The Shock Of The New

There would ultimately be more trouble in store with the decision to include Full Motion Video cutscenes between missions. Dan explains the context of the decision to take the game in this direction: "It's easy to forget now, but the early-mid-90s were sort of a weird period in videogame history. With the advent of FMV, game companies were looking to movies as a model, and Hollywood started getting interested in games but looked at them through the lens of the movie business. For a couple of years it really looked like the future of games was to be bits of gameplay interspersed with movie scenes."

Yet the problem with FMV was always the difficulty in making it look and feel convincing with a limited budget. Games of all ages are highly stylised affairs and something about the sudden switch between the pixelated in-game adventures to real actors (or programmers with drama school experience) in expositional between-stage roles always seemed a little off. As FMV disappeared, developers flocked back to rendered sequences that could more accurately match the feel of the gameplay. Now, the actual graphics engine of a game tends to be used as the method for delivering on-the-fly cutscenes, in an attempt to make the player feel as immersed in the action as possible.

At the time of TN's creation, though, FMV was king: "Back in that era, there was a real
FMV arms race, with Wing Commander III and IV in particular being the obvious competitors," Dan tells us "Lots of A-list games were including more and more FMV, and it was felt by management that if Terra Nova didn't have any it would look second-rate." A somewhat ironic concern, given how much of the FMV would turn out. Something with which Dan agrees, "I think all the FMV of that era was pretty cheesy, and Terra Nova's was cheesier than most! So I wince a lot looking back on it."

Cheesy? Never ...

The readme.txt for TN also contains details of a nod towards another trend of the era - the ability to play with a Virtual Reality headset. In theory the game was rather suitable for this, as it already had a visor-like field of vision on the game world. In reality, it's unclear whether anybody ever managed to play in this fashion. Dan reveals more: "Yeah, at the time, VR was the Next Big Thing. There were a handful of companies developing helmets and shutter glasses who were all trying to get everyone to put VR support in their upcoming first-person 3D games. Like FMV, it never really went anywhere, and what ended up really moving videogames into the next generation was 3D hardware (which started getting a foothold just as Terra Nova was shipping)." Another case of unfortunate timing for the game.

Comment

Add a comment using your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google or OpenID accounts.
blog comments powered by Disqus