{"id":1724,"date":"2017-10-06T23:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-06T23:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/307200"},"modified":"2017-10-06T23:30:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-06T23:30:00","slug":"how-the-blade-runner-game-ensured-players-never-knew-who-to-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2017\/10\/06\/how-the-blade-runner-game-ensured-players-never-knew-who-to-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Blade Runner game ensured players never knew who to trust"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Every time a player started a new game, the dice would pick whether characters were replicants or not.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

– Playful’s David Leary, reminiscing with Eurogamer<\/a> about his work on Westwood Studios’<\/em> Blade Runner adventure game.<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s a new movie\u00a0out this week bearing the name Blade Runner, and that seems to have at least partially inspired Eurogamer<\/a> to revisit Westwood Studios’ 1997 PC adventure game of the same name.<\/p>\n

Released more than a decade after the original film,\u00a0Blade Runner\u00a0<\/em>is a game devs should know about because it did something very rare in the ’90s: it presented players with a detective story that changed every time you played.<\/p>\n

“Every time a player started a new game, the dice would pick whether characters were replicants or not,” Leary told Eurogamer, recalling how he helped out on the game and coded a script that would (presumably semi-)randomly dictate\u00a0which characters were secretly robots.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Creating the code was not that technically difficult,” he continued.\u00a0“The challenge was to make sure\u00a0the pieces wouldn’t fall apart.”<\/p>\n

He goes on to talk about those challenges in a bit more detail in the full article, which is well worth reading over on Eurogamer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For a bit more historical insight into Westwood’s often-overlooked\u00a0Blade Runner\u00a0<\/em>game, check out Gamasutra’s own 1998 interview with Westwood cofounder Louis Castle<\/a>, in which he discusses everything from the intricacies of fitting the game on 4 CD-ROMs to the challenges of simulating cool\u00a024-bit smoke and mist effects on 16-bit graphics cards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Every time a player started a new game, the dice would pick whether characters were replicants or not.” – Playful’s David Leary, reminiscing with Eurogamer about his work on Westwood Studios’ Blade Runner adventure game. There’s a new movie\u00a0out this week bearing the name Blade Runner, and that seems to have at least partially inspired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}