Auteurship, Indie Games, and Out of this World/Another World

A recent post over at Mentisworks that reviews a great collection of indie titles got me thinking about just how auteurs (a word borrowed from film-making, where a film is characterized by a film-maker’s particular authoring style) also exist in the game industry. Michal’s review of a collection of 27 indie games demonstrates the kind of personal styles that go into each creation, and how each author (or two, or three sometimes) develop a game that suits their particular interests and artistic/game influences. While I find that most of these games definitely show some amount of artistic (in the broad sense) skill, there is one game that always comes to mind as a truly impressive example of independent game artistry: Another World/Out of this World. I highly encourage you to play the game (a new Windows XP-compatible remake is available. Play the demo or buy it here). Afterwards, read on for my review/critique…

When I bought this game for my 8 mhz 286 Amstrad PC in 1991, it barely ran. I had to turn the sound quality down to the lowest possible settings, and even then it only ran at a slow pace. Despite the relatively poor framerate at the time, the introduction still managed to be absolutely jaw-dropping. I had never seen animation so fluid, detailed, and life-like on my PC. That night I called a few friends over, and we crowded around the monitor to watch the introduction over and over, each time trying to imagine how such a feat of animation might be accomplished. The dark, brooding, almost secretive atmosphere of the introduction pulled me immediately into the game, through the fanciful depiction of an experimental physicist’s life – the hero of the story: Lester Chaykin. After struggling to play through the game on our 286 for months, my parents gave in to buying a new family computer: a lightning-fast IBM PS/1 486 PC with a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM!

Besides watching terrible grainy, low-res, low-rent FMV video clips with our new 2X CD-ROM drive, the first thing I did was install Out of this World and cranked the audio/video quality settings to the max. The difference was amazing, and I spent several days afterwards progressing through the somewhat complex puzzles, and extremely frustrating (and frequent) deaths.

But those thousands of grisly death animations were worth it – I needed to know how the story ended. With Lester’s grave always one accidental or mis-timed keystroke ahead, the game always seemed to be unpredictable and full of surprises around every pixellated corner.

What made the game so interesting; such a work of art both then and now?

Gameplay

In terms of gameplay and controls, certainly there is not a lot interesting to talk about. It is a basic arcade side-scroller: the protagonist has a gun (for most of the game), and he has to blast his way through enemies in order to survive. And, perhaps only slightly interestingly, the gun also can produce a force-field that acts as a shield from enemy laser blasts.

But what makes it so interesting in terms of gameplay then? Well, for one, each scene/room/screen is painstakingly handcrafted with its own traps, enemies, and puzzles. Not only are each of these creatures and traps hand-placed, but they are all crafted together simultaneously. So, for instance, in one of the early areas of the game, Lester Chaykin and his prison-mate must escape a barred cage hanging from the roof of a large mine. While Chaykin and the prison-mate rock the cage back and forth to build up swinging momentum, a guard stands nearby. When the cage swings widely enough, the guard takes notice and yells wordlessly at the prisoners; when/if they continue to rock the cage, the guard fires a warning shot. And (spoiler follows) if the cage swings widely enough, it breaks off its moorings and crushes the guard beneath it. This scene then leads Chaykin and his alien friend to begin their dangerous escape from the prison/mine. Throughout the game, all parts (enemies, backgrounds, walls, doors, the protagonist, weapons, traps) of the screen are crafted to simultaneously interact with each other in some pre-scripted yet surprising way. In that way, part of what makes each area/screen such a pleasure to play through are the hundreds of ingenious details that Eric Chahi scripted into the game in order to provide a seamless and life-like environment. Nowhere does the player feel that they are “starting a new level” – they are simply exploring the alien world as it is presented to them.

Second, and this is because the screens/areas were not planned out in advance, the gameplay definitely maintains an improvisational style throughout – literally no room is the same as any other room. Returning to the main topic of this post, one of the ways in which Chahi’s game clearly demonstrates a rich artistic style is in his willingness to improvise, experiment with and explore the game as he makes it. The author himself says on the Another World web site,

“During my encounter with Costa Gavras for his film called “La Petite Apocalypse”, he asked me how I proceded in creating the game Another World, and if I had already planned the entirety of the game from the beginning. It embarrassed me as it made sense to plan everything in advance and I had worked completely the opposite way. It is clear to me that Another World is the outcome of an educational improvisation!
At the beginning of 1990, the introduction was complete, the first level was being created and I had no clue about the following events, and even less about how the game would end!” (continue reading here…)

One would think that this development style produces a terribly inconsistent and fragmentary game, rife with plot or gameplay holes. But as I mentioned earlier, one of the hallmarks of the game is that it somehow maintains a style throughout, while managing to remain novel and surprising. Even after replaying the game several times in the last 15 years, I still find myself caught up in the beauty and difficulty of the game. Thankfully, Chahi answers this by saying,

“… I knew precisely what feelings and what look I wanted to communicate throughout the game. That’s what ensured the consistency and the direction of the project.” (continue reading here..)

Without waxing philosophically here, his point should be taken seriously: an artist ensures consistency in her/his work through an intuitive understanding of the kinds of feelings, images, or ideas that sit at the heart of the creation. And part of that artist’s job, then, is to express this vision in the fullest way possible, so other people can share in those feelings and images too!

Artwork and Graphics

At a time when some of the first artistically impressive games were just beginning to appear on the PC, mostly limited to the graphic artists over at Sierra On-Line and a handful of other developers, Out of this World stood out as graphically innovative. While other studios focussed on creating luxurious hand-painted static 2D backdrops (ie. King’s Quest V, Space Quest IV, Monkey Island 2, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, and Rise of the Dragon – all of which deserving their own discussion), Chahi broke the existing mould by introducing a minimalistic yet vivid artistic style that used polygonal shapes instead of bitmaps (for the most part).

Above: screenshot from the DOS version. Note the bleak, limited color palette, hard lines, and minimal detail. This version is nearly graphically identical to the original Amiga version.

Above: screenshot from the 3DO version. 3DO hired artists to repaint the backgrounds to reflect the system’s superior graphical capabilities. Despite the increased resolution the art loses its unique style, and looks much like any other game of that era.(screenshots graciously borrowed from Mobygames)

Furthermore, the game made use of an animation technique previously unseen (with the exception of Jordan Mechner’s Karateka) called “rotoscoping“. Without going into detail, rotoscoping was a process that animators used to transcribe movement from video footage to animation cels by “tracing” outlines of the subject. On his website, Chahi goes into significant detail discussing the rotoscoping process: from videotaping his brother running (which served as a prototype for Lester’s running animations), to quickly switching back-and-forth between his paint program on the Amiga and the image of his brother on the VHS tape, frame-by-frame.

While rotoscoping gave the in-game animation a fluid, organic feeling, much like Karateka (and Mechner’s later grand masterpieces, Prince of Persia and The Last Express), the real aesthetic achievement in the game’s art is the “cinematic” appearance. The introduction feels like an animated short-film, and brings the player into the story without the need for explanation or exposition. Furthermore, unlike most games which used pre-rendered video (until in-game cutscenes were developed for 3D engines), there were no differences between the art/graphics used in the cutscenes, and the player-controlled parts of the game – providing a completely seamless experience from beginning to end.

Characters, Story, and Narrative Style

While the game does not feature particularly deep or interesting characters (even Lester Chaykin and his alien buddy are not really explored as characters), the game marvelously expresses basic yet powerful emotions in the characters that give the player a sense of real attachment to them. Without words or dialogue, the characters not only manage to communicate emotions and intentions to each other through gestures or facial expressions, but ultimately to the player as their partner-in-crime. In that way, I find myself dragged into their plight not as Chaykin himself, but instead as a fellow accomplice doing my best to help them escape. While the story is a fairly standard shoot-our-way-out/prison break, it does manage to captivate and surprise the player as s/he is presented with the next obstacle (read: grisly death). Again, what is most surprising is that a classic linear story is told without dialogue, captions, or other kinds of exposition. This kind of storytelling stands in the face of contemporary games that inundate the player with checkpoints, hours of expositional dialogue, and quests, practically hammering them over the head with information on where they are located, where they are going, and what they should be doing next.

Closing Thoughts

While Another World was not a commercial blockbuster in its time, it managed to both demonstrate something new by violating some of the genre rules that had already been established and succeed as its own kind of interactive story. While superficially the game sports similar gameplay and graphics as Delphine’s excellent platformer Flashback, Chahi’s game pays far more attention to world detail and artistic style.

Looking back to the day I bought it with my hard-earned summer cash in the summer of ’91, I might be tempted to compile a laundry list of nags and ‘wish-it-hads’. But after writing this piece, I’m convinced that the game stands as a fine example of indie creation. The Windows XP redux of the game is absolutely faithful to the original Amiga version, and finally has a video resolution option that allows scaling to virtually any size desktop – the game simply looks stunning at 1600×1200! All of this from a game created over 15 years ago.