Terra Nova Retrospective

To the PC users familiar with their games, Looking Glass Studios were synonymous with great design and captivating ideas. In 1992 they released Ultima Underworld - notable for being one of the first games to feature real time first-person environments, but even more notable for being a blast to play. The non-linear exploration of that title was revisited in 1998 by LGS' Thief series, in which wry footpad Garrett had to rob and cudgel his way through a variety of mansions, tombs and ... err ... a trippy underground nature-god hideaway. Stealth, rather than brute force, was Thief's hook; not-so-gently encouraging players to chill out in shadows rather than taking on swordsmen head-on. To have Thief on the CV would be a boon for any developer, but LGS followed it up the very next year with much-revered and distinctly unnerving System Shock 2. When the studio was forced to close its doors in 2000, it was no surprise that gamers felt the industry had lost a creative force.

But there was another milestone game in the LGS catalogue, which doesn't always get the same coverage as their other stand-out titles (no, not British Open Championship Golf, although we're sure that was amazing too.) This game featured first-person combat, vast 3D environments, tactical squad control, jump-packs and some highly entertaining Full Motion Video. It was, of course, 1996's Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.

We spoke to Dan Schmidt, then project lead for Terra Nova - now lead gameplay programmer at Harmonix Music Systems, who you may just recognise as the chaps behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band - about the making of the game and the difficulties it faced in finding commercial success.

Let's Take This Outside

TN's plot is a futuristic musing on the themes of Imperialism. Colonists on Jupiter, locked in a stalemate struggle with Earth's oppressive Hegemony, eventually reach agreement (with Earth funding) to shuffle off to the distant Centauri star system. The game flashes forwards 150 years to a time when the Centauri colonists have re-established an uneasy peace with Earth and now concern themselves fending off pirates and dealing with other internal troubles. This in-depth backstory is told throughout both the old-fashioned chunky manual (which is as much about establishing the feel of the gaming universe as it is about imparting knowledge of the controls) and in-game via cutscenes and information terminals. Crucially, players can learn as much or as little about Centauri history and society as they choose - if they simply want to clamber into their suit of powered armour and blow up some pirates, the tutorial serves them well.

The seemingly incongruous union of weighty, flight sim-style lists of technical weapon specifications with gameplay that is relatively easy to get to grips with can be explained by a decision taken late on in development. As Dan recalls: "It was always about squad-based combat in powered battle armor, but it was originally intended to be a more hardcore simulation. Around a year from the end of the project, we realised that it wasn't much fun, and made the gameplay a lot friendlier."

Contributing to that fun were the gigantic outdoor environments of TN which, at the time, offered impressive draw distances. Where other games utilised crude fog to make up for their inability to process far away objects, Looking Glass had an altogether more cunning approach: "One interesting thing was the tech we used for drawing the landscape, which at the time was amazing - you could see way farther than in any other outdoor 3D game. It was designed by James Fleming, who now works with me at Harmonix. Basically it depended on the fact that the PC's resolution was so terrible (320x200) that when we were drawing things that were far away, we could fake them horribly, because they were only going to occupy a few pixels on screen anyway." Not only could players 'see' a long way on a horizontal plane, this ingenious technology also allowed spectacular birds-eye views of the battlefields using one of the game's most entertaining features - the jump jets. When sufficiently boosted, these could provide an almighty spring; perfect for launching a surprise aerial assault, making a quick exit, or simply for admiring the landscape from on high.

Unfortunately, the team fell slight victim to the double blow of a delayed game (although released in 1996, development on TN began in '92-'93) and the unstoppable march of PC technology. "It certainly got delayed a lot," says Dan "By 1996, games were starting to support "high-res" 640x400, which made the limitations of our tech apparent." Nonetheless, TN was able to create convincing outdoor environments on a scale that could not be matched by first-person 3D contemporaries like Quake or Duke Nukem, offering a completely different gameplay experience. After all, in which other games could you opt to play as a sociopathic lumberjack and blow up all the trees?