Tag: gamesradar

Opinion: ‘Games can be there for us in the toughest of times’

Most of the time, we enjoy games for the sake of entertainment, be it an engrossing story such as in The Last Of Us or getting together with friends on PSN on GTA Online, Battlefield or Destiny. But they’re also there for us in the toughest of times. I know because I speak from experience.

In September last year, my mother was taken into hospital feeling unwell. Soon afterwards, without going into the specific details, after a brief period of recovery she fell ill even further and subsequently passed away two months later.

One day, after making the trip to the hospital to sit with her for a few hours while she was still better (and in fact, seemed to be recovering at one point), I started another run through of Metal Gear Solid 3 on my PS Vita. MGS3: Snake Eater is special for me not just because it made me want to write about games – I love it above all other games for its fantastic story. And in particular, for one of the best, well-written characters you’ll ever see in any game: The Boss, my favourite character in all of video gaming land.

One of the best virtues of The Boss is her show of strength through adversity. Yes, The Boss is the game’s antagonist, but there’s that ending reveal: her self-sacrifice as part of her mission to help stop a nuclear holocaust between the US and Russia. “A lesser woman would’ve been crushed by such a burden,” EVA says at its end. But The Boss isn’t a lesser woman.

She shows herself as a very strong-willed soldier, not to mention the clear motherly instinct about her, something Hideo Kojima has overtly mentioned before. Some of these virtues that The Boss displayed played a part in helping me through a situation that made me feel like my life was in massive limbo. Soon after my mum’s death, I played any open-world game I could get into: GTA V, Far Cry 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, anything just to have something to do that took my mind off what was happening in the aftermath of such a massive life-changing event. Because I knew that if I played something linear, there’d be an end. And I didn’t want any of my games to end at that time.

It’s not just me who’s used games as a way to get through such personal situations, however. I’ve heard stories of how games can help someone through separation from their parents when young, or divorce, or when suffering from depression or other illnesses – either through pure escapism, or by experiencing a tale made by developers who have gone through similar situations. Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons’ director Josef Fares had to bury his own brother when he was younger.

Games have this fantastic, wonderful ability that no other form of entertainment have to offer: they let us escape our real-world situations and enable us to become who we wish to be and go where we want to go. Even if that escapism lasts a few hours, it’s a powerful tool. It doesn’t have to be genre-specific games, it can be any game you wish, as I discovered first-hand when I needed help. We all know games can be amazing forms of entertainment, but few appreciate the comfort they offer, also.

Opinion: ‘Games can be there for us in the toughest of times’

The greatest Sonic game we never got to play

A 16-bit platform game icon reinvented in a multi-gravitational 3D world. Spherical stage effects with an vast sense of scale and gallons of design innovation. A game which simultaneously pushed the series into the future and distilled everything that was great about its history. Super Mario Galaxy? No, Sonic did all that stuff first. Ten years before the Wii was even launched in fact. So why did the plumber get all the glory? Simple. Sonic’s game was never released.

It’s a “What if…” situation on a par with the dinosaurs not becoming extinct. Sonic games these days are the biggest joke in the gaming community, and 90% of the blame for their pariahship is rightly levelled at the miserable attempts to transfer the hedgehog into the third dimension. And Sega are well and truly out of the hardware business, having careened down a slippery financial slope ever since the Saturn failed to follow the success of the Mega Drive.

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But a good 3D Sonic game? On the Saturn? Oh, how different things could have been. How beautifully, beautifully different. So what went wrong?

Well a hell of a lot went wrong. The story is one of the most turbulent and dramatic in Sega history, as well as one of the least-known. It’s a tale of political machinations, strained relationships, inhuman working conditions and a game that very nearly killed one of its developers. Interested in reading the full, gory story? Then click on, and we’ll recount to you the tragic fable of Sonic X-treme, the game that probably would have been Sega’s Super Mario 64.

It’s 1994. The Nintendo 64 is coming and Sega wants something big to go toe-to-toe with Ninty when the machine is launched. Naturally, a flashy new Sonic game is the obvious solution.

At this point it’s important to note how Sega was set up at the time. It was a very divided company with a definite separating line cleaved between east and west. Sega of America and Sega of Japan were virtually operating as separate entities, and relations between the two weren’t always smooth. The division was so great in fact, that at one point during the Saturn’s development there were actually two versions of the machine being planned; a Japanese, CD-based design and and an American, cartridge-powered console.

So when Sega Technical Institute (a small US development division, once populated by Japanese Sonic Team members but by then also incorporating American employees) expressed interest in making the game, it was perhaps inevitable that things were going to get messy. At that early stage though, few could have predicted just how ill-fated the project would be.

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Above: The original pitch video

Preliminary work began with Sega’s 32X Mega Drive add-on as the intended launch platform, despite the fact that the device wasn’t even finished and firm technical specifications weren’t yet available. Michael Kosaka was the game’s producer and team leader at that point, and soldiered on with a design document regardless of the hardware complications. CGI artist and animator Chris Senn was charged with creating demo animations to sell the concept to Sega’s executives. We’ve been lucky enough to to talk at length with Senn about his time on the project, and we’ll be checking in with him regularly throughout this feature.

Senn had no choice but to design his demos conservatively due to the lack of clear hardware specs for the game, but upon being shown his work, Sega’s execs voiced concern regardless. In those post-Donkey Kong Country days, they weren’t happy with what they saw as simplistic graphics, irrespective of the constraints on the designer at the time. Even less encouraging was the response of Yuji Naka, original creator of Sonic. He simply shook his head and said “Good luck”.

In early 1995, the project took a huge loss when Kosaka quit the team and left Sega. As Senn recounts, “He and the executive producer Dean Lester were not getting along, and I believe Michael felt it was his best option to simply remove himself from what he thought was a politically unhealthy environment.”

The nature of the departure not only set the tone for many of Sonic Xtreme’s problems, but also set in motion the disorganisation which would dog the team throughout the game’s development. Relatively young and inexperienced at the time, Senn found his role shifting drastically. “Right about the time when Michael Kosaka left, my responsibilities mounted as the only designer to try and ‘take his place’. An impossible seat to fill, as Michael had done a fantastic job of navigating our team through hostile waters, but I did my best to come up with a design that went someplace a little less traditional than his designs.”

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And to further increase the adversity, the commercial nosedive performed by the 32X then caused Sega management to get antsy about the launch platform and move the game to the American version of the Saturn. And guess what. No firm technical details were around for that one either. Regardless, all of STI’s resources were shifted over to the X-treme project.

That decision didn’t last long though. Soon realising that only one next-gen console was viable, the US machine was scrapped, and the game was again shifted, this time to the ultimately released Japanese version.

Cut to later in the year. Despite the hiccups of platform changes and alterations to the staff line-up, the Sonic X-treme team was finally getting into its stride and starting to produce some very exciting results. The game was already shaping up to be an incredibly fresh, invigorating and downright drool-worthy reinvention of Sonic. It was a tight, focussed extension of what the 16-bit games had been, marrying exhilerating bursts of speed with inventive platforming and exploration.

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Resident programming guru Ofer Alon had created a striking ‘fish-eye lens’ camera engine which gave the game a spell-bindingly hypnotic, spherical look, long before Mario ever thought of going off-world. The game’s mechanics were already incorporating multi-directional gravity, levels which flipped and spun around Sonic, and all kinds of joyous, upside-down, inside-out, ring collecting malarky. If you’ve watched any of the videos in this feature yet, you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about. The game was shaping up to be the 3D Sonic that we still dream about today.

The team was split into two factions. One, led by Senn and Alon, beavered happily away on the main game levels, while the other, headed up by irrepressable human-dynamo Chris Coffin, worked on a more free-roaming, ‘arena-style’ 3D engine for the game’s many boss fights. The future of Sonic, the Saturn, and Sega itself was looking great.

However…

In March ’96, Sega CEO Nakayama Hayao visited STI to check up on Sonic Xtreme’s progress. By that point Alon and Senn’s work had made great progress and they had a few playable levels ready to proudly show off. This was going to be the meeting that really cemented Sonic X-treme’s place in Sega development history. Except that it didn’t. In fact in many ways, it was the beginning of the end.

Nakayama didn’t like what he saw at all. The reason for that? What he saw was old work on an old version of the game engine, developed by a team inexperienced with the level-editing tech. The ‘real’ version of the game made by Alon and Senn might well have convinced him, but he was taken away before the two were allowed to show him what they’d worked so hard on.

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He did however, get a look at Chris Coffin’s separate engine for the boss battles. That he did like, and he immediately ordered that the entire game be reworked using it. Here we go again…

It was a crushing moment for both the team and the project. With Alon and Senn’s version of the game blown unceremoniously out of the water, Coffin’s team essentially had a whole game to make. The December release date loomed on the horizon like an ogre with a headache. And a club with a nail through it.

Realising that development had well and truly hit the final ‘all or nothing’ stage, Producer Mike Wallis took drastic action and requested that Sega’s honchos allow Coffin’s team to knuckle down and crunch through the game in isolation. He put his foot down and requested that no more company politics be allowed anywhere near Sonic X-treme. Perhaps fearing the very same ogre, Sega management agreed. The team virtually moved into the office and started working sixteen hours a day.

The next fleeting ray of light for the team came in April of that year. When Bernie Stolar, Sega of America’s CEO asked Wallis what he could provide for the team to make life easier, Wallis said he wanted access to the game engine that Yuji “Good luck” Naka had created for NiGHTS. Getting hold of the technology would give the team the tools they just didn’t have time to develop by themselves, and inject the project with a much-needed shot of hope. And in an uncharacteristic stroke of good-fortune for the project, Stolar managed to deliver. In an ironic twist of fate, it looked like Naka himself might actually provide the very luck that he had wished the team.

Of course, by this point you’re probably expecting something to go wrong, and you’d be entirely right to. Two weeks after delivery of the engine, it turned out that Naka hadn’t been consulted. He protested at his work being given to STI and as a result the NiGHTS technology was withdrawn. The team was back to square one. Or rather it was back to square one minus fourteen days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZb7LE6G5Gg

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By May, things were shambolic. Morale was low, the team had a staggeringly high turnover rate, and the events of the preceding couple of years had seriously taken their toll on the project.

According to Senn, “It was about as bad as I’ve seen. The politics that led to Kosaka-san’s departure. Allowing a newbie wanna-be designer like me to fill a veteran like Michael Kosaka’s shoes without guidance and direction. Going through three lead programmers in the first year and a half of production, each time restarting the technology. A divide between people’s ideas about what the game should be. Egos. Inexperience. Poor communication, bad politics… all of these things contributed to the inevitable demise of the project.”

By that point most of the development tasks had fallen to Chris Coffin. Still holding an unstoppable drive to keep the game in production, he moved a bed into the office and worked constantly throughout the summer.

Meanwhile, Alon and Senn had been undeterred by the earlier rejection of their work. Still believing in what they had created, they had continued their version of the game to pitch to Sega’s PC gaming division. Alas, despite all of their efforts, the pitch was rejected and their vision of the game was essentially killed. As a result, Ofer left Sega. Unsurprisingly given the state of things by then, Chris Senn believes the rejection wasn’t the only reason for his departure.

“Ofer was a genius,and it was this genius that led him to prefer solitude with his work. Rather than manage other people, he chose to act out his title as Lead Programmer by trying to create the best possible product. Unfortunately, this seemed to rub certain team members the wrong way. I found myself defending Ofer to other people – management included – because they’d refer to him as ‘just a programmer’ and similar designations which I found incorrect seeing as he had such a heavy hand in co-designing the game. I believe the nasty web of politics were partially to blame for both Ofer’s departure and for the demise of the game itself.”

Things weren’t going well for Chris Coffin either. After a summer of working himself into the ground for the benefit of a small blue hedgehog, his body couldn’t take the strain any more and he caught pneumonia. He had pushed himself past his own physical limits and had leave the Sonix X-treme project before illness and stress finished him off.

And that friends, was about the end of the whole sorry saga. Without Coffin, Sonic X-treme could not be completed in time for its Christmas release date, and Sega decided to can the entire project and replace it with a port of Mega Drive game Sonic Blast. The main Saturn marketing push that Christmas eventually went to NiGHTS.

So just why did the team keep ploughing on despite the accelerated spiralling of the game’s apocalyptic problems? Purely and simply, it was belief in what they were making.

“It wasn’t so much that I’d invested so much already”, says Senn. “It’s that I truly loved the game we were trying to make. Sure, it had changed directions, team members, platforms and so on, but I still loved what we were trying to do. When I was using Ofer’s editor at its peak, the editor he’d worked so hard on, that we’d discussed day in, day out for so long…To have my hands on the fruits of all our labor and pain… my imagination was able to merely begin to explore what we could do. It had taken a long time to get to that point, and unfortunately, due to all of the circumstances, what we had was just too late.

“I plodded along until the project was cancelled, which probably saved my life. I spent three years recovering; one year to regain all the weight I’d lost, and two years to heal physiologicaly. That game rocked my heart, soul, mind and body to the core in every way. But as the saying goes, ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’. Great learning experience on so many levels!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_jY1e5LXus

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Above: One of the many Sonic X-treme fan tributes on the ‘net

With the game now essentially disowned by Sega in favour of such luminaries as Sonic Adventure and Shadow The Hedgehog, it’s tragically unlikely that we’ll ever see anything from the company that follows the model laid down by X-treme’s development team. There is however, always hope in the internet, and several fan remakes of the game have already been produced to varying degrees of effectiveness. The biggest source of potential right now comes in the form of Project S, a fan community initiative set up at Chris Senn’s own forum. It’s dedicated to the eventual production of a complete, non-commercial game based on X-treme, but we’ll have to wait and see.

And finally, having worked on the best Sonic game never made and very narrowly missed out on making the series great in 3D, what advice has Senn got for today’s Sonic Team?

“I would say the same thing to anyone – make a game that’s about quality, not quantity. Some people seem to think that a game has to have more things and characters and moves and levels and so on. I don’t agree. I think players want to feel immersed in a world that is consistent, with rules they can learn and understand, with risks and rewards that make them feel good; that make them feel like they are learning and getting better at something.

“Relating this to Sonic directly, I would want to make a game simply about him – maybe about a time in his life that’s never been covered. Set him up with a dilemma he ends up facing and let the player choose how they want to play, all as an umbrella for the classic foundation of polished, tight gameplay the original 2D games offered – but in 3D.”

We couldn’t agree more sir. We couldn’t agree more.

Chris Senn is now based in Los Angeles where he runs Senntient, his own multimedia production company dedicated to the creation of “strange and charming entertainment”.  

The greatest Sonic game we never got to play