Blizzard co-founders Frank Pierce & Alan Adam. Samwise Didier, art director with Blizzard since the days of Silicon & Synapse. James Anholt and Bob Fitch, technical directors who have made Blizzard’s flagship works together. And from industry legends Joyray Hall and Patrick Wyatt, who shared Blizzard glory days in various fields.
Live witnesses of Blizzard’s history gathered in one place. It is to commemorate the announcement of the’Arcade Collection’ that announced the splendid revival of Blizzard’s early masterpieces, Lost Vikings and Rock’n’Roll Racing, and Blackthorne.
On this day, Blizzard’s legendary characters brought up the stories of these games from their memories of decades ago.
The story begins with Blizzard’s predecessor, Silicon & Synapse. The Lost Viking, also known as the Three Viking Brothers of Heroes of the Storm, started with the idea of the puzzle game Lemmings.
At the beginning of the game, there were 100 types of 8-pixel Vikings that would replace Lemmings’ Lemmings. Each of them had various characteristics, but it was too many for players to use it, and eventually reduced to five and included only three characters: Olaf, Balog, and Eric in the release version.
Instead of reducing the number of characters, the play mechanics of each character have also diversified. Through this, a lost Viking representing Blizzard, different from the Lemmings, was born.
The player clears the map by manipulating the three protagonists of the lost Viking, one at a time. Even at the same level, the way you play the game is different each time depending on the order and how you use your character’s abilities.
This was the core fun factor of this game, but it was also a challenge for the developers who had to consider the game design in consideration of these points. Meanwhile, Alan Adam remembered that he was criticized to help when he presented the first version of the Lost Vikings to Interplay, which distributed the game. They helped improve the artwork, etc.
Blizzard legends introduced that the humor of the Lost Viking was interesting but not disrespectful, and that the line had a good sense of humor.
Meanwhile, I also explained why the Vikings were painted in one blue and two in green. At the time the game was released, Super Nintendo supported only up to 256 colors. There were only 15 colors available for each character, and there was no choice but to implement a limited character design.
Later, when the Lost Viking was added to Heroes of the Storm, the blue, green, and red characters were implemented as originally intended.
The Lost Vikings received good reviews, but the developers at Silicon & Synapse didn’t want to make the same game. They enjoyed new challenges and weren’t just success, they were also game-loving players.
Rock and Roll Racing is the sequel to Silicon & Synapse’s game RPM Racing. In particular, Blizzard technical director Bob Fitch wrote most of the game code himself. Samwise Didier jokingly said that this game was made by Bob Fitch, not Blizzard.
In particular, it has planted a number of personalities that are not related to actual racing, such as loading various weapons such as rockets and lasers on a flat car of RPM Racing. The track also depicts a burning planet with aliens or outside space instead of the usual tracks covered by many games.
Samwise Didier, all the games that Blizzard can make. He said that the possibility to create everything from fantasy to science fiction to horror started with this little game. At the time they said to each other,’We can make everything we want! Let’s do it together!’ and said that this was the power to create a Blizzard game that became popular worldwide in the future.
On the other hand, rock and roll racing is also a work that includes many challenges to overcome the technological limitations of the time. The development team of Silicon & Synapse added six sound tracks that appear as the background of the game, and also contains the voice of an announcer with various introductory comments. At that time, it was necessary to implement high compression technology due to the cartridge capacity limitation and to select only the necessary parts separately.
Meanwhile, as to the reason why he insisted on metal music as the sound to be included, Samwise Didier, who was in charge of the sound at the time, replied,’Because heavy metal makes the player want to run faster,’ and winked.
Lost Viking is light and humorous. If rock and roll racing deals with lightness, Blackthorne is a game with a darker and more serious atmosphere. With a shotgun, the protagonist, Kyle, convinced the Blizzard developers that they could create a darker world as well.
Blackthorne’s story is the beginning of Blizzard’s telling stories to people. The script and the characters were treated more seriously.
In particular, the main character, Kyle, is Blizzard’s first anti-hero. The development team introduced that they were the first to deal with figures like today’s Illidan and Arthas, saying that they weren’t like bad guys or tough guys. James Anholt broadly explained that StarCraft’s Jim Raynor is also a kind of Blackthorne-style character.
Alan Adam recalled that when he first checked the game, he was surprised by the animation as natural as its dark side. The smooth flowing motions were possible because there was a rotoscoping technique in which the artist converted the video taken by the actual actor into the actual game.
Artists looked at the recorded video and drew the outline one by one to implement the movement. The character moved at 16 frames per second and performed various actions.
Meanwhile, for the name of the protagonist Kyle, various names such as Toros and Salak were nominated, but Kylie Reese, the protagonist of the movie Terminator, sounded pretty good and decided to be Kyle.
The legends of Blizzard who were together on this day named the Lost Viking, Rock and Roll Racing, and Blackthorn as their best games of Blizzard. In particular, with the release of the’Blizzard Arcade Collection’, which provides a combination of these three games through the opening of BlizzCon earlier, you can enjoy legendary games on current-generation devices.
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