He walks back and forth between the factory and his apartment, and could be anywhere inbetween. This comes into play when Foster has to talk to a character, obnoxious factory owner Lamb, in a certain part of the city. The game was built using Revolution’s own Virtual Theatre engine, which would give NPCs rudimentary AI routines. It was a huge undertaking, especially for a small team of only about a dozen people.īeneath a Steel Sky was developed, according to Cecil, in “a grotty little office above an arcade in the town centre of Hull.” Instead of a network the team would toss floppy disks across the office at each other. Finally, a team of animators at Revolution took Gibbons’ sprites and brought them to life. He used Deluxe Paint II-bitmap graphics software designed by Electronic Arts-to draw the characters pixel by pixel, while the backgrounds were digitised paintings with foreground elements added to give them depth. Then, with only 500 colours and a 320x200 pixel resolution to work with, he began work on the game itself. He imagined Foster in his original Underworld pitch as “tall, tanned, and craggy, a mixture of Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max.” He sketched out the Nazi-esque uniforms of the security officers and the city’s jumbled, industrial skyline. When it came to designing the look of the game, Gibbons started with concept art in his familiar comic book style. The acting is decent, but the comical tone is, once again, at odds with the setting. Actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company were hired to record the dialogue, but the writers were unhappy with the results and re-recorded the entire thing with traditional voice actors. They attempted to compromise and find a middle ground between the humour of LucasArts games and the “ridiculously earnest” Sierra adventures. Cummins wanted the dialogue to be fun and flippant Cecil wanted it to be more serious. There was apparently some tension between writers Charles Cecil and Dave Cummins about the tone of the game, which may explain its inconsistency. The humour almost feels like an afterthought as if they wrote a serious, straight-faced sci-fi tale, then played Day of the Tentacle and thought “Damn, we better lighten this up with some jokes.” But in the next moment, you’ll be solving an elaborate puzzle to flip a dog into a swimming pool. True, there are some thoughtful moments in the game that touch on these issues. It feels like a missed opportunity, because dystopian fiction is often a great way to say something meaningful about our own society. But they don’t do enough with this aspect of the story, focusing mainly on Foster’s immediate predicament. It’s a politically charged game, informed by the era in which it was made. I can’t think of a game with more northerners in it. The jaunty music, slapstick, and silly jokes jar with the bleak setting, and for a game supposedly set in Australia, most of the people you meet have stereotypical regional English accents. Inspired by the success of LucasArts adventure games such as Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island, Revolution injected the game with a distinctly British sense of humour. In some respects it is, but mostly it has the peculiar whimsy of a sitcom from the 1970s. With such a dark premise and that evocative title, you’d be forgiven for thinking Beneath a Steel Sky was some kind of earnest, weighty science fiction story. At the beginning of the game, a jack-booted security force arrives in his village, kills his adopted family, and takes him to the city as a prisoner-and he has no idea why. A helicopter crash left him stranded in the Outback as a boy and he was raised by a group of aboriginals. Set in Australia in the wake of some unspecified apocalyptic event, it’s the story of a man named Foster trying to escape from a dystopian metropolis called Union City. Gibbons wrote a story outline, titled Underworld, which laid the groundwork for what would eventually become Beneath a Steel Sky.
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