Ellard

In 1994, (it might have been 1993 it’s hard to remember…) Nintendo Magazine ran a spread on a forthcoming game. There was a bit of 3D and a few screen shots and some quotes for the team that was working on the title. 14 years later I am still struggling with the same game. That is, three years more than Duke Nukem Forever, which is supposedly the most hilariously delayed game of all time. We’re obviously not such a meme, but still win on pathetic.

What is this game and why is it older than some people you know? Why start it and why not finish it? Sit yourselves around the electric heater and we’ll have a tale.

We started with an idea loosely based around J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (stop snickering down the back it’s not pretentious – that’s an action packed tome well worthy of gamedom). Back then the idea was to have a series of rendered static images, between which the character would travel first person. The game Myst was a recent technical marvel and people were impressed by computer graphics with little bits of QuickTime to add occasional movement. This is what the magazine described, an adventure game. We were quite busy building 3D objects trying to match up the scale when DOOM was released.

I can recall quite clearly downloading DOOM from a BBS and seeing the 3D view, thinking OK that’s very clever – then moving my mouse and having it unexpectedly revolve around the screen. I don’t think I can convey how surprising that was. Followed by the thought … we’re fucked. DOOM was the death of polite little pre-rendered adventures. The team disbanded. (Greets to Jason and Fincher, nice you have real work now.)

VRML as a relic of Early Internet.

In 1996 or thereabouts the first free Virtual Reality Modelling Language tools started to appear on the web (BBS was now web… things used to move fast back then). SGI made the best tools but many different companies later joined in including Microsoft (with Chrome) and Adobe (with Atmosphere). It looked like a 3D version of HTML was on the way up and I started to try bits of code and some models. Back then display cards were not very powerful and a getting a vile green rotating doughnut up on screen was a big thing. VRML had one advantage – the sound handling was great, not only positional 3D audio but with cardioid sound from each source. However VRML had many more problems. No two authoring tools agreed on the format and what worked on one wouldn’t load in another. As an interpreted script VRML was slow, so slow that sounds would fall out of sync depending on the speed of the processor.

I showed off a few concepts at conferences at the time. The project was then called 1001 Recorders. The idea was to have sound sources that the player could hunt and collect and combine to make music – not unlike Fluid which was on the first Sony Playstation. Actually a lot like Fluid. I liked Fluid too much. When at a conference I was asked doubtfully why anyone would want to collect and combine music in 3D, it warned me that I needed a better basic reason for a game.

This is Early Internet.
People inventing solutions for problems no one has.

Trying to get sounds to sync was a big problem and beyond my skills. Even on the fastest machines there’d be a dreadful phasing, probably one reason why VRML was soon abandoned by everyone in favour of X3D – a simpler language with no sound at all. So I started to look around for a better underlying technology and found MPEG4.

Many paths, no truth.

These days people forget that MPEG4 was supposed to be more than a video format. It is multitrack and has a 3D channel, synthetic sound (based on CSOUND), sprites, text and much more. Probably because almost no-one could find a reason to implement the whole thing. IBM had a go, a few others. I was thrilled to think of 3D objects to which you could attach multitrack streaming sound – which would keep time. It really was like stringing speakers around a virtual space. And I waited for tools. And waited.

It became obvious that it was never going to happen. I switched to QuickTime and bought some software called Axel3D that could be used as a 3D track in a QT stream. Axel went bankrupt. I blew a grand on a system called Anark. Anark Corp. decided that airline safety was going to be their main focus and cut out their small customers, (of course airline safety is very Anarchic). I spent way too much on a zoo of different technologies. All dead ends.

Sometimes reality takes a while to reach the brain of a romantic fool:

• Real Time 3D over the web was a dead duck.
• I’d lost my vision – devising a reason for the technology rather than vice versa.
• Nevertheless it was urgent that I find a new mode of expression as music albums were dying.

Thinking back on High Rise it was suddenly obvious how that game should procede: The Sims Meets Doom. You socialise at parties meeting people and influence them (The Sims) into raiding parties on upper and lower floors of the high rise building (Doom). Taking two of the world’s most successful franchises and combing them will make somebody very wealthy – but it’s not going to be me. (You maybe – steal the idea!)

Meanwhile it was time to find employment and avoid starvation, and this was a very depressing period, because everyone (including you) has to realise one day that they just aren’t talented enough to follow up all their ideas. And the question needed to be rethought – why do this? What is the artistic merit? Is this something that will entertain anybody?

Arse Kick.

It was now the 2000′s and teaching was paying for food. I’d started to collect images that resonated – images that told a story. The idea was to create an ideal personal hell in which drama could take place. Evereybody has inner demons that energise their work and it was a question of finding mine. They included Tiger Balm Gardens, Fun Fairs, Aeroplanes, Pilots and more. But making a pinup wall is not enough… you need a kick in the arse. Or several. I got several.

• In researching a commercial video installation I looked into world fairs – particularly the 1930 New York World’s fair. And there was something very dark and mysterious there. World Fairs are Eros and Thanatos.
• I went back to university. I had to make up some video poetry for a course and in about a week (after all those years) came up with Lives of the Saints – drawing upon the images I had collected. Prominent was aircraft. This was obviously something that needed some further exploration.
• The Australia Council sent out requests for applications for an online artwork to be diplayed in Second Life. I hated Second Life and didn’t want to do it – then I had a dream about an aircraft graveyard and had a great idea… which I decided was not going to be in Second Life but…

And then I saw Bioshock. Never mind the game play, which doesn’t interest me much. The ATMOSPHERE. Lighting, music, design. It reaches some artistic level that makes a fantasy real. Obviously a game can be filmic.

3D is the problem.

Which inspired buying yet another 3D technology called Unity 3D which is very good, much better than all the tools I suffered over the last decade (and we use it at work so a good choice). But when trying to build the sets for my idea, the results just kept being flat… especially compared to Lives of The Saints. This is not the fault of the software – this is because after all this time I realised that what I want is essentially photographic. And every time I start to make it 3D modelled, it drifts away from this ideal. That’s a worry when you think about time (perhaps) misspent. Understanding can take 14 years.

Now I am working on photographs. That are immersive. And we arrive back at Myst. There’s many lessons here, one of them must be to stay true to the muse, and not the canvas.