Waterworld

Core studio team:

I had just completed whichever project I was working on at Creations, and hanging around chatting early one evening, before heading to the pub, when Richard Kay came upstairs to the office I was in and said, "Who wants to go to Hawaii?"

A week later I was on the other side of the world taking a tour of the Waterworld set, at Interplay's expense, to help me design a game based on the movie. I think me and the Interplay Associate Producer I was working with were the only game developers there - all the other people on the trip, from various video game companies (Ocean, Nintendo, and several others), staying in our 5 star hotel, were senior management. Funny that.

Interplay wanted us to copy a Lucasarts Star Wars game which was big at the time, which was all based around streamed FMV with sprites moving over the top (Rebel Assault?).

This was a truly terrible idea. At least the Star Wars game had you flying down canyons, which both looked interesting, and justified the fact that your movement was completely on rails (otherwise you would hit the canyon walls). But it was still unplayable.

Waterworld was set on the open sea. Making the background a pre-rendered movie of a flat ocean, with no ability to change direction, was destined to result in a dull looking, unplayable mess.

But the customer is always right, so we made the game that they wanted, with a 100+ pages game design, a big team of artists rendering a CD full of movies, and brave coders trying to make a decent game out of it all for about a year of all of our lives, and it was a dull looking, unplayable mess.

So they canned it.

Interplay went bust, didn't they?