I don’t have this fancy book that tells me what can change a person’s nature, but there are certainly a lot of things that can change the nature of a game. In a retrospective of PC Gamer’s upcoming issue 390 (402 for our friends overseas), contributor Robert Zak delved into the strange history of Planescape: Torment by talking to members of the unlikely Interplay team that helped make the game happen.
“I was just trying to figure it all out and noticed that there were three Planescape projects with four people each,” recalls Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. These were the thrilling years of 1996-1997, with Interplay simultaneously publishing Baldur’s Gate and internally developing Fallout and, ultimately, Planescape: Torment. Urquhart was head of the RPG division at Interplay, which later merged into the publisher’s popular subsidiary, Black Isle Studios.
According to Urquhart, almost no work was done on one of these projects, the second remains a mystery, while the third presents a tantalizing but probably unfortunate “what if” scenario: a first-person, fully 3D dungeon crawler that would take the advantage of the novel cards 3D accelerators such as 3dfx Voodoo.
“I said, ‘OK, we need a game that we can run and just create without having to invent new technology,’” Urquhart said. “We’re going to use the Baldur’s Gate engine and stand out with a character that’s not just a generic character, and we’re going to reinforce that by zooming in on the camera.”
Donley also described how Torment lead designer Chris Avellone was initially something of an enigma to the Black Isle crew. Although PTR has become one of the canonical D&D video games, Avellone’s first project at Interplay went less smoothly. “There was a guy down the hall who always just went back to his office and closed the door,” Donley said. “You never really knew who he was. All I knew was what he was working on Descent to Podgórze“
Another member of this team, whom Donley referred to as Interplay’s “Dirty Dozen”, was Eric Campanella, who sculpted and animated many of Torment’s main characters, even though he only had experience in 2D graphics and not the 3D modeling that formed the basis of the PTR sprites. Artist Dennis Presnell, currently working on Avowed at Obsidian, described himself as a “college dropout” who learned the digital art tools for Torment “just by pressing buttons and seeing what it did.”
However, this team would finally make some real magic. An early sign of this came when Black Isle employees flew into BioWare’s Edmonton headquarters to show off the game. After demonstrating the opening scene in the Tormenta engine, Donley recalled that BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka turned to the programmer and said, “You told me we couldn’t have that many frames of animation. Why does the game look so good?”
You can read Robert Zak’s full retrospective in Planescape: Torment in issue 390/UK 402 of PC Gamer magazine. You can also subscribe to the magazine via MagazinesDirect in both cases US and Great Britain.
