THE MAKING OF BIOFORGE

EVERYONE KNOWS ORIGIN SYSTEMS FOR ITS WING COMMANDERS AND ITS ULTIMAS BUT THE ONCE GLORIOUS GAMES COMPANY HAD MANY OTHER GREAT TITLES UP ITS SLEEVE, SOME OF WHICH HAVE BEEN LOST IN THE MISTS OF TIME. LIKE BIOFORGE FOR EXAMPLE...

- PAUL KAUTZ

There are some buzzwords, like ‘multimedia’ that dominated the gaming culture in the Nineties. But the one word that was even more ubiquitous than that was ‘interactive’ – absolutely everything just had to be interactive and, if possible, an ‘interactive movie’. Which in reality usually meant cheaply produced postage-stamp-sized, direct-to-video quality level clips on CD-ROM, giving the player only the lowest possible level of actual interaction.

Ken Demarest, who started work at Origin in 1990, had a different point of view on the matter, as he came from the technological side of things: as a coder on Wing Commander and the lead programmer on Ultima VII: The Black Gate, he saw interactive movies as a chance to create games that were as movie-like as possible without reducing the players to mere spectators. The key element for him were ‘synthetic actors’ – virtual characters who behaved like their realworld counterparts, only exactly when the players wanted them to. Logically, the game’s working title was Interactive Movie 1 – later to be changed to Green Guns and ultimately BioForge, with Ken taking on the roles of director, chief programmer and motion-capture model.