Now I don’t have the fancy book learnin’ to know what can change the nature of a man, but there sure are a lot of factors that can change the nature of a game. In a retrospective feature for upcoming PC Gamer print issue 390 (402 for our friends across the pond), contributor Robert Zak dug into the strange history of Planescape: Torment by talking to members of the unlikely Interplay team that made it happen.
“I was just trying to figure everything out, and I noticed that there were three Planescape projects that all had like four people on them,” recalled Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. These were the heady years of 1996-’97, when Interplay was simultaneously publishing Baldur’s Gate while internally developing Fallout and, eventually, Planescape: Torment. Urquhart was head of Interplay’s RPG division, which was then coalescing into the publisher’s well-loved subsidiary, Black Isle Studios.
“Almost no work” was getting done on one of those projects according to Urquhart, the second remains a mystery, while the third presents a tantalizing but likely ill-fated what if scenario: A first person, full 3D dungeon crawler that would have taken advantage of brand spanking new 3D accelerator cards like the 3dfx Voodoo.
“I said, ‘Ok, we need a game that we can go and actually just make without inventing new technology,'” Urquhart said. “We’re going to use the Baldur’s Gate engine, and differentiate ourselves by having a character who’s not just going to be a generic character, and we’re going to reinforce that by zooming in the camera.”
As development progressed, many of Interplay’s resources were devoted to a never to be released sequel to 1995’s Stonekeep. This allowed a number of newer developers to take up the reigns and prove themselves on a project with a large degree of creative freedom. Some of them weren’t even familiar with the Planescape setting before starting work on the game. “[Urquhart] just came one day and said, ‘We’re going to do a Planescape game,’ and in my head I’m going ‘What the fuck is that?'” recalled PST lead artist Tim Donley.
Donley also described how Torment’s lead designer, Chris Avellone, was a bit of an enigma to the Black Isle crew at first. While PST would go on to be one of the canonical D&D videogames, Avellone’s first project at Interplay went less smoothly. “Down the hall from me was this guy that would always just go to his office and close the door,” Donley said. “You never really knew who he was. All I knew is he was working on Descent to Undermountain.”
Another member of this team Donley described as Interplay’s “Dirty Dozen” was Eric Campanella, who sculpted and animated many of Torment’s main characters despite only having had experience in 2D art, not the 3D modeling that formed the basis of PST’s sprites. Artist Dennis Presnell, now working on Avowed at Obsidian, described himself as a “college dropout” who learned his digital art tools for Torment “just by pressing buttons and seeing what it did.”
This team would eventually do some real magic though. An early indication of that came when Black Isle staff flew out to BioWare HQ in Edmonton to show off the game. After demoing Torment’s opening in-engine scene, Donley recalled BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka turning to a programmer and saying, “You guys told me we couldn’t have that many frames of animation. How come the game looks so good?”
You can read Robert Zak’s full retrospective feature on Planescape: Torment in issue 390/UK 402 of PC Gamer magazine. You can also subscribe to the mag via MagazinesDirect in both the US and the UK.