trip to France to pitch the game they called Outcast to the two biggest publishers in Francophone gaming, the Paris-based Ubisoft and the Lyon-based Infogrames. The former turned them down flat; the latter agreed to buy a minority stake in Appeal and to fund the project after just a few days of talks. Grolet, Robert, and Sauer set up shop in the Belgian town of Namur and embarked upon what would turn into a four-year odyssey, alongside a development team that would grow to about twenty people at its peak.

Outcast was created in this nifty-looking building in Namur, above a ground floor of shops.

In the beginning, Outcast was a project driven almost exclusively by its graphics technology, just like everything else the friends had done prior to it. To whatever extent they thought about the gameplay and the fiction, it was as a way to showcase the potential of voxel graphics to best effect. That meant large outdoor spaces to set it apart from the DOOMs and Quakes of the world. The first draft of the plot took place in the jungles of South America, casting the player as a vigilante who goes to war with a gang of drug smugglers. But the friends soon concluded that an alien environment would be better, in that it would show off the visuals without drawing attention to the many ways they could fail to deliver an accurate rendering of the flora and fauna of our own planet; voxels were better at impressionism than photo-realism. Then someone had the idea that, if one outdoor environment would be good, a collection of them to hop among, each with its own aesthetic personality, would be even better. For a good two years, the fiction and the gameplay failed to advance much farther than that, while Appeal worked on their tech and built out the environments in which the game would take place.

There was a danger in letting any such technology-first project drag on for so long, in that consumer-computing hardware in the second half of the 1990s was very much a moving target. When work on Outcast began, most games were still running under MS-DOS, using unaccelerated VGA graphics running at a typical resolution of 320 X 200. The next few years would see Windows 95 and its DirectX libraries finally replace the MS-DOS command line that had been so familiar to gamers for so long, even as SVGA graphics running at a resolution of 640 X 480 or higher became the norm and 3D graphics accelerators became commonplace. Appeal had to reckon with and adjust to these sweeping changes as best they could. They made the switch to Windows, but their voxels were not able to make use of 3D-acceleration cards. In order to keep frame rates reasonable, they had to settle for the rather odd resolution of 512 X 384, a middle ground between the past and present of computer-game graphics.

Outcast’s graphics weren’t terribly impressive in the numeric terms by which such things were usually judged: resolution, texture density, etc. Yet they have an impressionistic beauty all their own. After living with the dark, rather sterile graphics that dominated at the time, booting up Outcast was like opening the curtains in a dark room to let in the light of a gorgeous summer day.

From about the halfway point in its development, Outcast began to expand its horizons, to become something much more than just another graphical showcase. This was accompanied by the arrival of some new characters from outside the somewhat insular world of French gaming. They would come to have an enormous impact on the finished product.

Alongside their French artiness, the core trio were possessed of a huge fondness for big-budget American action movies and their typically bombastic scores. Franck Sauer especially wanted Outcast to have a bold, striking soundtrack to accompany its unique visuals; he cited John Williams, Alan Silvestri, and Danny Elfman as appropriate points of departure. Knowing that such a feat of composition was well beyond his own modest musical talents, he placed an advertisement in some American film-industry magazines, and eventually settled on a Hollywood-based composer named Lennie Moore. Moore was given permission just to go for it. The music he came up with was sometimes wildly, almost comically over the top — he names the pull-out-all-the-stops operas of Richard Wagner as one of his most important influences — but it was like nothing else that had been heard in a game before.

Best of all, Moore happened to have a relationship with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The peculiar economics of post-Soviet Russia, where institutions like the aforementioned orchestra had been cast adrift without the state patronage under which they had thrived in previous decades, meant that they were often willing to take on “low-culture” music like videogame scores that no similarly credentialed Western cultural standard bearer would have touched, for a price it would never have countenanced. So, Lennie Moore and Franck Sauer found themselves traveling to Moscow in the summer of 1997, to spend a week recording the soundtrack with an 81-piece orchestra and a 24-member vocal choir, conducted by another American named William Stromberg. Sitting in an empty auditorium listening to the music being performed for the benefit of the tape recorders, Sauer could hardly believe his ears; he still calls it “an experience of a lifetime.”

The Moscow Symphony Orchestra arrives to record the Outcast soundtrack.

Outcast was suddenly taking on a decidedly multinational personality. Indeed, Moore’s score made use of a variety of exotic instrumentation in addition to the orchestra and choir, such as an Armenian duduk, Indian tablas, and African congas. The choir sang passages from Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin.


Around the same time that Lennie Moore and William Stromberg came onboard, Appeal hired yet another American, a writer and game designer by the name of Douglas Freese who would spend the next two years with them in Belgium. His assignment was to come up with an overarching plot to join together the six disparate voxel-driven environments that had already been created, and then to write all of the dialog for the many characters the player would encounter there. For it had been decided that Outcast would be, despite its Francophone origins, an English-language production first and foremost, one that could then be localized back into French and other languages as necessary. Writing from my own selfish standpoint as a native English speaker who prefers to play games in that language, this strikes me as a pivotal decision. It means that the Outcast which I know isn’t afflicted with the layer of obfuscation that tends to make playing even well-translated games — to say nothing of the bad translations! — like peering at their worlds through a window coated with a thin rime of frost.

Is the story of Outcastgood story? That depends on how you look at it. In the broadest strokes, it’s both clichéd and convoluted. You play a former Navy SEAL by the name of Cutter Slade — has there ever been a more perfect action-hero name in the history of media? — who is part of the first team of Earthlings ever to use a newly invented piece of mad-scientist kit that enables one to visit a parallel universe. (The influence of Stargate SG-1, a very popular television show at the time, is strong with this one.) But this is no casual research trip for the team: a black hole has been created in our own dimension by an unmanned probe that was sent previously into the alternate one. The rift can be closed only by locating the probe and returning it to the dimension where it belongs.

Your alter ego Cutter Slade. While the backgrounds are rendered using voxels, foreground characters and objects are rendered using more traditional polygons. Even here, however, Appeal found a way to be innovative. The game was one of the first, if not the first, to use a texture-mapping technique called bump-mapping to render action-hero musculature.

Alas, something goes haywire on your trip between dimensions as well, and the four members of your team arrive on the world of Adelpha at widely scattered points in not just geography but also time, with their equipment — including Cutter Slade’s action-hero arsenal of advanced weaponry — likewise scattered hither and yon. And so the game proper begins. In the role of Cutter, all you really want to do is locate your three companions, locate the probe, and return along with them and it to your home dimension, but it turns out that in order to do that you have to defeat a dictator who has taken over Adelpha and is suppressing its alien inhabitants with standard dictatorial glee. This is the task to which you’ll find yourself devoting the vast majority of your time and energy.

As I already noted, this story is as contrived as any in the videogame space, not to mention riddled with plot holes bigger than the inter-dimensional rift itself. (If the probe is such a problem for the stability of the multiverse, why doesn’t the other Earth equipment that’s been scattered everywhere on Adelpha seem to be any cause for concern?) The saving grace is in the details. Cutter Slade at first seems like just another one of the musclebound onscreen ciphers in which Arnold Schwarzenegger once specialized, but, once you get to know him, he turns out to conform more to the Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford archetype. (The voice actor who plays Cutter in the French localization is actually the same one who dubbed over Willis’s voice in the French Die Hard.) He’s always quick with a quip, expressing appropriate exasperation every time he’s given Yet Another Fetch Quest to carry out by one of the huge number of characters who inhabit the six regions of Adelpha, but he’s a soft touch at heart. He proves to be good company for his player, thus fulfilling the first and most important requirement for any videogame avatar. He’s so likable that you really want to bring his story to a happy ending.

Cutter Slade is a fish out of water much but not all of the time on Adelpha: being a former Navy SEAL, he’s pretty good at swimming as well as running, crawling, hitting, and shooting. “As far as Cutter is concerned, I had an easy time with his dialog because we both were in alien lands — him Adelpha, me Belgium — and we both had something to accomplish,” says Douglas Freese.

You can move from one of the six wildly disparate regions of Adelpha to another one only via the teleportation portals you find scattered about. The first region is a small training area, but the others are sprawling open spaces that show off the capabilities of the voxel engine to maximum advantage. Your main goal in each is to find a MacGuffin called a “mon,” of which you need all five in order to liberate the planet. But getting each mon will require working your way through a whole matrix of puzzles and other, preliminary quests given to you by the local inhabitants, members of a humanoid species known as the Talan. Most of the quests are self-contained within each region, but every once in a while the game switches it up and demands that you do something in another region to meet a local challenge. The whole design is impressively nonlinear; you can go almost everywhere right from the start, can tackle the regions in any order you wish. A short time after you find a mon, the game fires off a larger plot event involving your search for your missing teammates and sends you scurrying off to put out a fire somewhere and learn some more about What Is Really Going On on Adelpha. In this way, Outcast manages to balance a high degree of player freedom with a more conventional plot, with a coherent beginning, middle, and end.

The Talan are the most shiftless bunch of aliens ever. Some of them explain that they’re pacifists who cannot possibly shed blood themselves, yet they’re perfectly okay with you doing the blood-shedding for them. (Certain parallels from the real world of 2025 inevitably leap to mind, but it’s probably best if I don’t point them out here.)

Solving the many and diverse problems afflicting Cutter and his new Talan friends often entails combat; this is where the other, less cerebral side of the game’s identity comes to the fore. You can fight either from a third-person, behind-the-back perspective, Tomb Raider style, or from a first-person perspective, Quake style. Either way, you have half a dozen different weapons to experiment with — assuming you can find them and keep them fed with ammunition — and always have your sturdy action-hero fists available as a fallback option.

I found the combat in Outcast to be a blast — literally so, in the case of one of my favorite weapons, a handheld grenade launcher that makes as enjoyable an explosion as I’ve ever encountered in a game. By no means is it entirely free of jank — I had a persistent issue with getting hung up behind the bodies of my fallen enemies, whom Cutter’s SEAL training has apparently not taught him to step over — yet it seldom failed to put a smile on my face. One of the most satisfying tactics is to forgo weapons and just run up and beat the snot out of the evil Talan soldiers, Three Stooges style — one hand holding your victim by the collar, the other whaling away on his face. (For extra fun, use the one you’re beating up as a meat shield against the ones who are shooting at you.) I have to give special props to the artificial intelligence of your opponents, who do a remarkably effective job of coordinating with one another in a firefight, who are even capable of luring you into deadly ambushes if you aren’t careful.

As most of you know, this style of gameplay isn’t usually in my wheelhouse. Yet I had more genuine fun with Outcast than with any action game I’ve played for these histories since Jedi Knight. Just as is the case with that game, Outcast is full of big explosions and flying bodies, but it never gets morbid about it: there’s no blood to be seen, and corpses simply disappear after a few minutes in a puff of energy. (There’s probably some in-story explanation for that, but who can be bothered to look it up?) Meanwhile the difficulty is pitched perfectly for me, occasionally challenging but never crazily punishing, rewarding smart tactics as much or more than fast reflexes.

The eternal videogame pleasure of making stuff go boom…

While it’s very easy for a review like this one to slip into talking about Outcast as a game of two halves, it doesn’t really feel that way in practice. One of its most amazing achievements is how seamless it is to play; one never gets the feeling of shifting from “adventure mode” to “shooter mode,” as one tends to do in so many cross-genre exercises. Everything takes place within the same interface, and everything you do is connected to everything else. There are plenty of dialog puzzles and object-oriented puzzles of the sort you might find in an adventure game, but there are also some physics-based puzzles that wouldn’t have been possible in a point-and-click engine: shoot a pendulum at just the right point in its sway to make it move faster and faster, drop a bomb perfectly into the bottom of a well. Solving a fetch quest might require you to fight or sneak your way past some soldiers to get what you need; then, in turn, the outcome of the quest might be to weaken the enemies you fight later by taking away some of their food supply or reducing the power of their weapons. Most of your enemies do not respawn. This means that, if you invest a lot of time and effort into cleaning up a region, it generally stays that way. Adelpha is a truly reactive world that allows for considerable variance in play styles. You can flat-out go to war on behalf of its oppressed peoples, or you can sneak around, resorting to violence only when absolutely necessary. It’s entirely up to you.

The commitment to verisimilitude in all things led the designers to attempt to provide diegetic explanations for even Outcast’s gamiest aspects. The fact that the Talan you meet are all males — presumably a byproduct of a limited voice-acting budget in the real world — is here the result of a segregated alien society, in which women and children live in a separate enclave except during mating season, when everyone comes together to get their grooves on. The fact that the Talan all know how to speak English is explained as… ah, that would be spoiling things. Moving back onto safer territory, it’s studiously related in the manual that Cutter Slade carries a “miniaturization backpack” around with him, thus explaining why it is that he can hold an infinite quantity of stuff in his inventory. The onscreen HUD as well is explained as merely the view through the “direct bio-neural interface” which Cutter wears at all times.


Of course, this sort of thing can quickly get silly: if the above hasn’t convinced you of that already, the in-game “Gaamsaav” (groan!) crystal that lets Cutter capture a snapshot in time surely will. On the other hand, even it is cleverer in design terms than it first appears. Cutter has to stand still for several seconds in order to use it, which makes it inadvisable to pull out in the middle of a firefight. In this way, Outcast deftly heads off the overuse of a save function which can rob all of the tension out of a game, without annoying and inconveniencing the player too unduly through more draconian remedies like fixed save points.

As this example illustrates, Outcast provides more than just an unusually reactive and thoughtfully realized world: it also succeeds really well as an exercise in playable game design. This is not to say that fomenting a revolution on Adelpha is easy; there is little hand-holding in this wide-open world beyond a useful if sometimes cryptic quest log. Yet the game is never unfair either. If you explore diligently and follow up on all of the information you’re given, it’s perfectly soluble. I got through it without a single hint, although it did take me a few weeks of evenings and weekend afternoons to do so. The mere fact that I was motivated enough to put in the time says a lot. I had the feeling throughout that this was a game that had been played by lots of people before it was released, that it earnestly wanted to be played and enjoyed by me now, that it was a game whose designers had thought deeply about the player’s experience. What might first seem like an aggressively uncompromising game proves to be full of thoughtful little affordances for the player who deigns to pay careful attention to what’s going on, such as the portable transporter devices that you can use to jump around to arbitrary points within a region and the handy lexicon of unfamiliar alien phrases that is automatically compiled for you as you talk to more and more Talan. It isn’t even necessary to finish all of the quests in order to finish Outcast; much of the content is optional.

Exploring Cutter’s inventory.

I’ve expended a fair number of words on Outcast by now, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded in capturing the sui generis quality that makes it so memorable. Needless to say, no game arises in a vacuum, and we can definitely find precedents for and possible influences upon this one if we look for them. Most obviously, it can be slotted into the long and proud European tradition of open-world action-adventures, dating back to 1980s classics like Mercenary and Exile. Then, too, it’s not hard to detect a whiff of Tomb Raider’s influence in its behind-the-back perspective and its occasional jumping puzzles. Outcast’s unflagging commitment to verisimilitude and diegesis brings to mind Looking Glass’s brilliant System Shock. The fetch quests might have come out of an Ultima game, some of the puzzles out of Myst. Yet Outcast blends it all in such a seamless way that it ends up entirely its own thing. It is, if you’ll forgive the cliché, more than the sum of its incredibly disparate parts. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s interactive narrative at its purest, in which the gameplay exists to serve the story and the world rather than the other way around.

Outcast is a game made with passion, with no constraints of being tied to a particular genre or to please a particular group of people,” says Franck Sauer. “We just did the game we wanted to make, and that was it.” The end result is as groundbreaking and inspiring an attempt to make an action game where the action feels like it matters as is Half-Life. Indeed, if we’re being honest, I had a heck of a lot more fun with Outcast than I ever did with Half-Life. Personally, I’ll take the chatty and funny Cutter Slade over Gordan Freeman the stoic cipher any day.



Despite all of Appeal’s efforts to give Outcast appeal across the Atlantic Ocean by making it an English-first production, and despite a significant Stateside advertising campaign, it proved a hard sell in an American market where successful games were by now largely confined to a handful of hard-and-fast genres. It sold only about 50,000 copies in the United States after its release in the summer of 1999. Thankfully, it did considerably better in Europe, where it sold 350,000 copies. Combined with a relatively low final production bill — Sauer estimates that Appeal brought the whole game in for about €1.5 million, even with the cost of hiring an entire symphony orchestra and choir for a week — this total was enough to place the game right on the bubble between commercial failure and success.

After dithering for a while, Infogrames agreed to fund a sequel, on the condition that Appeal would make a version for the Sony PlayStation 2 as well as for personal computers, with more action and less adventure. That project muddled along for a little over a year, only to be cancelled by the publisher in 2001 as part of a program of corporate retrenching. Appeal shut down soon after, and that seemed to be that for Outcast.

Yet the game retained a warm place in the hearts of the three friends who had originally conceived it, as it did in those of a small but committed cult of fans, some of whom discovered it on abandonware sites only years after its release. Franck Sauer, Yves Grolet, and Yann Robert were eventually able to win back the rights to the game from their old publisher. In 2014, they made a lightly remastered version called Outcast 1.1; in 2017, they made a full-fledged remake called Outcast: Second Contact; in 2024, there came the long-delayed sequel, Outcast: A New Beginning. Being stuck in the ludic past as I am, I haven’t played any of these, but all have been fairly well-received by reviewers. Kudos to the creators and the fans for refusing to let a very special game die.

As for me, I’ll try to keep Outcast in mind the next time I’m tempted to pass judgment on a game without giving it an honest try. For games, like people, deserve to be judged on their own merits, not on the basis of their peer group.




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SourcesThe books Principals of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation (3rd ed.) by Michael O’Rourke and Outcast: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Joel Durham, Jr.; Computer Gaming World of November 1999; PC Format Gold of Winter 1997; PC Gamer of November 1997 and April 1998; Next Generation of January 1998; PC Games of December 1998.

Online sources include the old official Outcast site, an old unofficial Outcast fan site, a presentation given by the Appeal principals on Outcast’s graphics technology and aesthetics, a vintage “making of” documentary produced by Infogrames, an Adventure Classic Gaming interview with Doug Freese, a Game-OST interview with Lennie Moore, and a capsule biography of William Stromberg at Tribute Film Classics. Most of all, I drew from Franck Sauer’s home page, which is full of detailed stories and images from his long career in game development.

Where to Get It: There are two versions of Outcast available for digital purchase: the remastered Outcast 1.1 and the remade Outcast: Second Contact. If you buy the former, you gain access to the original 1999 version of the game — the one that I played for this article — as a “bonus goodie.” Should you decide to play this version, do note that it’s afflicted by one ugly glitch on newer machines, involving the lighthouse in the region of Okasankaar. (Strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely have to solve this puzzle to finish the game, but doing so does make it easier.) Your best bet is to make momentary use of the cheat mode when you find yourself needing to repair the lighthouse in a way that Lara Croft might approve of. On my computer at least, every other part of the game worked fine, the occasional bit of random graphical jank excepted.

 
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Posted by on September 19, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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