- [spooky music] [Abe chants]

- My name's Lorne Lanning. I'm the co-founder of Oddworld Inhabitants, and currently the chief creative officer of the company. [ominous music]

- [Abe] My name is Abe. Here's the story of how my creators went to hell and back to bring me to life. 

The Setup.

- The idea of video games was something that I knew from the arcades. When I was a kid, delivering papers in New England, sometimes it would be 15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and so, with the quarters, you could get into a truck stop and you could play pinball, so you could have heat as long as you could keep playing before they'd throw you out, and then I just really go into playing and I loved the arcades. And my dad, at the time, was working at this company called Coleco. He was telling us that he was working on this new game machine that was basically gonna bring video arcade into the house. That was really interesting, but my brother and I, he was three years older than I am, we were like, "We're gonna get the arcade for the house, "which means we can invite girls over to the house to play, "so, yes, Dad, "we definitely want one of those Coleco machines, right?" That was really when I started getting interested at playing a home machine, because most of the time, I was just trying to get out of the house, 'cause it wasn't that wonderful an environment to be in, my household. My parents were divorced, so I still got along with my dad, and he's building the ColecoVision now, but I still didn't have any idea that this was something I would do. 

Like I always excelled in art and it just came very naturally and I loved to draw and I loved to paint and do these things, but because I was from New England, I didn't know anything about how to get in the entertainment business, how it worked. And I was pretty much a poor kid growing up, so I was always driven by like how am I gonna survive in the world. I gotta figure out how to make a living through art. I went to school in New York, in New York City, the School of Visual Arts, and I started focusing on photo-realistic painting, and with photo-realism, that actually really became a stepping stone to everything that I do today. But I'm still not thinking how that's gonna get me into games, 'cause I'm still thinking games are still so simple looking, and I'm thinking I wanna make Star Wars. So, I was seeing how I would take painting and catapult painting to maybe be a map painter and get myself into the film effects business where I could create these worlds. I was creating these worlds to escape and take off in the world. I didn't wanna be bogged down by all the issues that we had as kids. 

So, I went to Cal Arts in Valencia, California, and started studying film and animation. I get this call, and the guys goes, "Hey, we heard you know how to use Wavefront Software," and he goes, "Well, we're TRW Aerospace. "We're short on something. "We have a visualization lab. "Would you like to come down for an interview?" This is like one of the biggest military industrial complex companies in the world. What the job was was visualizing the weapons system underneath Reagan for the Star Wars weapons system that was one of the reasons why the Soviets decided we shouldn't keep this war up, is we can't compete with that. So, the concepts that we were dealing with were so out there that the generals in the Pentagon no longer understood what the hell the scientists were talking about. It's not bombs and bullets. It's way different, like sci-fi different. We saw the blueprints of everything about how the final product needed to work and how everything that was in it worked, because our job was to visualize that to show to some general that's gonna make a big multi-billion dollar decision. And I'm learning, like, I really wanna create this alternative universe that would later come to be called Oddworld, but it started from all kinds of fragments of all different things that I had experienced in life, like working in the south Bronx, driving forklifts, seeing how food flow worked for the United States. 

So, from being there, I would see people that were starving cooking dogs. I've seen dogs on spits, people with bonfires on a road. This is the United States, right? This is the 1980s. No one was photographing this stuff. No one was covering it on the news. We were looking at some real desperate shit. We would have entire truckloads of food that would come in at times, but it was perfectly ripe, which meant it should become an insurance job, 'cause by the time it gets to the store, it's probably not gonna be good. So, this was like a huge conflict to my heart, because I could see that here's all this food, and it's being destroyed right in front of all these people that need it. So, all these experiences are shaping the stories I wanna tell. I'm piecing together food, the irony that our world is being consumed by corporations that are chopping down the lungs of the planet, but representing themselves with happy face logos. That irony became sort of a signature of Oddworld. So, I was like, okay, how do I take this stuff and put this together so I can make these stories, these movie stories, 'cause this is all I'm thinking about at the time, to be CG animated movies that one day we'll have the opportunity to make, and it's not that I needed to make movies, but I need to tell stories and I need to create these worlds. 

Oddworld, to us, is really a reflection, a mirror of our own world's, our own planet's, dilemmas. So, rainforests, pollution, racism, prejudice, starvation, all these types of things are what is going on at Oddworld, too. After TRW, I was able to use the work of the weapons to get myself a job at Rhythm & Hues, which was one of the most glorious Academy Award-winning visual effects companies, so in five years, I went from the bottom to visual effects supervisor. Sherry McKenna made me a visual effects supervisor at Rhythm & Hues, and she's the vice president, bringing in the big jobs. So, I started telling her, "You know, "we should start looking at video games." And I told her the story of Abe, but I told her the story of the whole quintology. This is a five-part story. It starts with a slave who loves animals who's working in a meat processing plant, and it was like, "What?" And I was like, "Yeah, it's a terrible place "for this guy to be, "but he's gonna make the most out of it." But then, what he doesn't know yet is that the employees that reach their prime, they're gonna wind up part of the product. They just don't know it yet, so it's like of like Soylent Green meets The Muppets. And from there, I roll out the whole five-part series of one big epic.

- [Leader] You will find your unborn brothers.

- And when we get done with it, she goes, "That's amazing. "Let's make five movies." And I was like, "No, we're gonna make five games, "because five movies is gonna cost at least $500 million, "and who's gonna give us that? "Nobody, but we could get maybe $25 million "to make five games at less than $5 million a piece. "Then, we can make five movies out of them, "but by then, it'll be a popular IP," and all this. And she's like, "This guy, "he's just such a pain in the ass." So, she goes, "You get the money, and I'll do it." And then, I did, and then she had to. [laughs] Right? So, then it was like we were just trying to raise, at the time, it was $3 1/2 million, but for a game, I remember talking to publishers, and they'd go, "Do you realize that you need to sell "a million units to make money on that game," and I was like, "Yeah, why are we here, right? "It's just economics. "If I didn't think so, "I wouldn't be asking you for the money." So, I was very critical of what the characters were in games, not that I wasn't enjoying them, but when you put it up to a Hollywood standard of character development, character arc, what's happening across the multi-act structure, you had a whole different analysis of what constituted a popular character, so does Mario turn into a good movie?

- Trust the fungus.

- It's a terrible movie, because it's not there to begin with. How many other game movies did we just give no depth that we expect from movies?

- I want a replay.

- So, they brought to the movie the same superficiality that's in the game, except what had the game going for it was it was a good challenge. Now, it's just a challenge to watch. So, for me, I was like, if we build really rich characters with really rich, deep stories, not only would it make a good game, but I'm writing them all as if they're movies, and that's how I'm starting off in the development of them. How is their arc going to change? How does this slave who rises out of nothing and the least likely guy to ever pull it off, how does he wind up changing the world? That was the arc of Abe through the quintology, and one of the people that, right in the beginning, I was like, I need a killer production designer, going back to Steven Olds, who's a brilliant production designer. He designed a lot of the cast of the original game. Abe was named after Abraham, so if we go to the three Abrahamic religions today, you know, Judea, Christianity, and Islam, they were all based off of this character of Abraham, the real Abraham, because he would become the beginning of the new thought, and that's how I always thought about our characters, where this was the beginning of myths that would live on in their world, but we're gonna catch their story of these individuals taking their journey. We're gonna be there as they began something that later would become a global religion.

- [Monsters] Abe, Abe, Abe, Abe!

- The essence of gamespeak was characters could throw a word instead of a punch or a kick or a bullet or a bomb, and that word could then initiate another character, so we could have, "Hello," and they'd go, "Hello," and then, "Follow me," "Okay," you know? And they'd do this, right? And even like hello was kind of select, and follow me was move, and wait was paste. And this is how I was thinking about it. I was like, well, we do this with editors all the time. We do this in our RTS game. This unit, go over here.

- [Orc] Stop poking me!

- But I knew if we could do that and make it feel like a pet, if we could make it like what a pet would go, "Here, boy," and he comes over, and now, if I smack him, everyone's going, "He was a good dog. "Why did you smack him?" Right, which is different than if I just smacked him. They'd be like, "You're an asshole. "You smacked a dog." But the dog who did something for you and then you smack, you're really a jerk, so it's just puzzles out of character relationships, and then they go off together. That moment was a little bit of magic, and everyone we presented to that was older, or any women or girls that we presented to, were like, "Aww," right? But then, if I took them around the corner and got that guy killed, they'd be like, "He was such a good guy. "Why'd you get him killed?" You could tell that they were emotionally getting hooked in it, right? And because the character you were controlling was engaging them through voice and they would obey and do, you had a different sense of responsibility and ownership over them. That was sort of the subtext of the psychology. It was what was driving that, and the whole game would be laced with that, through from beginning to end, and then that would be something in the signature of what would make this character unique that would carry through in the series. While the industry went 3D, we went sort of the old world, but used the CD-ROM capacity. At 600 megabytes, we can save this many frames of animation as pre-cycles, we can save this many frames of background and get 270 frames of background in this many cycles of animations, and they'll all fit on the disk, and I was sort of working it that way, rather than we'll have a 3D character that's running around and doing these things. 

So, I'm looking at it that way, to go, if we can do that, then even at an NTSC resolution, we can have pre-rendered, beautiful 3D worlds, but you're just not gonna be able to move around in them the same way that the character can. And anyway, I like the format of the flip screen still screen, because it puts more attention on the character, and you feel like, if their animation's done well, I felt more in the games that were doing that than I did from the other games, because I felt like I was really more the guardian angel of this life form and this virtual world that I was in control of his destiny. You really feel responsible for the guy. You're not trying to project yourself into him, and saying, "Well, I did this," like you would in a first person shooter or something. You're looking at it and going, "I want him to survive. "I want him to succeed." The other thing that we did was we built and audio engine that was actually tracking the action, and it would change dynamically to the action. That was not typically happening in games in that time. When you went to the specs, and this was the spec on PlayStation and this was the spec for Nintendo, you gotta let the user turn off the music, and I was like, no, we're fighting that one. That's old games. Music was overlaid on top of the game. It wasn't composed like a score. We build it into the narrative of the experience, and saying that you wanna turn it off, does a movie DVD have the option to turn off the music while you're playing? No, because it's part of the experience. It provides hints. There's a lot of things that we're doing with sound cues that are embedded in the music, and if there's no action, there's no music. As soon as Abe starts to engage the enemies, you're gonna start having ♪ dun dun dun da da da da ♪ and then the action will pick up.

- [Monster] Help.

- One of the things in "Abe's Oddysee" that I was kind of amazed that people didn't appreciate was how fast the load times were, because we can only load up so much in the beginning. It's not just a bounce on the guy's head, a hoppy skippy game. There's story here. There's a different change of pacing, and that magic moment's gonna be the story told in better quality CG than you've seen in most games ever before, and then, when it drops into the game screen, it's gonna be magic, and now you're in the game. It was so hard, because our game screens were actually have NTSC resolution. To make them fit, we had to scale them down to half the size and, in game, scale them back up, and that was to save memory space and performance, and then, video played back at a different rate, and so it had a chip that would play video that was different from the ways the graphics displayed in the engine for the screen, right? So it had like one way for video playback and another way for gameplay. There was no way to have a movie seamlessly go into a game screen. Pop, and then the screen would reset and the buffer would refresh and all this crap, right? And I'm like, we gotta get rid of that pop. We finally pull that off, after a tremendous amount of work, and then it was like you watch the story of, "This is Rupture Farms. "I thought I had a good job." You know, and the way that story ended with the camera and then came to the game screen, no one had seen that before, and I knew that was a wow moment, but we needed more. We wanted to build a game that was based around empathy and based around saving, but we wanted the casualties to be hilarious, right? So that was part of the irony of the IP. So, what we had to do was we had to make sure there was like increasingly funny and humorous ways in which they would die, which were really influenced by Vaudeville acting, right, like back in the silent movies, and we were like, "That's what we need. "We need that acting from the silent movie era," and comedy was always essential part. And so, it was like, how funny can I make it if you don't care about the character, right? It's not just about writing jokes, right? There's really almost no jokes in the game. It's the disaster of what happens when you fail trying to rescue some vulnerable guys in a really deadly, big, epic, threatening world, and the failure should be hilarious. You know, in a black comedy kind of way.

- Hello.

- Hello. [comical music] [monster screams] [Lorne imitates monster scream] [electricity buzzes]

- [Abe] The Problem.

- Parts of the team were conflicted. They're like, "He's just weak. "I don't wanna play a guy who's weak. "I wanna play the strong guy," and we're like, "That's not this game," so we had those kinds of conflicts, of we're starting with a scrawny Spartacus, right? But he's not Kirk Douglas. He's got a lot of heart and that's his real strength, and he's got a mind to figure things out. We're not trying to make the guy you wanna be. We're trying to make the guy that you could identify with as being, and then, if he can prevail, then you probably could, too. One of those other qualities was Abe should never carry a gun, but we were saying that we were building an action/adventure platformer, so the experienced game designers were just, half the time, looking at me like I was a total idiot, because they'd be like, "So, you wanna create "an action/adventure game where the character "doesn't really have much action, is what you're saying?" And I was like, "Yeah, but we can pull this off, you know? "Let's just create adventure. "Let's creatively try to solve this problem." It was like, "This is just ridiculous, "just give him a goddamn gun," and I was like, "If we give him the gun, "then he's gonna solve every problem with the gun, "and then you're no longer in a puzzle game "'cause the guy's got a gun. "And if he ever picks up a gun, "we can't go back from that moment, "so how do we get Abe a gun without giving him a gun?" This is our problem to solve. [Abe grunts] [Abe groans]

- [Abe] The Fix.

- "When we're having this fighting, he can't have a gun. "You're not making any sense. "How can he be an action character if he doesn't have a gun? "We'll give him a bow and arrow, then." I was like, "It's same difference, you know?" So, we're having these fights, and I was like, our creative problem to solve is this: Abe doesn't carry a gun. Now, how are we gonna solve the problem? Well, what do we have to begin with? What we have to begin with is who is Abe? Well, we knew he was the remnants of an indigenous culture that was sort of mystically connected to the landscape and had those powers like we think of that certain Native Americans had, certain Shaolin Monks had, the Native healers that do their hallucinogens have. They had this connection to sort of Yoda's more landscape, right? I believe we don't have all the answers, but it's somewhere in there, and these mystical, kung fu type guys, the understand some of this stuff, and the indigenous cultures with the shamans and the healing, they understand this stuff, and Star Wars is kind of encapsulating this brilliantly. Yoda kind of saved my life, in terms of giving me hope and letting me look at things in a way where I didn't feel as alone in the way I viewed the world. Just like this relationship to nature and how we can help ourselves find our way through that, and if you go back to ancient China, it was very similar stuff. They were very powerful. They could shape shift, they could project into an eagle and see things from the skies. What if he's using his supernatural powers, and what if we created that he could possess other characters by going into a [chants], you know, by going into that? And if he could possess other characters, those could be the characters with the guns, and this way, we can beat the age-old no-no in games, which is don't give me something that's fun and then take it away, and now I can't have fun with it anymore. We figured out that, through possession, we could possess other characters. You would be able to have the gun for the moment that you possess them, and then, when you de-possessed them, they popped. But then, you were like, "Of course I don't have a gun. "He had the gun." And that gave us a way to have shooting action dynamics without Abe doing it, and these are solutions that, in my experience, a lot of people just wanna cave to the convenient answer. Just give him a gun and let's just change the nature of that, because it's just easier. Kinda killing the IP before it starts, because now we're just doing what everyone else does, and we're not differentiating in that different, unique way. So, if possession can get us there, that's how we get Abe to not have the gun, and that's how the user, the player, isn't disappointed that that happens, and then we can still ramp the action, we can scale it, but Abe will still go back to just Abe with a loincloth, solving his basic problems with his brain when he doesn't have someone to possess and wanna do that with.

- [Abe] Oops. The Lesson.

- One of the things I had learned was the essence of sort of brilliant, creative ideas, it's not that you had some brilliant mind and you could just birth it out of thin air. It was that you figured out the right question to ask. You figured out the right problem to solve, then focus on solving that, and by the time you solve it, you look brilliant, but not so much for the answer. It was the problem in the first place. The idea of rescuing versus killing, normally you accrue the more you kill. I wanted to flip that dynamic, too. I was like, Abe's about saving, because I felt like one of the biggest endangered natural resources we have is hope, and I know that, when I didn't have it in my life, things were really dark and really, really challenging, but when I had some, everything was much better. And how many people I knew that had no hope and how many suicides I saw, and I was like, I wanted to make things that made people feel more empowered, because the childhood was not a really happy one. My brother, who was three years older, he died of severe alcoholism at 47 years old, and I could have easily taken that route, too. But rather than have conditions beat me, I decided I was gonna be a fighter and beat conditions, so I just wanted to succeed, and I didn't wanna make things that were just difficult to play and challenging to win, but I wanted something that you went away and you remembered. And we finally get the game done. We send what we believe is the final gold disc for manufacturing, and we find this bug, and it's a crash bug. It's a class A crash bug. That's the first print of the first run of games, and we're watching that and it's just like [breathes deeply]. The only thing you can do is make sure the next manufacturing run does a better job, and that's it. You're screwed. You're screwed.

- We're screwed.

- We spent three years of our lives killing ourselves, suffering through what it takes to pull that off, like if you're a startup or a small indie group. Everyone else slipped. They didn't make Christmas. We were all under the same publisher. [dramatic music] "Oddworld" comes through, "Oddworld's" their biggest Christmas hit, "Oddworld's" the only one they can depend on. That's a curse. It's not a blessing, it's a fucking curse, because what happens then is now it's in emergency measures. We need your next game, part two of the quintology, we just need it for next Christmas. We'll pay whatever, but you gotta have it for us next Christmas. I was like, "It can't be done. "The story I wanna make, I can't do in a year, "and that wasn't the idea. "I can't do it in nine months." As good partners who said, "We'll do it, "but it's gonna be a bonus game," and that's why Exodus was not the part two of the story I wanted it to be with the brew, and that's where this many years later, almost 20 years later, we're coming out and going, "This is where "Soulstorm" is gonna be, "what that second title story was supposed to be," except at least now, we have 21st century tech to really rock it into a truly contemporary next gen title. But it's part two of the five-part epic. You know, as a lot of the fan base knows, we shut down our development studio in 2005, but we held onto the IP, because we believed it never had its fair shake in the marketplace. We always believed that it had a great start, pretty much, but it tripped out of the gate and then it tripped, tripped, tripped. From that period forward, we waited for digital distribution to become a thing, so we put them on a digital store. Sony was letting us self-publish. Now, organically, not raising money, just earning money through self-publishing, to the point where "New and Tasty," the remake of "Abe's Oddysee", had enough success that it put us in the position where we could actually make a new game and pay for it ourselves, which meant we didn't have any publishers. We didn't have anyone to bail us out. We could totally sink or swim on this. Let's build the "Exodus" we wanted to build, and let's then do what we can today, so let's get back to that brew story. Let's put it back into the epic where it should have been.

- Holy shit.

- We can build the game we always wanted to build. We can self-publish across the spectrum. It's really ambitious. It's the most sophisticated thing we've done, and hopefully, it elevates the brand, but you know, we've still got a year to deliver it, and as we've talked about, a lot of things happen in this business along the way. So, hopefully, we've done the right thing, made the right choices, and we can see people be really happy with this game when we ship it. [spooky music]

- Thank you, Ars Technica. Goodbye. [Abe farts]