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THE MAKING OF
HOW FREDERICK RAYNAL CREATED AND LOST THE FIRST 3D SURVIVAL HORROR GAME. By Dan Griliopoulos
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INFO
FIRST REVIEWED PCG 30, 82% PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Infogrames REQUIRES 1.8 GHz CPU, 512MB RAM LINK n/a INFLUENCED BY Fear itself GET IT FROM Good Old Games
he stories told by our game-creating heroes retread familiar paths: the secret project, the team triumphing against the odds, the evil management, the disaster averted. Alone in the Darks inception has all of these elements. Yet it also draws something from the movie industry and something from French culture. The projects creator, and driving spirit, was Frederick Raynal. His story starts in his fathers small-town video store in rural France. Young Frederick was, as he tells me in charming broken English, shy. I had a talk with a psychologist, we were talking about Eric Chahi (Another World, From Dust), Paul Cuisset (Flashback) and myself, we are the same kind of guy, very introvert... when I was little boy, I make paper games, board games for my friend. Because I always have this feeling I meet someone that I dont know what to say to him, and games were my way of saying OK, lets play! So Raynal started building games young, learning electronics through a correspondence course, then buying a ZX81 in kit form. As a painter found a pencil or a sculptor a hammer and pick, I found my tool to make games. Teaching himself about processors from a book, Raynal fell out of love with formal education and in love with programming. After secondary school, he went to work in his fathers shop in Brive-La-Gaillard, fixing computers and selling videos. I was living in the shop, literally, he says. Going to bed when completely dead, dealing with customers, then back to my computer. I was completely immersed. His first games from the age of 13 to 22 were Laser (1979), Robix 500 (1983) and Popcorn (1988). He distributed these on the nascent bulletin boards of the time and eventually fan letters started coming through the post swiftly followed by two job offers while Raynal was doing his military service. One came from a big
French interior design in full force.
Parisian company and the other from the tiny Infogrames, based in Lyon. Smalltown boy Raynal went for Lyon because it was a good compromise between a big town and a human town, he says. The company didnt figure in his calculations. Raynal didnt know anyone in Lyon. Hed also never worked in an office before. But he wasnt perturbed by the move out of the video store because there were computers! I feel well here. However, because hed put his job title on the co-developed Popcorn as graphisme, Raynal had inadvertently landed an artists role, and he had to prove his skills. They made me do a test. It was EGA, they wanted me to do a line function. I worked on it and optimised, and optimised. They said, oh, its 800 times faster than ours.
sheets, which he found huge and difficult. To simplify his own game, he decided to set it in the 1920s and place you in an old haunted manor, so there was no electricity and no dialogue just an adventure game with some action. His colleague, the artist Didier Chanfray, drew a polygonal structure for the first room, while a trainee called Franck de Griolami helped with the programming. Already the gothic horror of Alone in the Dark was settling into place. Raynals next step was to write all the technical tools needed to create a 3D game. Usually, Id think about a game and do a prototype in two hours, he says. But I needed a 3D modeller ie, a modelling program But this was early 1991. Id never seen a pro modeller! The 3Desk tools he made by himself, in a few days, contained all the core elements of modern 3D applications such as Maya and 3D Studio, as well as letting him try out the animation of his characters. But to make his world look realistic, he needed an artist to fill in the blank polygons. He ran an internal contest between Infogrames artists, giving them the wireframes to work from. Only two of them produced anything, and he settled on Yal Barroz, an art school graduate who was about to leave the company and wanted the work. Raynal created a generic character: Man_0 a programmers crash test dummy very simple because I needed something quickly. By September, he could control a 3D character with the keyboard. Playing in the polygonal test chamber, he quickly learned a lot about the problems camera angles can cause in 3D games, and what to avoid. The 12 polygon bird coming in the first window in the game; I showed that to Infogrames. Infogrames in those days only employed 35 people, and had turned down all the previous pitches from this shy designer. But when they saw the 3D room, they approved it immediately. The starting team consisted of Raynal, Chanfray, Barroz (who started dating
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GAMEOGRAPHY
POPCORN (1988)
Developed by Christopher Lacaze, with Raynal doing the graphics duties, this Breakout-style game was programmed in assembly language to run on an 8MHz processor. Despite this, it can still run perfectly well on modern PCs if you can find it.
LITTLE BIG ADVENTURE (1994)
Contemporary with Alone in the Dark 3, Raynal and Adeline released this delightful, bizarre LBA, a fantastical isometric action-adventure involving rebellion, magic balls and prophecies, with a hero called Twinsen. LBA was a lot inspired by Zelda, Raynal says.
TIME COMMANDO (1996)
Its easy to overuse the word bizarre with Raynals games, but this time-leaping combat game featured a huge arsenal of period-appropriate weapons in each of its bizarre settings. It was released on PC and PS2. The ultimate weapon was a yo-yo.
LITTLE BIG ADVENTURE 2 (1997)
Even more bizarre than the first game, LBA 2 replaced the handdrawn 2D backgrounds with fully 3D outdoor environments. It was extremely large and varied, with multiple planets to visit and featured relatively advanced enemy AI. It sold 600,000 copies worldwide.
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