Looking back at it. The games we waited so long for.(Part 2:Prey)
By insanejedi 1 Comments
So like this previous blog post, I'll be revisiting games that were long in development, the hype, and how it all happened in the end. So stay with me as I explore through almost 2 decades of gaming delays, development, and marketing.
Prey
I feel like this is cheating a bit, because Prey wasn't exactly in development for the 11 years since it's incarnation in 1995. It was probably killed off mid way in development and picked back up in 2005. The real story of the first incarnation started in 1995 when 3DRelms wanted it to be the absolute best looking game of the time, and to a big degree they did show off that ambition in a big way, allowing 3DRelms to be spoken in the same light as Id and John Carmack or Epic and Mark Rein. These we're big engine companies back then, that whenever they released a game it would always be a contender if not out and out winner of "Best Graphics: Technical" awards of that year. So what did the game look like?
Oh but you think that portal was just video feed of another place that would just physically teleport you doom style into the other room?
Yup. You probably heard this but Prey had real portal technology back in 1998. This is 1998 where Portal the game was seen as a technical break through literally almost 10 years after the fact. And these portals reacted just as in many ways if not more than Valve's portals. For one you could actually move the portals in 3 dimensions, where in Portal the game, the portals will actually break whenever a platform it's sitting on moves. I don't know if that was a design decision or a technical challenge, but Prey has the ability to do that and does that in a seemingly smooth way. Not only just the portals though, Prey just looked amazing back then, remember that the best looking games of that time is Unreal and Quake 2.
Which looked like this...
Granted not bad, but Prey looked like it was going to be competing with the Quake 3 space of graphics and at the time looked like it was going to surpass it. 3Drelms was so proud of their engine that they decided that they we're going to use this engine in their Duke Nukem: Forever game. Unfortunately it seems that 3DRelms bit off more than they could chew, facing technical problems that nearly halted development of the game time after time. At some point like in true 3DRelms fashion a once impressive game engine was now scrapped for a new one, and an interesting and impressive game was now delayed. 3Drelms tried reviving it somehow by hiring 1 single tech programmer to do the job of writing a completely new variant of the Prey engine but of course that fell apart and Prey was basically cancelled during 1999. Jeff Gertsmann said that that 3DRelms decided to work on Duke Nukem: Forever instead of Prey and that was the reason for the indefinite delay.
After several rumors and leaks of 2001 and 2002 of 3DRelms using Human Head Studio's to develop the game and using id Tech 4, it was only until 2005 that that actually came through fruition. Using the Doom 3 engine, and level design from Human Head, and it seems like the gameplay concepts of the original Prey were left in tact, including the portal system. So how did this all work out?
Disappointing? Well it's not the whole story...
So while Jeff Gertsmann may have had a somewhat tepid response to the game, it did score a solid 83 on Metacritic and ended up being at worst a fairly competent shooter.(which can be more than said than 3dRelms next shooter.) Ultimately though if you felt that the portals we're nothing more than fancy doors, or thought they were genuinely an interesting addition to gameplay, the fact of the matter is that after the release Prey wasn't a big seller and in 2011 isn't remembered for much other than weird native American shamanism and the "Don't Fear the Reaper" scene in the first 30 minutes of the game. Which is probably why Prey 2 maybe doesn't look like anything of it's predecessor. None the less I think in the end Prey delivered what it promised, an impressive looking shooter with portals, but I guess both reviewers and gamers found out that it doesn't carry the whole game into a big AAA title.
Next: Dennis Dyack and Too Human development.