Information The Warren Spector Papers: Historical videos from Origin, Looking Glass and Ion Storm

[Infinitron]

Tags: Ion Storm; Looking Glass Studios; Origin Systems; Warren Spector

A post over at the Ultima Codex informed me of the existence of this video archive, hosted by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. It's part of a larger collection of documents and other media donated to the university by Warren Spector, who has been involved with historic preservation in the gaming industry for many years.

The videos themselves are mostly promotional stuff, mainly related to various Origin and Looking Glass games from the early to mid-90s, but also to Deus Ex and other Ion Storm titles. In addition to Origin's more well-known games (Ultima, Wing Commander, etc), there's material here from many of their more obscure titles. Of particular interest is a video labelled Autoduel, which is actually a promotional video for an apparently never-released Autoduel Online game based on the classic from 1985. There's also a video with a few minutes of rough footage from a mysterious unidentified first-person game, which were found on a VHS tape spliced in between a bunch of random TV show recordings(!)

The site is rather slow, and the quality of the videos poor, but still, this is quite the treasure trove. Warren Spector's career has taken a turn for the pathetic in recent years, but he should be commended for assembling this.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

So, here's the question: will they fire Warren Spector?

 

[Infinitron]

I've been doing some Internet archaeological research into this Autoduel Online game. Apparently it was supposed to be a virtual reality game (lol 90s), then an MMO, and then the developer went bankrupt.

I've even located some people who worked on it. Kenneth will probably post about this next. Let's see what we can dig up.

 

[Excidium]

The sound effects in that FPS remind me of Thief.

 

[Infinitron]

The sound effects in that FPS remind me of Thief.

Yeah. It might be Dark Camelot.

 

[Infinitron]

The sound effects in that FPS remind me of Thief.

Yeah. It might be Dark Camelot.

I posted about this in that thread on TTLG. Some interesting responses:

Were the devs using that recognizable and proprietary editor at any stage while they were developing Better Red Than Undead before they switched to Dark Camelot? DromEd's only one iteration of the editor, as is ShockEd, so there may have been a RedEd or UndEd, heh. Sean Barrett left them in 1996, after contributing to the editor and making his Portal Renderer, and was kept in the loop as a consultant over the next few years. We can see the Quake connection in that video pretty clearly.

Aside from the extensive map construction suggesting otherwise, it could just be a demo map for the tools, given that the video is mainly a demo of the water effect, and then of the way that engine handles sound, before propagation and occlusion were added, and the way the camera is moved through the map, and how some of the map is constructed, I was reminded of the German Looking Glass Technologies promo video, with the untextured/under-textured fly-through of the Bonehoard while discussing DromEd and the Dark Engine.

According to Wikipedia:

Thief began development in April 1996.[48] For the initial designer and writer Ken Levine, credited by The Telegraph as "a key figure in the creation" of Thief,[49] inspirations came from two of his favourite games, Castle Wolfenstein and Diablo.[50] The initial concept was to make an action role-playing game and Levine was given the job of designing the game's world and story. Levine said the initial ideas and projects that have later morphed into Dark Camelot, before eventually evolving into The Dark Project, included School of Wizards and Better Red Than Undead, which was "a campy story" about communist zombies. The game was supposed to be a first-person sword fighting simulator, but "the marketing [department] killed the idea," to his disappointment.[51] According to programmer Marc LeBlanc, "The first proposal was Better Red Than Undead, a '50sCold War game where the Soviet Union is overrun with Chernobyl zombies and you have to go hack them to pieces as the loner from the CIA because bullets don't work on the undead."[52] Doug Church said the game's design was built around the idea "of having factions who you could ally with or oppose yourself with or do things for or not."[53]

The next concept, Dark Camelot, still focused on sword combat. Its plot—an inversion of Arthurian legend—featured Mordred as a misunderstood hero and King Arthur as a tyrannical villain.[54] According to Church, the game featured Morgan le Fay as Mordred's "sort of good" advisor andGuinevere as a lesbian who would betray Lancelot and help Mordred to break into Camelot and steal the Holy Grail.[53] The game's design combined a first-person perspective with action, role-playing and adventure elements.[6] Warren Spector, who had recently left Origin Systems to found Looking Glass Studios Austin, became Dark Camelot's producer after his predecessor departed.[55][56] Artist Dan Thron said: "For a good long time, we had no idea what the game was about, until somebody stumbled upon the whole thief game play where you're not just running out trying to chop people up."[52] Church recalled that "the basic stealth model was [...] having the guard looking the other way and you going past pretty quickly. So Paul [Nerath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part and why not you just do a thief game."[53]

The editor shown in the video is called DromED though, so it's probably not older than Dark Camelot.

 

[jewboy]

Dark Camelot might have been a great game, a sort of Ultima Underworld III in spirit, but it was the usual business shit we take for granted now. My recollection is that they had spent quite a bit of development time, maybe something like a year, on Dark Camelot before switching to Thief for money reasons. A lot of us LGS fans were super pissed when it was announced that their new RPG just became an action game. When LGS went under I had mixed feelings about it because in a way they totally deserved it after basically selling out.

 

[Infinitron]

Dark Camelot might have been a great game, a sort of Ultima Underworld III in spirit, but it was the usual business shit we take for granted now. My recollection is that they had spent quite a bit of development time, maybe something like a year, on Dark Camelot before switching to Thief for money reasons. A lot of us LGS fans were super pissed when it was announced that their new RPG just became an action game. When LGS went under I had mixed feelings about it because in a way they totally deserved it after basically selling out.

"Action game"? Come on, man.

Dark Camelot mostly likely would have been far more of an action game than Thief turned out to be.

Dark Camelot was a project that died before it got very far. It was to be a swordfighting adventure game designed for general market appeal.

 

[Excommunicator]

Autoduel huh. Sounds like an appropriate name for a game from the current AAA crop. I guess they were just ahead of their time.

 

[jewboy]

Well what would you call it? Of course it was an action game. The marketing term was I believe 'first person sneaker', but it was nothing more than a kind of action game. What it really was was an attempt to make money. They wanted to do an RPG, but I guess they couldn't afford the time it would have taken. So they did a simpler, cheaper sort of game instead. In any case it was certainly not another RPG like they had promised and all of us had been expecting. The only games they had made so far had been Ultima Underworld I and II. They were RPG devs. It would be like Black Isle deciding to make Splinter Cell. What they first announced was most definitely a full RPG. Another RPG in the spirit of the Underworlds. There was serious backlash when their expectant fans discovered they were changing genres to something completely different. I remember when they had announced that there would be no stats in their new not-an-RPG-anymore game. People were not happy. That must have been when they had first announced that they had changed their minds about their new RPG. That it wasn't going to be an RPG at all. I was very, very disappointed. It wasn't until Arx Fatalis that I finally had something like an Ultima Underworld III.

 

[Infinitron]

Well what would you call it? Of course it was an action game. The marketing term was I believe 'first person sneaker', but it was nothing more than a kind of action game. What it really was was an attempt to make money. They wanted to do an RPG, but I guess they couldn't afford the time it would have taken. So they did a simpler, cheaper sort of game instead. In any case it was certainly not another RPG like they had promised and all of us had been expecting. The only games they had made so far had been Ultima Underworld I and II. They were RPG devs. It would be like Black Isle deciding to make Splinter Cell. What they first announced was most definitely a full RPG. Another RPG in the spirit of the Underworlds. There was serious backlash when their expectant fans discovered they were changing genres to something completely different. I remember when they had announced that there would be no stats in their new not-an-RPG-anymore game. People were not happy. That must have been when they had first announced that they had changed their minds about their new RPG. That it wasn't going to be an RPG at all. I was very, very disappointed. It wasn't until Arx Fatalis that I finally had something like an Ultima Underworld III.

Uh, System Shock, Flight Unlimited, Terra Nova. LGS were never an RPG exclusive developer.

 

[Jasede]

Is this a troll or something?