tassa税金taxSteuer,impuesto

INTERVIEW WITH ERIC CHAHI 1

Eric Chahi is one of those game designers that doesn't have the name recognition he deserves. In 1991, he designed Out of This World (released in Europe and Australia under the more logical name Another World), a 2-D platform game that used polygonal graphics to create a psuedo 3-D feel with effective cinematic cut scenes. Though the game is a bit short, if not hard to control at times, the storytelling is wonderful, done much like a silent movie due to the lack of dialogue in the game. Originally released for the PC and Amiga, it was later ported to a number on consoles, including the SNES and its Sega CD. Three years later Chahi released Heart of the Alien, a sequel to Out of This World for the Sega CD.

I recently contacted Chahi to ask him for an interview and he generously agreed. Providing a melange of intriguing answers on topics ranging from his thoughts on the controversial ending to Heart of the Alien to cinematic influences on Out of this World. It was truly an honor to interview Chahi and I only hope that those of you that read this article are inspired to snag a copy of Out of This World to experience one of the more unique video games ever made.

E-BOREDOM: Remember the first video game you played?

ERIC CHAHI: It was Space War, a two player game where ships battle around a gravity star on a screen capable of displaying vector graphics. The second generation of arcade games (Tempest, Defender, BattleZone, Pac-Man, Xevious etc...) that inspired me to create games.

E-BOREDOM: How did you get you start in the gaming industry?

ERIC CHAHI: While I was attending high school in 1983, our Math teacher was responsible of a little Computer Club. She teached some introductory lessons of the BASIC programming language on the ZX81. That was my first step in programming. At the same time, I realized how computers could be a useful tool to create games with.

During the summer, I got my first computer when I was 16. It was an Oric. I decided immediately to create a game, actually two, written in BASIC. One was a clone of the arcade game Carnival, and the other one involved a frog eating insects. After finishing both games, I contacted importer of the Oric computer and asked them to publish m games. They agreed, but only paid me with some small pieces of computer hardware. While it wasn't a large payment from working all summer to make a game, psychologically it was most rewarding.

Next, I learned assembly langage. For the next ywo years, I continued to program games by myself-- it was an obsession. Each game was published for the French market, and I received actual money this time! In 1987, I decide to make my living from game creation, so I dropped out of school.

In 1988, the Amiga 500 changed the landscape of computer gaming by allowing games to have colorful graphics. My interest in illustration pushed me to become a graphic artist, leaving programming by the wayside. For a year I worked for a small game company creating backgrounds and animations on Amiga.

In 1989, Paul Cuisset at Delphine was searching a freelance graphic artist for his new project Future Wars. My portfolio didn't please him at first, since my past creation on amiga was based on retouched scanned images. For the next 3 weeks, I worked like a crazy man to improve my portfolio. Finally, Paul was conviced to work with me. After wrapping up Future Wars, I started to study programming again and began to create Out of this World.

INTERVIEW WITH 2

E-BOREDOM: Did any films inspire the cinematic style of Out of This World?

ERIC CHAHI: The movie that influenced me the most was clearly Star Wars. However, I would say that science fiction books and fantasy artinspired me more than movies. Curiously, comics were a big influence because sequential art is closely related to storyboards.

E-BOREDOM:Out of This World features a great character known as Buddy, an alien who befriends the protagonist of the game. Did any other aliens from other media influence your sympathetic alien portrayal?

ERIC CHAHI: The first aliens I met lived on a blue planet named "Earth." But other than that, the first imaginary extra-terrestrial I encountered was The Thing From Another World. John Carpenter later made a remake of it.

E-BOREDOM: What led you to create the graphics for Out of This World with polygons instead of sprites?

ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.

I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences. Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up less disk space than traditional sprites.

E-BOREDOM: When designing Out of This World, how challenging was it to prevent levels from being too easy or too hard?

ERIC CHAHI: It is really a trap because the creators know the game so well they progressively adjust skill level and rules so that it remains enjoyable for them. This creates a problem by making the game too difficult for beginners. It is important to proceed to some test with external people, just to watch them play to know where and why they got stuck. To adjust the difficulty level, it is necessary to stand back and take a look at the game.

Globally, I think that the most important quality for a game designer is to be able to have an outer look on their creation, to have the illusion of the first time playing the game constantly throughout the design process. They need to be able to feel it from inside and outside at the same time. It is valuable for any aspect of creation.

E-BOREDOM: Did you originally have a sequel in mind when creating Out of This World?

ERIC CHAHI: Not at all. This sequel was decided from the pressure of Interplay. I never had the initiative to do a sequel. So instead of a real sequel, I thought it would be much more interesting to replay the game from the alien's point of view.

E-BOREDOM:Heart of the Alien has a very controversial ending, causing some fans on the Internet to be in an uproar. Was the ending always intended to be so bittersweet?

ERIC CHAHI: Well I prefer the ending of the first game. I wanted it to be uncertain regarding the hero destiny, is he alive ? Heart of the Alien lifted the veil to much. Personally, I'm not happy with the sequel. Hopefully, this has been released only on Sega CD.

E-BOREDOM:What are you working on now?

ERIC CHAHI: Actually I'm collecting and sorting ideas in order to create a new game. I really miss designing games.

This week we talk to Eric Chahi

Every Friday, Edge Online speaks to a videogame luminary and asks them to answer 20 fixed questions about themselves, the games they play, and their thoughts on the industry.

This week we talk to Eric Chahi. After joining Delphine as a graphic designer on Future Wars, he went on to create, program, and design (down to the cover artwork) the seminal adventure Another World. Following its successes, he took on his most epic project, Heart of Darkness, which led to years of troubled production, and a hiatus from games making when it was finally released. Now, years later, Chahi is working at a measured pace to make a return to games, and in the meantime, Another World is enjoying a resurgence in popularity with official ports landing on a number of handheld devices from GBA to mobile phone.

What was the first game you ever played?
It was Space Wars, a vector game with two ships dueling around a gravity star. I enjoy that game so much.

What was the first computer/videogame machine you owned?
Videopac was the first console. My first computer was an ORIC 1.

What was the first thing you ever created for a computer or console?
A game named Frog, where the player ate insects as a frog, launching his huge tongue to catch them. There were two kinds of prey, flies and bees. It had an energy bar that was slowly decreasing, so the player had to eat fast but not grab bees, which would make the poor frog explode. I wrote the game in Basic in two weeks - my very first game.

What was your first job in the games industry and what was the first thing you ever designed?
I sold the previously mentioned game to the French ORIC importer - my first freelance work.

What's your favourite game ever, and why?
It’s too difficult to answer to such a question. I like so many games.

What was the last game you played and what did you think of it?
Liquid War - so simple, so intuitive. A game that needs to be better known. Very addictive.

What upcoming game are you most looking forward to?
Shadow of the Colossus and Spore.

How many hours a week do you spend playing games?
Hum... It depends the game I'm playing. Sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes 15 hours.

What's your favourite book/album/film of all time?
I love theatre, I love painting, I love deserts, I love volcanoes, I love grass with that strange aroma of moisture, when leaves start to fall after a little rain. I love watching people walking in the street lost in their thoughts. I love...

Of all the games you've been involved in, what's your favourite, and why?
Another World, because it was truly personal in many aspects. It was the concretization of many things I’d learned from previous experiences. For me, the game is at the same time a huge achievement, relative to that period of my life, but also "une oeuvre de jeunesse" in the absolute. I’m not sure how best to translate that - it’s a creation of someone that has not yet totally reached his creative maturity.

What game would you most liked to have worked on?
Katamari Damacy. It is probably the most innovative game I've played in a long time. The concept is very simple - it’s really a fresh breath of air to play. It's based on the changing perception of universe by the player, an appreciation of an object's size: Is it bigger than me? Can I roll it? It’s not only challenging, but the theme is very clever, getting bigger, absorbing all these things, people’s houses... It’s really an echo, a metaphor for our world, our materialist civilization where we always want more, often to the detriment of others.

we talk to Eric Chahi

What projects are you working on at the moment? What stage are they at?
My new projects are still on a pure theoretical design process. Assembling, rotating and organizing ideas. It’s too early to say anything.

What annoys or disappoints you about the industry?
That's the point, now it's just an industry. Industry means “productivity and profitability.‿ It's just locked in a deadly closed cycle, the same kind of games with just some enhancement from previous successes. Licenses rule. Publishers (and many developers, too) prefer to compete with each other on a non-creative basis, and focus on technical aspects - everything that can be quantifiable, data. Filling more data, meaning more human resources. This logic demands a lot of money just to distinguish themselves a little inch from other games. Everybody wants the top technology. If there are twice as many customers tomorrow, I'm sure that game development will cost twice as much, just because publishers are in a data race, and not in a creative race.

The biggest successes have come from original games - people are waiting for something new, the expectation really is there. All the great genres of today’s games have come from older more conceptual games. Video games themselves were born because some guys in the seventies had the nerve to go in an unknown field. Unfortunately, most of today’s publishers have nothing in common with that pioneer soul. They live on their established positions and the fear of suffering heavy losses on the stock exchange.

I have a lot of doubts about content evolution. I'm afraid it’ll be many, many more years before creators and publishers take more responsibility with game ethics. I'm not talking about the un-nuanced politically correct from whom video games bear the brunt, but simply of an underlying ideology. People talk often of violence in games, but that’s not the problem. It’s truly the way a subject is approached, and what is communicated to players that must be considered. I'm not saying all games must have critical views on things; it’s possible, of course, to create them with that casual jewel of pure gameplay. I'm just saying that any creator or publisher has responsibilities, and must be conscious of things other than gameplay and money.

What do you enjoy most about working in the industry?
After I just said all that, I must look quite grumpy. But I'm still very excited to start a new game. I feel true energy aside from all the big machinery, I feel things are moving. Well, I hope I'm not wrong...

Whose work do you most admire?
People who try and make things evolve. It can be anyone from established people like Peter Molyneux, Keita Takahashi, or small independent developers who create and publish outside the mainstream.

What new platform are you most looking forward to making games for?
I'm not especially focused on a specific platform. But, it is interesting to see the wide spectrum of technology from mobile to next-gen. Small teams can still create games.

What excites you most about next-gen?
Nintendo Revolution’s spatial interface, because interface is the communications bottleneck between player and program. Any improvement in this direction is better than drawing an extra zillion polygons.