THE MAKING OF No One Lives Forever 1&2
The late Nineties were a pioneering time for first-person shooters, but also a time when these early 3D games were all slathered in dark, rusty colour palettes. Then, like an expressionistic splattering of rainbow paints in a drab industrial control room, sassy Sixties-themed shooter No One Lives Forever shook things up in 2000.
The radicality of this game and its 2002 sequel went far beyond their swinging stylings. They were story-driven and sharply written, they offered freedom of approach in tackling objectives and the sequel introduced an AI system that laid the foundations for FEAR – a game that’s lauded to this day as one of the best implementations of enemy AI in videogames.
1998-1999 was a prolific period for developer Monolith Productions (see our feature on the early years of Monolith in issue 219). The studio released no fewer than nine games in that time, during which it also began development on No One Lives Forever. Working out of a huge multi-building complex in Kirkland, Washington, the studio’s rapid expansion and wealth of simultaneous projects was largely fuelled by its big-thinking cofounder Jason Hall – which came with its perks and drawbacks.
Hall, along with several of the founders, was an audiophile, which meant that Monolith had its very own sound studio on-site. Monolith cofounder Toby Gladwell tells us, “Jason was always very big on audio and one way in which Monolith was ahead of its time was that our audio was always really good, and music wellscored.” The crisp dialogue and Guy Whitmore’s excellent soundtrack for were born from this obsession for acoustics.
