Shut up and Play This: Blade Runner

Shut Up and Play This is a weekly article reviewing various games played by the author of the week in question.

Unlike your regular desk job, working in the games industry can mean long hours. Long hours means less games…or to be more specific, more of the game I’m making and less of the games I want to play. In weeks like these I become retrospective of some of the great games I’ve played: Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Fable 2, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate II. And then there’s the list of games I’ve played that not many people have…and you’re insane if you haven’t played these.

Take Blade Runner for instance. Made in 1997 by Westwood, it was one of the last adventure Point and Click games: but it was more than the slow paced, hemmorage inducing puzzle-solvers of the early 90s. Blade Runner brought Adventure games to the modern times (of the late 1990s) and did a lot of things that should have changed the industry. Playing as Ray McCoy you, like Deckard, have to track down a bunch of Replicants (those pesky Androids from the film). You travel to scenes that are faithful reproductions from the movie, including your own apartment and converse with new and old characters familiar to any fan.  The game’s cutscenes, environments, music and sound effects pulled you into that futuristic dystopia…and I was in fucking awe.

I'll take two. TWO.

The game did some unprecedented things back then.  Besides the technology, besides being a rare great move-franchise game made 15 years after the movie came out, and besides pulling Adventure games out of their treacle- momentum decline, Blade Runner had a very strong narrative. This was a big fucking deal back then…BioWare had only just emerged on the scene and hadn’t yet release Baldur’s Gate, the game that changed RPGs. In Blade Runner you WERE Ray McCoy; you WERE playing with your life and you were solving the mystery of who were the replicants. And for each player the story was their own experience. Westwood set out to make a game that would have a different narrative depending on who was playing the game. The characters who were Replicants were randomly determined at the start of a new game.  This meant that a Strategy Guide would be of no fucking use. This meant that for every character you met, whether it was your first playthrough or your seventh, you had to pull out your Voight-Kampff machine and ask questions to determine whether they were a Replicant. Or not. You could just shoot them and hope that they were (Remember the scene of the stripper in the movie?). This only helped to bring you into this world, to make you a part of this world with your interactions and actions making a difference.

Tell me about your mother...

And best was that your choices made a difference. A real fucking difference.

Conversations were similar to what we see in Mass Effect. Mass Effect uses paraphrases to make the resulting choice a surprise, and new, instead of required reading. In Blade Runner you could choose the questions directly or you could set your responses by emotion: you didn’t know what you’re character would say, you only knew it would be angry, sympathetic or smarmy. What you chose in these conversations could make a big difference to the outcome of the game: it would determine whether a character liked you enough to help you in your quest, or they could just outright fucking hate you and piss off for the rest of the game.

And then there are the endings. 13 of them. And while the ‘choose at the last second to get a different ending’ do exist in the game, the choices you made could affect the entire outcome and make some doozies of an ending: everything branched from what you did as Ray McCoy.

Let’s take four of my friends who all played the game to the end — and because ALL of you reading this that haven’t played are going to turn around and play it, I’ll do this without major spoilers — I played 20 or so hours until the end and made a choice and got my ending. Another friend played 20 hours made a choice and received a different outcome. Another person played 26 hours, made a choice just before the ending and received something else entirely.

And then there was the friend who played 7 hours and met a teenage girl named Lucy. You have a choice in the game to help Lucy, and you can have conversations that influence her trust in you. And after only playing 7 hours of the game my friend chose to run away with Lucy. Credits roll. And he came back to us at our weekly meet-up (read: DnD) and told us how awesome the game was, even though it was short.

How fucking insane is that? The developer put in thousands of hours to create a deep and long game, only to have it possible for the player to finish it in 1/3 of the time. And they put so much work into the environment, the atmosphere and the experience up until that point that the player would feel satisfied with their outcome.

THIS is what the game industry is about. This is what makes us different from the movie and television industries: we can provide completely different experiences depending on how you play. And what’s the importance of that? Think about how much socialization will happen due to this. You only have to look at the BioWare Community to see how much interaction happens because players are excited that our games provide outcomes based on their choices.

Blade Runner was an early game that was a mediocre hit that started to show how exciting our industry can be. It’s a game that any and ALL gamers should enjoy. And it’s a game that will easily play on your netbook, even the 701s.

In fact, I’m running downstairs and dusting off my box to install it right now.

Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)
• http://www.bioware.com
• http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/196769/2227
• My own fucking memory.
• http://www.brmovie.com/Game/index1.htm
• http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,14
• http://www.trustedreviews.com/video-games/review/2006/09/12/TrustedReviews-Top-5-Games-Of-All-Time/p5