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 real-world 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.
The first game, released in 1992, went in the direction Ken had in mind, “[] provided a lot of inspiration, but we believed that we could outstrip their technology. I think we succeeded in that regard,” he tells us.
