Hey, hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of PC Gaming Classics, AKA The Backer Page Podcast. This is a podcast about 90s PC gaming. I am one of your hosts, Phil Iwaniuk, and with me is Jeremy Peel. Hello. Hi, Jeremy, how you doing, mate? I’m good, thanks. I think we actually forgot to get Samuel Matthew to approve the name The Backer Page. We just did it, but I think they’re at peace with it now. You can call it what you like, really. It’s your podcast. That’s what The Backer Page alludes to. It exists because of kind backers and wealthy benefactors. But yeah, it’s a sort of dual name entity at this point. It’s The Backer Page informally, but I think in the paperwork, it’s PC gaming classics. Yeah. Let us know your thoughts on which name you prefer. Yeah, we’ve got deep on the self analysis already. But yeah, the deal is we’re covering six brilliant games from the 90s era of the PC platform. Last time we did System Shock 2, didn’t we, in forensic detail? We did, yeah. You weighed in on that, listeners. Yeah, the feedback was really good. I loved that. Loved the boostings and all that. Yeah, isn’t that nice when you get feedback and it’s good? Which is incidentally not what happens when you publish articles on the internet. Should probably stress out how different and lovely it is to, writers don’t read the comments. They try not to, because it always goes wrong. You end up reading something that ruins your week. Oh, I can, I could probably tell you verbatim some of the comments on my reviews from many years ago. Like before I learned to stop looking at comments and all social media. Like it really, it’s the ones that you know are a bit true. Yeah, yeah. And most of them are a bit true. You know, you’ve never done perfect work and like reviews particularly are like totally subjective things. So if someone calls you up on like an opinion that you just, you hold really, really closely and you know, they fundamentally disagree with your point of view. You’re like, well, yeah, that is just as valid, you know? It’s not like there’s a scientific methodology to these things and you pour in bloody like lithium on a game disc and it’s like, oh, it turns out this is a six. It is so subjective. And if someone calls you out, then you’ve really got no recourse. I mean, I shouldn’t give anyone the ammo, but if you really want to get to me in the comments, you want to say that, oh, this writer’s trying a bit too hard because I am trying really hard at all times. And if I’ve pulled it off, then you don’t notice. It looks fairly effortless, but sometimes I guess you can see the strain. Oh, blimey. Yeah. Well, would you rather that or they’re not trying? They’re phoning it in. Yeah. I don’t know which would, both of them would hurt me. Cause I think both can be true at different points in time. It’s very rare. There’s probably been 10 reviews in my life where I’ve hit the middle ground where like, I’m not having to think too much and labor over like clever phrasings. It’s all just coming out really well, but I’m also super engaged with it. And I feel pleased with the end result. It’s a magical space that you get into and it happens very rarely for me. Yeah. No, same. We’ve given listeners the tools to destroy it there. So it’s very trusting. But then I feel like based on the feedback we’ve had from the first episode of the podcast, I don’t think they want to destroy us, Jeremy. Not yet anyway, not until they turn on us. Maybe some of our opinions about 90s PC games will all come crashing down. But until then, yeah, thank you so much for everybody who has fed back. It has all been massively positive stuff. Let’s find some from the Discord and read them out, Jeremy. Do you have any to hand? I will do. Yeah. Oh yeah, I think I’m hitting the vein of like when the episode first came out here. I want to get to, oh yeah, here we go. So, well, Ben Blaster was really looking forward to the show. Not sure if they came back to say that they enjoyed it, but they were certainly excited about it. Ian Welby, here we go. Really enjoyed the episode today, it’s a game I’ve never played, but as Jeremy says, it’s part of the lineage of a genre I like very much now. The big compliment I’d pay to this episode is that it does feel like an episode of The Back Page despite no large men. I have no idea how large Phil and Jeremy actually are because of their chemistry. So they’re so, no, so they’re knowledgeable. I’m trying to twist that into a better compliment. They’re so knowledgeable and interesting, but still having a laugh because they know each other. We do know each other. Good stuff. And I’ll be looking forward to the next one. Thank you very much, Ian Welby, for that. Yeah, and there’s an important question embedded in there as well. And I am the larger of the pair of us. Yeah, I don’t think I am. Neither of us are as tall as Samuel and Matthew are. I’m 5’11. Yeah. So I don’t know if I… I’m roughly 6. Yeah. So you probably just sneak into the height restrict. It’s like the opposite of… No, it is like the, you have to be this tall to like this podcast. Yeah, it’s not the opposite of that. You only let small people on. It’d be a disaster. They’ll be flying out of the seat belts and things. So let’s not even think about that. Let’s find some more. Naslin is a Discord regular. He said, really great stuff, Jeremy and Noodles. That’s a reference to the old false assertion that you’ve gone by noodles in a band for many years. Yeah, that I have in fact noodles from the offspring. Yeah, Naslin said, my parents’ 90s PC could barely run Zoombinis, so it’s lovely to experience system shock 2 vicariously through the pod. There was a lot of Zoombinis chat going on, actually. And yeah, we weren’t sure if we were being, if it was satire, like if Zoombinis was a real game or not. But yeah, a lot of people. Yeah, big deal for a lot of people in their early years. Quasi educational game played in schools apparently. Yeah, more of a US thing, right? I guess, I guess that must have been it. Yeah, I’ve got one here from Campbell. I also really enjoy the episode. I don’t really have any mileage with 90s PC games, but like the regular Back Page podcast episodes, it’s fun listening to people talk about things they’re passionate about. Look forward to the rest of the series. I thought the Review Wars segment was great as well. Thank you very much, Campbell. Very kind. There’s one here from Tofu Jacob. Just finished at the back of his page. This is in Top Shock 2. Edmund thought it was great. Someone who’s never been a big PC Gamer. A lot of those early games are huge blind spots. Great discourse and energy too. Look forward to hearing the rest. That’s nice, isn’t it? It’s nice to hear that we do have rapport. Because I enjoy our conversations. Yeah. We’re not deluding ourselves. Yeah. It’s weird to have your friendship tested by an external ear. Like these two get on. They seem like they like each other. Phew. It’s a possibility that I hadn’t considered is that we make the podcast and then have our friendship picked apart and people go, I don’t think these two are going to make it. And that actually just kind of breaks us. Yeah. Do you know what? I don’t think Phil’s very engaged with what Jeremy says. What could we do with that? It’d be so hard to overlook that. I’ll go for one more here from Crocklin because it, sorry, Crockin, it raises another interesting point. A great episode both. I’ve desperately wanted to play SS2 for about 15 years now and have made three separate attempts over the years. Unfortunately, it makes me feel extremely motion sick. Anybody have any good suggestions on what I can do to remedy this? I believe I’ve tried messing with Field of View before in the past, but maybe not properly enough. I also find I’m susceptible to this with older games, I think because the frame rates tend to be a bit lower and the FOV on a square 4 by 3 aspect ratio is much closer, much narrower and it sucks. I think I used to get that quite a lot when I was a kid and first getting used to staring at a screen from a few inches away. Jeremy, you’ve written something about this, which you linked in the Discord. Yeah, I wrote something for VG247, kind of speaking to an expert on motion sickness in games and whatnot. And yeah, I’ve definitely suffered from this as a lover of first person shooters, but more so in my adulthood, strangely. Half-Life, which we’ll come to later in this series, is a big one for me. I think that’s FOV related. But yeah, I spoke to this guy and he told me that a lot of it’s to do with the speed of things passing in your peripheral vision, you know, and that’s how your body measures speed. And the kind of disparity between that going on on the screen and your body, obviously being static. So your brain is getting two different feeds and they don’t match. And so your brain registers that as something weird is going on. You’ve probably been poisoned by a weird berry. Therefore, you need to feel sick to throw it up. So the nausea is in fact like a defense mechanism from your body. But unfortunately, you can’t turn off, you can’t tell it that you’re actually just exploring Black Mesa and that you’re not dying. Fascinating. Quite frustrating. Yeah. Clever, clever bodies. They’re always one step ahead, aren’t they? Whatever we want to do. Yeah. I get really sick in VR and that’s just not going away. You know, people talk about getting your sea legs in VR. I’ve got quite a few hours in it now and I just, oh, whatever the… I’ve experimented with different movement styles. I think the only way to do it would be if I had a massive gymnasium to run around in so that I didn’t have to ever jerk around, you know, teleporting or moving as you would normally move and again, just by sort of sliding along without physically walking forward. The only thing that doesn’t make me sick is actually walking forward so that my brain isn’t getting those mixed messages. But that’s a different… It’s going to be tough for you when your workplace moves to Zuckerberg virtual office space and you’re throwing up during presentations. Let me start it on the metaverse. Don’t get me started on it. You might have brought legs to the metaverse, but you’ll still be legless. So yes, thank you again for all your kind words on that means, means genuinely loads to us. So thank you. And also, of course, thank you to our podcast parents, Samuel and Matthew for allowing us to do this. So last episode, we talked a little bit about who we are. But I think it’d be nice, Jeremy, to tie things up into a bow for the listeners and explain how what’s our connection to Samuel and Matthew. So perhaps you would like to start us off. How do you know these two giant men of games journalism? Well, I knew Samuel first and obviously Back Page listeners will be aware that he was editor in chief of PC Gamer and before that of the magazine and that all kind of ran parallel to my modest rise in games journalism. And I have a distinct memory of being at E3 for the first time, bumping into Samuel and him saying, oh, Jeremy Peel, you’re the person I’d most like to poach from PC Games N. That was the first time that someone outside of my immediate team had, you know, a peer had said, hey, your stuff’s good. Yeah, I had quietly profound impact on me, I think. Oh, other people might notice what I’m doing. And yeah, I mean, I think that was the first comment that kind of like eventually gave me the confidence to sort of go freelance and know that there would be places out there that wanted my work. And sure enough, when I did, Samuel was like the first biggest backer of me, you know, immediately told the PC Gamer team to kind of commission me for stuff. And yeah, I’ve written a lot for them ever since. And yeah, that’s lovely. I didn’t know that. That is characteristic of Samuel. Yeah, that’s a lovely little story. Yeah, Matthew, I’ve had, I’ve spent less time with, I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him so often, but I know him more vicariously through the podcast. I have more of a sort of a parasocial relationship with Matthew, I suppose, but I greatly respect him as a fellow freelancer. We both write for Edge and we both have similar kind of sensibilities and kind of standards in writing. And you sort of recognize those people, don’t you, when you work in and keep track of what they’re doing and what they’re saying. Full of yourself, similar standards in writing. I would agree there. I know them both from my days in future publishing many years ago. Matthew would have been there probably as editor at NGamer when I joined and was a staff writer on OPM. We had what you would do when Review Code came in on that floor, all the magazines were sort of spread out on one floor and there was like the demo room, which was this sort of glass-fronted meeting room with all the debug consoles in there and you would just sort of sequester yourself off in the demo room. Those were the best days because you would just be eight out of full working day, just sat in a room on your own, playing a game, making notes and it was just delicious. And one day I was in there playing, I don’t know, some like Ninja Gaiden, Yibur thingy or other. I think it was Ninja Gaiden Z, that really, really difficult and substandard Tecmo Koay PS3 release. And Matthew was in there like on the debug Wii and like that would happen sometimes and you’d get a little bit of a chat going about what you’re reviewing. But I just remember him actually being super engaged with whatever this game was and really taking like taking the time to explain it and what he liked about it. And I just got like a sort of in-person mini review about this fairly obscure JRPG from Matthew and I like his his passion and like commitment to the cause really came across. And and that was yeah, that was lovely. We shared a nice little moment which he probably doesn’t remember because he was a very established and experienced editor at that point. And Samuel, when he joined Future, he was like the very young hotshot in town. He came with like a real reputation like I’m pretty sure Samuel’s only about 24 now. So when he like when he joined PC Gamer and quickly became editor, I think he might have even come in as editor. He was super young. He might have been the youngest that they’d ever had. And it was like who’s this hot young kid in town who’s who’s mixing it all up? And, yeah, I think we went on a few press trips here and there and I just had a sense of this like incredibly capable, prodigious man who’d like, yeah, wise beyond his years. And I remember a particular incident where, like one of his staff writers was just like I was chatting with him round the corner from where Samuel and the team were sitting and the staff was just like wobbling a wobble board, like a bit of cardboard as he was talking for like, but for about 10 minutes. And Samuel just like effortlessly came over and almost like a Jedi mind trick. He was just like, stop doing that. Or he might be like, you need to stop that, you know, and it wasn’t like, it wasn’t angry. It wasn’t out of line, but the wobbling stopped. And the staff writer just sat down at his desk with his work. And I was like, yeah, I understand why this this young editors come in and shaking things up at PC Gamer. So that’s my experiences with those two, in case anybody’s interested. I’m sure Samuel appreciate being described as the hot young kid with authority. Yeah, absolutely. So that’s how we know them. Let’s move on. So, great, let’s finally start talking about Blade Runner in a minute. But let’s stretch our legs first, listen to some ambient Vangelis-like synths, and then we’ll get into the 1997 point-and-click adventure game from Westwood, Blade Runner. Right, I’ve made another cup of tea. We’ve listened to some Vangelis. And now it’s finally time to talk about Blade Runner, the 1997 point and click, some would say classic. Jeremy, what are your recollections about how this hit the industry, and how did you first become aware of this game? I wasn’t aware of it until a few years later. I was into my Westwood stuff. You know, I played Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Iberian Sun. But I distinctly remember seeing Blade Runner listed among PC Gamer’s best games list. You know, right in the back of the mug. So much to answer for. Yeah, yeah. They still do that, but now it’s, now it’s a kind of like a personalized list from a right of each time, if I’m right. I think it still runs that way. You know, I got to do one once during my two week freelance stint as a deputy editor on the mag once. And you know, it’s a cool, it’s a good way to do it. You know, you get a variety of different tastes feeding into that. But you know, in the nineties and early noughties, magazines were all about building those definitive lists, weren’t they? You know, whether that was Q Magazine voting Oasis into the top five of the stone roses of the best albums ever made. They’d do that every month. And yeah, PCG, they would have this list of like, well, these are the best PC games. You know, full stop. I think that’s actually, yeah, really significant shift in the tone of games coverage in general, right? Like, yeah, the nineties and 2000s was all about being definitive. And, you know, the mag voice saying like, listen, if you’re not playing this game, like you’re an absolute fucking loser. You’re not part of our club. And these are like the 100 greatest games or 50, you know, whatever it is. And yeah, now it is completely changed. And it’s, yeah, it’s about like bringing different voices in to say, actually, these are the games that I really like for very personal reasons. And then, yeah, as you say, next month, a totally different selection of games so that you get an even broader landscape and nobody’s trying to profess to ultimate wisdom on it. I’m not sure which I prefer. I think both have got their merits. Yeah, as you know, it was probably more exclusionary back in that time. I mean, it definitely was, but there was also something about- Yeah, particularly the way I phrased it. Something about that kind of being in the gang of a mag and the kind of authoritative tone. It felt like kind of adopting an identity. And yeah, PC Gamer, they would have this. I’m trying to think what would have been in there at the time. Probably we would have quite had Half-Life 2 by the point I was reading it. What year are we talking? Like 2002, 2003? Yeah, yeah, about then. What would have been in there? I still think they would have been making the case for Half-Life 1 as the greatest game ever in the early 2000s. Maybe, maybe. Like maybe they’re like, you know, it’d be wow, wouldn’t it? It’d be wow, as soon as wow hit. Yeah, so it was definitely like, it was recent games, you know, that were kind of leading the pack there. But I do remember that there was this, you know, mid to late 90s adventure game still punching up there with the rest of that was Blade Runner. That was still kind of beloved at the time, five or six years on and hadn’t been supplanted by anything. So that made an impression seeing that there, you know, I trusted PC Gamer’s opinion on these things. And so kind of noted that this was a special game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it. Like, unless it came back on sold out or one of those sort of reissue labels in shops, it was pretty difficult to track down these slightly older games that were like four or five years after the fact. The adventure games just move at a slightly different pace, don’t they? That’s probably always been the case. Other than in that real heyday, the early nineties, like the adventure game, like ultimate pick in any games mag probably was two or three years old. Like the longest journey was the best adventure game for probably seven years. Yeah. As far as all the games mags are concerned. Yeah, that’s true. It’s just one of those genres, isn’t it? Certainly. It just moves at a speed of its own. Yeah, and Blade Runner came right at the end of that heyday, arguably just beyond it. You know, Full Throttle had been a couple of years earlier, which, unless I’m mistaken, was kind of the last big smash hit for the adventure genre. Can you think of any others? No, I think you’re right. This is coming just at the awkward stage where technology is allowing adventure games to do something more than like the scum engine tried and tested formula, but nobody was really sure how to do it. And so obviously LucasArts went with Curse, and which was like really poorly received at the time and has subsequently become, some say, some reckon it’s the best of the Monkey Islands. But yeah, they were trying to do something different. It was on 48 different CDs of glorious sort of 2D animation and Blade Runner takes a different approach to what can we do with this extra firepower in PCs now. But yeah, it was growing pains at this point. And I think the fact that there wasn’t a unified approach to making a good adventure game to a higher technological standard meant that it started to lose ground to things like shooters that were being iterated upon at a much faster rate and things like RTS games as well. And then the rise of isometric RPGs, just meant that this genre got slightly sidelined. It was just trickier to figure out. Fundamentally, you play a point and click adventure game the same way you play Windows. It’s really, it’s super intuitive, right? Like you have a sense of, these are the things that I need to click on in order to further this experience just the same way as like hitting start and getting to the whatever it was in Windows, like into Microsoft Paint and doing some graffiti or like a wavetable or MIDI program and just listening to some MIDI files. It’s really intuitive. And that was probably a big part of the appeal and what was driving a lot of the sales and a lot of the popularity of the genre earlier in the nineties. And then as soon as people had become slightly better versed in gaming in general on home computers, that changed the proposition, I think, for adventure games. And it wasn’t, they needed something more than just sheer accessibility. And I should say as well, I’m talking about accessibility, even though those games are absolutely befuddling in their puzzle logic. But at least you know, you don’t need to know a control scheme and there’s no problems with like, elsewhere in other genres, there hadn’t really been unified control schemes yet. And you might want to play certain, you might want to play Descent with a joystick. You might play some racing games with a joystick and not as point and clicks, you just need a bloody ball mouse and 45 minutes to figure out which items to combine. That was it. Yeah. I think there’s an argument to be made that Blade Runner is this kind of smartest application of, you know, the kind of 3D tech at the time in an adventure game. It didn’t throw out, you know, you’re still working with essentially 2D backgrounds in the way you play them. It’s still those kind of lovely vistas, but it’s also a very kind of technically innovative game. There’s a lot of work with shadows and lighting and fog and all these very kind of things that were being enabled by early 3D tech. A lot of motion capture in Blade Runner. It’s incredibly smart. Yeah, we have names for all the things that they were doing in game tech in that game now, but at the time they were building them from scratch in their own engine and applying them with a very specific goal of capturing the atmosphere of a Ridley Scott film from the 80s. Yeah, no small order, but yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s so smart about how it uses its tech. We’ll dig into a bit more about that, some of the techniques involved in order to achieve the look and how kind it was on systems at the time. It doesn’t require a 3D accelerator, which is quite an achievement. This one, I got my first PC after this game came out. However, that PC came with this glorious little tray of titles bundled with it. And among them all was Blade Runner. This was the first adventure game I ever played as a result. So there was like, what else was in that little disc tray? There was like Redline Racer, Ultimate Race Pro, Total Annihilation, Fallout, probably something, Actua Soccer 2 and then Blade Runner. And I had no sense, yeah, it was amazing. I had no sense at the time that Blade Runner was, I probably knew that it was a film, but I hadn’t seen the film. To me, it was just like, the universe was basically whole cloth. Like as I was playing it, it was like, yeah, the game had come up with this. I was like, wow, this is all right. I’ve thought about this world. I had no idea that there was a film and a book and an entire sort of language of cyberpunk built around it. Have you seen Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Westwood’s Blade Runner? That’s exactly how it felt when I finally watched Blade Runner years later. What do you mean? You’ve never seen Blade Runner? It was mad. I was like, this film adaptation of a game is so spot on. It’s unreal. They’ve used some of the same noises as the game. I didn’t even realize the game was so popular. And then of course, click that I was watching a film from 1982. Yeah. I didn’t see Blade Runner until my late teens and it was right. Foolishly, I accepted at the time that the final cut was the final cut. Oh no, was it the director’s cut that came first? I forget. Oh yeah, right. I watched the second to last cut, which was the most modern at the time, which is the one that comes without Harrison Ford’s Bored narration, New Irish but Bored. Right, yeah. Yeah, that was my first experience with Blade Runner. Yeah, I was many years later and yeah, it was a revelation. I think I did know that the film predated the game, but I didn’t know how closely the two played together and yeah, like you, once I started reading PC Gamer, certainly in like 1998, 1999, they were still banging on about Blade Runner being this amazing point and click game. So that’s sort of like that enriched my respect for this game that I was struggling with because I didn’t understand any genre conventions. I don’t remember the Edge or PC Gamer score. I think generally the critical reception was pretty positive to this. If I were to hazard a guess in PC Gamer, I would say high 80s. It sold well as well, I believe. I gather that it was a slightly ludicrous investment in that they spent more on it than adventure games at the time typically made back. So just to break even, they had to do better than the rest of the genre was doing. But it did succeed, so a big swing. I guess they must have pinned a lot on the Blade Runner name. I think I read that it outsold Curse of Monkey Island, like three copies to one. So that is probably the Blade Runner name doing some of the heavy lifting there. Although it is a fantastic game in its own right. It is. It’s strange to realize that Blade Runner was, what, 82? And this game came out in 97. So effectively, it was ancient history already. Those obviously were kind of at the 40th anniversary of Blade Runner now. But it’s akin to somebody making a Blade Runner game now. It’s not there was no sort of if not within the natural window of a movie tie-in. No, not at all. No, it’d be like if Westwood had made the Wild Wild West point and click adventure game, then that would be contemporaneous. Yeah. And in some ways, it’s a shame that we don’t live in that universe. But yeah, probably the modern parallel is the Avatar game coming out. I mean, obviously, there are Avatar movies about to hit. But currently, it’s a similar proposition. Avatar came out, what, 2009? The game’s coming out at some point in 2023. Franchise has been dormant all that time. Yes, it doesn’t quite line up in terms of the years. But yeah, it’s a strange one. I wonder whether Blade Runner was quite the cult classic in the late 90s. I gather that the re-releases, the new cuts really built its reputation to where it is now. Early on, it was more of a word of mouth success. But yeah, I suppose the advantage of making a game in that way is there was no box office date that Westwood had to hit. It all happened. It all happened. Yeah. I think it was a pretty difficult one to put together because of that license, right? I was trying to get my head around how this happened, and there was a sort of a legal entity called Blade Runner Collective, who owned some of the rights to some of the bits. But then some of the movie studios and Ridley Scott owned some of the other bits. So I don’t think when Westwood got this deal with Virgin, when they broke it that yes, they could make a licensed Blade Runner game set in the universe using the name, they couldn’t have any of the official dialogue from the movie, I don’t think. There were certain restrictions and it just because the rights holders were like seven different companies at this point. And because it had been so long ago, it was difficult to even figure out who owned the rights to what. That sounded like one of the more difficult aspects of even getting this game made. But hats off to Westwood for doing it. Because not only did they manage to bring it to market, but they did it in extraordinary fashion. And with a lot of licensing impositions, created something that is absolutely part of that universe and just feels like a totally authentic companion piece. And particularly if you played it before you saw Blade Runner, it feels just every bit as authentic and valuable a contribution to the cyberpunk canon. Yeah, I think at the time that Blade Runner entity talked about a sort of licensing entity must have had a game in mind or wanted something of that nature because there was some kind of EA were in talks with them at the time as well apparently. But Westwood won them over with, you know, they had a kind of clear goal in mind. Louis Castle, I believe his name is a Westwood co-founder who was creative director, art director and technical director on this game. Over the 90s. He had a very sort of specific vision for what this game should be and how it would capture the tone of the film. And obviously that resonated and they made the right choice there. Despite the fact that Westwood were not known as an adventure game studio at the time. No, let’s talk about that actually. Westwood were obviously the Command and Conquer guys. I think from memory the first Command and Conquer was 95. Red Alert would have been 97, I think. And then just in tandem, here’s this brilliant adventure game. Absolutely at the forefront of defining what an RTS is and designing things like the fog of war and just elements of the visual language of RTS games that we take for granted now that somebody actually had to sit there and think about and design. Pathfinding was a big deal at the time. They’d done all that kind of technical work. A modern studio having made that kind of creative investment in something, they would struggle to justify an about turn like that. You know, let’s completely start from scratch in a different genre with a new engine and whatnot. The equivalent I was thinking of in modern times is maybe like playground games doing Fable. Obviously playground are the Forza Horizon studio, very acclaimed, celebrated, like sort of arcade open world racing game entity. And now they’re taking on Fable. It sort of makes sense to me somehow. Like it doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. I feel like that’s probably in good hands and they’ll make a good game there. But that’s about as extreme a right turn as a studio tends to make in the modern era. I can’t think of any more extreme examples of that. Can you? No, not off the top of my head. Yeah, AAA studios tended to. I mean, it was more common in the 90s to kind of to switch things up in that way and teams are smaller. And we’ll come to this when we get to Quake. Quake was originally going to be this weird sort of hybrid like side on fighting game and various other influences. But I didn’t know that. Oh, man. Well, we’ll get to that. But it ended up settling into what they’d already learned from Doom and then became our first person studio, which is what id Software is today. And that’s how AAA studios generally function. They have a speciality and they stick to it. At the time, I guess it was more common to kind of jump between different things. But still, you know, it wasn’t where Westwood was building its reputation and arguably quite a strange way to start following all their money and resources. I’ve just had to have a look about that Red Alert year that I slapped on it. I was a year out. So Red Alert was 96. So they brought Command and Conquer out in 95 and then a year later, they managed to make Red Alert. I’m growing exponentially in respect for Westwood. What a 90s they had. I think maybe the only through line to draw in How Blade Runner happened is that they could handle an official license. Westwood, before they started faffing around with RTS games, did a lot of those Disney platformers, like the Lion King platformer, and did they do that really hard Donald Duck platformer? Maybe they didn’t. It was a super hard one. It got remastered in 2011, 2012. I can’t remember. But yeah, they knew their way around a movie license as best as anybody did in the late 80s, early 90s. You just turn it into a platformer. But I guess they would have been a trusted entity with it. Yeah, they knew their way around movies as well. Of course, like Command and Conquer with its FMV cutscenes. Like Westwood were an early adopter of CD-ROM. They figured out how to like compress video in this way. And do you want to know a fun link between C&C and this game? Please. Kane, the actor who plays Kane, Joe Kukin also directed the cutscenes in the Command and Conquer games and directed the voice performances in Blade Runner. No way. I didn’t realize that. So it’s Kane’s fault that we have that incredible Tim Curry, like, SPACE! SPACE! I don’t know if he was still involved. He would have been directing that scene. Perhaps. Oh, really? But like all that sort of like absurd straight to camera mission briefing stuff. And high sci-fi drama. That was him. Yeah, it sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? Like, yeah, that, that FMV based storytelling and then the like the animated sprites as well. Although I think they work totally differently. The, the character models in Blade Runner are like, they sort of look like zoomed in soldiers from Command and Conquer. Yeah. I think to modernize, but they’re working in a really different way. I think like in Command and Conquer, they are just really simple little animated sprites. In Blade Runner, they’re like, they’re 3D voxel based like entities. Yeah. About 750,000 polygons in those, in those character models. But it’s all, it’s all, yeah, it’s all voxels. So that’s why they didn’t, you didn’t need a 3D accelerator to run it. It’s, it’s voxel rather than like polygonal. I’m, I’m in over my head. I don’t know if you can tell. I’ve gone too far into the technicalities. I don’t understand. Voxels. It’s like Minecraft. I’ve always heard that voxels are less system intensive. So let’s just leave it there. But yeah, it’s just, it’s just fucking clever, isn’t it? Like they, they had a vision for what they wanted to look like. And then they also had the technical mastery to realize that vision in a way that could hit like the average PC and people, you know, people could access it and it didn’t run at three frames a second. Yeah. It’s just terribly impressive. And also shout out, it’s time for Phil Butch as a composer’s name. Last, last episode, it was Terry Brosius, Eric, Terry Brosius, Eric Brosius. And this week, it’s Frank Klepaski, Klepaski? Klepaski, Klepaski. He was a composer from Command and Conquer who did that incredible, like, the industrial metal soundtrack in Red Alert, the one that begins with like a… Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He composed that. He also composed the score here in Blade Runner, which sounds to me, and we’ll get into this deeper into the podcast, but like it sounds like just the score from Blade Runner. They didn’t have access to that. They couldn’t use it. So Terry Klepecky, aka Frank Klepecky, his real name, sort of did it all from scratch. He re-recorded elements of the original soundtrack verbatim and then sort of deconstructed it and then used elements of that in the Blade Runner game soundtrack. So they just really knew what they were doing. And somehow this was a year after Red Alert. I don’t understand how they pulled it off. Fascinating to talk to Lewis Castle about it. Yeah. Returning to the film. I did notice like specific sort of ambient sound that you get in the game is there in the film or very close to it. There’s in Harrison Falls’ apartment, there’s a sort of background noise that happens. That’s it. I’ve been hearing that for hours. It’s part of the Jeremy Peel soundboard now. It’s such a specific atmosphere to Blade Runner. They wouldn’t have been able to capture it without the tech they built for it. So much of the look of that film comes from those kind of very powerful spotlights and they often cast through spinning vans or there’s often some kind of motion involved with the shadows and to have those looping in a game at that time is a very, very big deal. And I think if Westwood hadn’t gone to that trouble of making that work, then it wouldn’t feel authentically Blade Runner in the way it does. I absolutely agree. I think the strongest asset that it has going for it is how well it captures the ambience and the atmosphere. And part of that is in the sound. But yeah, it’s the ambient lighting as well. And the way that you’re looking at pre-rendered backgrounds, but as you transition between them sometimes, you’re not just going to a hard cut and then being presented with the next screen. The camera moves with you and you get a small video basically that’s transitioning the angle of the pre-rendered background. Yeah, that’s true. And that adds a lot to the sense of being in a place and seeing it from a different angle. It’s very smart. Yeah, and you get NPCs kind of moving in and out of the scene, don’t you? Just when you’re standing in the street, you’ll get sort of nameless characters just passing through from A to B. You can click on them and go, hey, police, and they’ll blank you. Yeah, there’s one really cool punk-looking guy. He’s like a really tall 70s London punk in a leather jacket and a mohawk. And I always wanted to talk to him, but I was never interested, Jeremy. Oh God, what was I going to say? There was something else about the technical aspects that I wanted to say before we moved on. I’d read something impressive and smart that I wanted to put in. What was it? I think it’s probably about the… Oh no, it’s the AI. Let me tell you about the AI as well. It’s absolutely nuts how it works in this game. Basically, by the sounds of it, every AI entity, they designed them with behaviours, but not like waypoints and routines. So the AI is like acting on objectives that it knows it needs to meet. And so it’s sort of semi-randomised, which in a point and click adventure game is pretty baffling. Quite a baffling decision. And there are certain things right from the start of the game that are already sort of predetermined will or won’t happen in your playthrough. Just sort of random variables about where characters will be and how they might behave. But yeah, everybody, you know, like, I’m trying to think of examples, but there will be some… One of the components in this game is like zooming in, zooming and enhancing on photographs that you’ve taken. And the elements in those photographs will change depending on what the AI has been up to while you were in that scene. Yeah, so you might get a photo of a person to zoom and enhance, or it might be like the scale of an animal instead, depending on what’s been going on. It sounds a little bit like how Deadly Premonition works. All the inhabitants of that town, they have quite rich interior lives, and they’ve got things that they need to accomplish on a 24-hour cycle. So you’ll find them hanging out at the diner or driving from tither to tither. And it sounds like a 1997 version of that, that each AI character has certain tasks to accomplish, and they will do it sort of according to their own whims. I did read that certain characters can be human or replicant on different playthroughs, and that will be determined beforehand. As a player, you may or may not discover that about a given character. That’s super clever as well. This is 1997. That’s amazing. We both have replayed this very recently, and we’ll get into how those two playthroughs diverged a little bit later on, but that’s quite the nugget. I didn’t realise that, and this is probably my third time playing through now. I think there’s probably just been enough years in between that I’ve always forgotten who’s a rep and who’s human. Amazing stuff. Anyway, my tea is getting towards the bottom of the mug, so shall we take a little break, and when we reconvene, we’ll get into the second episode of Review Wars, and then we’ll get into Phil and Jeremy Remember, which is where we contrast our original experiences of Blade Runner with our contemporary playthrough of the game. So shall we have a little break, Jeremy, get back to it? Let’s do it. Right, let’s pick back up. We might as well get straight into Review Wars, get it over and done with. So if you are coming to this episode new and you’re not familiar with the concept, this is where myself and Jeremy sort of tried to outdo each other. We imagine we’ve been commissioned to write the review of this game in situ in the 90s for one of the big games mags. So we write a lovely sort of indulgent intro paragraph, but we also do it with a little bit of sound design because this is an audio medium and the winner gets the spoils, the loser is ritually humiliated and their name is dragged through the mud. Speaking of winners, shall we? Sure, sure. I wouldn’t vote on System Shock 2, Review Wars, which is- And I’m fine with that. Yeah. As I’ve mentioned, I’m absolutely fine with that. Yeah, I mean, you’ve only had many years of experience in production and voice recording, as I’m sort of floundering and- Looking around, leaning on a single module of music tech in uni in 2009. I mean, it’s unjust. It’s unjust, I will acknowledge. No, I know, do you know what? Let’s be real, yours had content in it. Yours told you about the game. It could actually function as an intro paragraph in a review, whereas mine would be very strange, I think. I went with the low hanging fruit. I did a showdown impression and I was talking to the player in the voice of showdown and suggesting that they weren’t clever enough to play this game because it was a genre hybrid and that was a big deal in 1999. To think you went with the surefire method of insulting the reader and that didn’t pay off for you. Maybe that’s what it was. So this is something of a grudge match already, two episodes in. We’ll play through our respective song wars and yeah, there’ll be a vote that we’ll put up and vote for your favourite. Is it a head decision or a heart decision? I think it’s going to be, it’s a heart pick, isn’t it? The Review Wars. I think so. I don’t think we’re going to be… I don’t think people are choosing that one. I don’t think people are voting on the qualities of the fade outs and the looping, are they? Which is really, those are the margins that I need to exploit in order to stand any chance. All right, well, let’s get into it then. So Jeremy, do you want to begin with yours this time or should I take the lead? I think you should go first this time. My great fear this week is that we’ve done the exact same thing. We’ve done yours slightly more thoughtfully. And then like whoever goes second, it’s like, oh, yeah, it’s like having to follow like a brilliant like stand-up set and you’re all your jokes are about the same thing, like four out of ten versions anyway. So am I going first? Yes. What can I say about this one? I think it speaks for itself. Let’s just get into it. All right. All right. You know, I already did one of these IQ tests earlier this year. Well, I’ll say that it was which friends carried to all. Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. 118 Arleigh Road. Yeah, that’s where I used to live. Was this part of the test? No, just warming you up. You place a DVD into your disk drive, an adventure game of the years. I mean, is that a question? I’d play the game, obviously. It seamlessly immerses you into a cyberpunk future where replicants masquerade as humans. You’re part of the rep-detect police force sent to hunt them down. One of them just massacred some animals downtown at Runciter’s. Yeah, sounds alright so far. I’d keep playing. After a long day gathering evidence, you return home to your apartment. Your dog, Maggie, is waiting for you there. I would click on Maggie over and over again and give her loads of treats. Even if there was actually just only one line of dialogue to cover that interaction. The investigation’s heating up. You’ve picked up a lot of clues. And you need to drag down your next witness. Um, probably just look at all the available locations and just keep spamming them until I see someone new. During a routine questioning, a chef throws a giant cauldron at you and makes you run for it. Yeah, not the first time that’s happened, actually, in an important click adventure game to me. Um, I get my gun and tail the perp. Tail the perp. Can I pull that off? It’s the fourth act now. More dead bodies. The net’s closing in on your suspects. But it’s closing in on you too. Ooh, I, er… Alright, I wouldn’t look up a walkthrough, but obviously I want to get the good ending, so, but like, but I definitely wouldn’t look up a walkthrough. Look, I’m not, I’m not a goddamn cheater, alright? Look, I’m done with this test. Mr Iwaniuk, please calm down. I tell you what I’d do. Let’s do. That was brilliant. It’d be strange to see that in print, wouldn’t it? I mean, what I’ve done there is that I’ve imagined the Voight-Kamp test, I’ve completely disregarded the idea that this is part of the opening paragraph of a review. How would you express the writer kills the interviewer in prose? I don’t know. It’d just be bang and asterisks, I think, you just have to infer. I don’t think, I mean, that would be subbed out straight away, any editor with this song would be like, Phil, mate, come on, tell me about the game. So, you know how you mentioned the possibility that we might have done the exact same thing and that one of us would go first and it’d be slightly better. In the Discord, listeners pointed out, there was a few possibilities, like the kind of low-hanging fruit of this. You could do a Tears in Rain Rugerhauer speech. Yes, it did cross my mind, that one. You could do a Bored Harrison Ford narration. Of course, you could do the Voight-Kampff test, which is the most tempting choice, and I knew there was a real possibility we both had done it, and that is what has happened. Such a direct head-to-head. Okay, right, this is Jeremy’s Review Wars. Please, sit down. Sorry. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions. I’d like you to answer as quickly as you can. Of course, anything I can do to help. You’re in Game Station, walking along the aisles, when all of a sudden, Game Station closed down. It’s a hypothetical. Right, okay. Walking along the aisles, you see a stand, advertising the new Blade Runner game. The box bears the logo of Westwood Studios, the makers of the Command and Counter series. Oh, so it’s an RTS, like June. It’s a point-and-click adventure game. How does that make you feel? Nervous, I guess. I hope they know what they’re doing. Mind you, cutscenes in Red Alert were really good. You play a Blade Runner, like Deckard, but you’re not Deckard. Instead, your life runs in parallel with his. You wander the same streets, investigate some of the same scenes, but you never cross paths. It’s lonely. One time, you catch a glimpse of Harrison Ford in the background. Oh, cool. Did he do the voice? No. Don’t know why I thought he would, to be honest. Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention. Alright, yeah, Christ. There are no puzzles in this adventure game. Instead, you crack down leads on your cases. But eventually, even those unravel, as you begin to question your career and very identity. It’s weird, but I like it. Sounds like the arc of a film noir detective. Is it like a femme fatale type character? Yes. She’s 14 years old. What the fuck? The test is designed to provoke an emotional response. Clearly. Whether or not you run away with a 14-year-old girl is determined by the choices you make in the game. There are four possible endings. But those choices aren’t made clear to you. In fact, you often won’t be aware you’re making them at all. Sounds like a really strange and unique game. I think I’m gonna play it. It’s a hypothetical. Yeah. A shame video games were destroyed during the Third Terran War. Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother. My mother? Let me tell you about my mother. Oh, my God. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to about seven solid minutes of a camp test there, everyone. This is the best possible thing that could have happened. What I will say is that I think yours is tons better because you very, once again, I’m furious because what you’ve done is very subtly, just communicated all the premise of the game, some of the major beats in the story. There’s a feeling of what it would be like to play. There’s some value judgments there. It does feel like a review. Whereas I thought, brilliant, void camp. I’ll just do that and the premise will carry it along. I don’t need to think much about what I’m writing. I’ll do a funny voice and then I’ll do the other one as me and then it’ll be brilliant. Well, let me give you two points in your favor. One, the reverb. I’m quite annoyed that I didn’t put that in. I felt like I was listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with yours. It was great. Two, the accent, which I really struggled with and I can’t do American accents. And even during the recording, I was like, can I change this to an accent I can do? Can I do like a posh authoritarian British accent? But I tried it and it instantly doesn’t feel like Blade Runner. So I had to make do. And I know I was also influenced by, I’d just seen Glass Onion, the Knives Out film the day before. And I think having just watched an English person do a bad American accent, I just kind of fell into that sort of weird Southern lilt that Daniel Craig does. That was the only way I could find into it. I didn’t notice that you were, yeah, it was getting quite deep South. If anyone wants to go back, when I say Harrison Ford is where it really breaks down. I just couldn’t figure out how to get my mouth around the vowels in that one. But as we’ve established, these are heart picks rather than head picks. So although, yes, my reverb is technically superior from production standpoint, I don’t know that that’s gonna be enough to sway the vote. If this podcast was going out to like sound on sound listeners, then perhaps, but I think I might have just lost another Song Wars. And listen, I’m absolutely fine with that, as I’ve mentioned. So yeah, we’ll put the poll up. Vote however you like. Just know that whatever the result, I’m fine with that. Let’s move on to talking about the game. I don’t think we need to cover that there’s some Voight-Kamp tests in the game. I think that aspect has been quite well uncovered. We’ve both recently replayed this. I played it on the old beige 98 PC upstairs on the original disc that came with my first computer. So that was a spiritual and heartening experience. But yes, that felt like a nice sort of 360. How did you feel coming at this game in 2022? Yeah. And when was the first time you played? I haven’t played this one before. This is one of maybe two games in our series that I’m coming completely fresh to. So I know this game meant a lot to you, a formative game for you, but I was way more familiar with the films beforehand. And I sort of deliberately went to the other end of the spectrum in terms of you playing on a PC of the time, you’re playing the original version. I went with the enhanced edition, which came out this year with the very mixed reputation. The night dive. And I played it on Switch. So it’s completely a different environment. And yeah, I mean, should I get into some of the technical stuff about the enhanced edition or should we come to that later, do you reckon? No, that’s not as good a time as any. What I will say is that I absolutely adore night dive studios and any criticism of them, I take very personally as a criticism of me as well. But no, go for it. Yeah, they’ve had a rough time with it. Ironically, we talked about Blade Runner wasn’t made to a movie deadline. Whereas with the Enhanced Edition, they really wanted to get it out for the 40th anniversary. And so, it maybe wasn’t quite as finished up as it could be when it came out. And there’s no one thing, no one criticism of it that really sort of stands out. It’s just a lot of small things that kind of added up to a pretty negative reception when it emerged. It’s one of those remastered games where the source code is lost. So it’s all kind of reverse engineered to kind of get the best of it. Yeah, they apparently lost all the masters when Westwood moved in like 98 or 99, they moved studios. Oh, sure. I just can’t get my head around that. I think that happened, didn’t that happen with a Double Fine game as well? The Grim Fandango. They might have lost a bunch of original illustrations and things. Icewind Dale 2 as well, I think like. Yeah, that’s heart-bugging about that one. Yeah, I think in a lot of tech industries, people don’t think in terms of preservation at the time, because everything feels worthless a year later, and it’s only 10 years later you go, actually hang on, we want to keep hold of that. So yeah, I think they had a real time with it, and they have patched it since. And I found it mostly fine, like mostly it just felt like I was playing this 90s adventure game. A couple of things that stood out as bad issues. Also at any point in Blade Runner, you can pull out your gun and shoot at things. The shooting was sort of intermittently working for me. I could always get my gun out, but it didn’t always fire when I clicked, which is, you get some pretty sort of tasty encounters in this game where you really have to be quick on the draw if you’re going to come out on top. And that’s obviously not a great addition as a misfiring gun. And the other thing I had, which almost like led me to abandon my save, was I did conduct a Voigtkampf test on a, I believe it was Bullet Bob, the guy who runs the gun store in… Yeah. Is that Animoid Row? And… I think it’s DNA Row. DNA Row. Is that right? No, I think it’s off Animoid Row. It’s not on the same block. Yeah. I’m not sure, I’m not sure. But after I’d conducted this Voight-Kamp test, the game returned to the scene in the shop and I couldn’t click anything. The cursor had disappeared, nobody was speaking. And I thought, oh, this is it, it’s screwed. But I discovered on a Reddit thread that someone had had a similar issue and they just said, I’ll just leave it for five minutes and I’ll wake up again, which is what I did. I just left it for a couple of minutes and then Bullet Bob just woke up and started speaking again and I could continue with the game. And it was the only time it happened, but it was pretty severe bug. So yeah, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a port or a new version. Well, I wonder how much of it is, how many of those issues are introduced in the remaster because it’s not a perfect game on a technical level when you play the original disc as well. Like it’s, yeah, there’s some, there’s definitely some jank. Like I had a moment where, you know, the, I can’t remember his name, he’s the guy in the fantastic red jacket who’s got a real walk and he’s down like the Swing Club. He talks about Sinatra a lot. He kind of talks like, hey daddy-o. I forget his name. Why you look so grim? He, I went like, my icon disappeared as well in DNA Row or Animoid Row, whichever one. I think there’s both, right? Yeah. Quite near bullet bobs. And I was like, what’s going on? I couldn’t move, couldn’t like do anything. I was just waiting. And it turns out that like just off screen, that man in the red jacket had like entered and I was about to talk to him, but I had to wait about a minute for him to like walk very slowly, sauntering in his smoking jacket towards me. And it was only when he popped back out from the other side of a, like a steam vent or something. I was like, oh, this is what’s going on. That’s why I can’t do anything. The shooting doesn’t feel great in the original. I don’t remember times when I was like, definitely misfiring. There is a time, there’s a moment when you come across somebody, is he called Majani, who’s strapped to a bomb? Oh yeah, that moment. And you have to shoot the chain to free him and then run off very quickly out of the room. Yeah, the shooting was pretty haphazard. Like I would be shooting definitely on the chain at like 50% of the time. It would fire, but it wouldn’t break the chain. And 50% of the time it would. So I had to do a lot of reloading there. That’s a steady next lyric, isn’t it? Something like that. Yeah. She delivers it with a bit more panache than I did. You’ll never break the chain. Yeah. So yeah, I experienced a little bit of junk. I don’t want to just defend Night Dive for the sake of it, but I do love them because they’ve got such a specific taste in games that seems to overlap with mine so much. It’s like they’re just going through my personal collection of favourites from the 90s and remastering them for me. And they do on the whole, they have a stellar reputation for this stuff. They’re incredible like that. They’ve held their hands up with this and they’ve been interviews in which they’ve explained the factors that led to it. Being iffy, people coming down with COVID and this kind of thing, which I’m inclined to give them the sort of benefit of the doubt and the trust. I mean, the Quake remaster alone, like we’ve been playing through Quake and Co-Op. It just feels like there was always Co-Op in Quake. They’re so good. So yeah, well, my, yeah, I obviously first played it back in 98 on my first PC. I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do. Like it was my first experience of like getting my head around point and click logic. So what the game does really well actually, and this only really struck me when I played it now, is that there’s no tutorial at all. You load up the game. There’s not really even a main menu. You’re just in it. And you instantly know what to do. The UI is absolutely transparent. It’s just a cursor that, that changes depending, like depending on the interaction available, you can move certain places to swap scenes. You can pick certain things up. You can click on people to talk to them. That’s it. It’s so light touch. And then you’ve got like elements like the, the Esper, like zoom and enhance photo machine thing. You’ve got the void camp test, which occurs quite rarely. That’s a little bit trickier to get your head around for the UI of that. Why you want to pick. I had to read the PDF. Low intensity questions. The manual to know what all the knobs did, all the meters on the void camp test screen. Yeah. But generally it’s absolutely seamless. You just, you put the game disc in your PC and then 30 seconds later, you’re in the Blade Runner universe with so little faffing and it never feels the need to explain itself. Nor does it ever really need to. The moments where you get stuck are just because of the puzzle logic or because of randomized elements. You need an NPC to be in a certain scene and they’re not there because they’ve got this weird AI behavior that means they’re off doing something else when you need them to be there instead. But yeah, the fundamental design of this game, I think, is just absolutely fantastic. It’s so intuitive. Yeah, I think it’s much more intuitive than the average point and click game, actually, because although you are coming environments to pick up items and, you know, on a fundamental level, you’re combining them with certain characters or what have you to get a result, but it doesn’t follow that kind of puzzle logic of, this is some silly joke solution about burning a rope with a candle or what have you. It’s a detective game. And so it has this very sort of rigorous logic to it, and you are following leads. And generally, you know, like, if you think that you have a lead, then you can take it to a character who that’s relevant to, and you’ll get something usable. So, yeah, and like getting stuck in this game doesn’t feel the same as it does in another point and click game, because you can, it feels very natural in your role as a Blade Runner to kind of like, go back over environments, see if you’ve missed any key evidence, to look back through those images, you know, do the zoom and enhance and try and find those elements where the, you know, the perspective shifts and you see somebody’s face at a bar or something and you’re able to kind of follow that to a new area or something. And also the fact that you’re conducting the investigation that crosses over with what your peers in the force are working on. Like there’s this other character, Crystal, who’s a Blade Runner as well, right? And she’s working on a lot of the same cases as you and you’ll see her crop up at certain junctures, not the same junctures, it depends how quick you are and you know, what she’s doing compared to you, but like you will bump into each other at certain points. And you can also head back to the police station, sort of upload your evidence and download hers as well. So if she’s found a lead that she’s then gone and checked in with police HQ, then that can be yours and you can use it. So there’s always kind of something you can do to shuffle things along and it feels like, feels in character, it doesn’t feel like the game’s breaking. It feels like a very natural thing for you to do as that character. Yeah, I really enjoy that loop as well. I did this when I first played it and I found myself doing it most recently as well of being out and following, pursuing leads and things and then popping back into the police station every evening, uploading your data, seeing if the chief’s there. The chief’s never there. He’s very rarely there to talk to. But I’d always check or maybe pop down into the jail cells and have a chat to whichever perps are down there. And then I’d go back home. I’d feed Maggie, check my answer phone. And I love that domestic aspect of being a Blade Runner. Have a kip, dream about something weird, and then back to it. Yeah. It’s always nighttime, of course, because it’s Blade Runner. You wake up and you get a phone call and that gives you your next location to go to. It’s a similar reward system to a point and click adventure in that when you’ve done something smart, then you get to see a new environment, you get to see a beautiful new background. But it follows the logic of McCoy the detective. He won’t go to Animoid Row until he’s got a reason to go there. It’s not that he doesn’t know where it is. He can fly there and it’s been whenever he likes, but he’s not gonna go until there’s a lead that takes him there. And so it’s quite exciting when you get something that you realize that, oh, there’s this earring that one of the perps in a bombing is wearing and it’s shaped like an insect and there’s somebody who sells that kind of thing down in Animoid Row. And so you get to go there and you get to talk to all the shopkeepers and find all sorts of different avenues to explore that way. Yeah, we should talk about Lucy a bit, shouldn’t we? Because as you correctly pointed out in your superior review wars, Lucy is a 14 year old girl who’s also something of a love interest in quite a troubling way in this game. And obviously I didn’t find that troubling because I was 12 when I played this. So Lucy was an older woman. So I was well into the love interest angle. I suppose it’s not explicit, is it? It’s not made explicit that there is a romantic component to it, but it leads you down that path. Yeah, it’s not. And for the majority of the game, I thought, oh, this is a detective trying to, you know, you have dialogue options to a degree. Well, that’s a weird aspect of this game is like, if you only pick, you can pick like a personality type, right? For your, for McCoy. And so if you pick one of those, like what you say in a conversation is governed by that. You don’t choose it. So he might be very polite, or he might be, you know, sort of… Surly. Yeah. That was the first time I’d seen the word surly. It might be, it might be surly. And I didn’t realise to begin with that that takes the option away from you to be surly or to be polite, which gives it a more sort of cinematic feel when the conversation flows that way. But I think the best way to play it is the mode where you can, you can select wherever you want. But yeah, you can, you can be kind to Lucy, which feels like a natural thing to do because she’s a vulnerable girl, maybe human, maybe replicant who’s caught up in a, in a sort of ring of terrorists seeming way. You’re like, well, this is not great. You know, I’m not going to be surly to this poor girl. But yeah, I mean, ultimately in this game, I ended up with an ending where, without, you know, aiming for it, I ended up driving away in a car up north, sort of Bonnie and Clyde style, with Lucy. I was like, oh, hang on. Is that what this has been? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the ending I got first time as well. And yeah, I was, I was pleased with it, you know, at the time I didn’t think much about it, but yeah, McCoy’s, McCoy’s more than 30s or 40s. It’s a slightly strange dimension to it. And she’s, she’s sexualized in quite an awkward way, I think. And that’s probably that begins with the film. But yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s, it feels, it’s not, it’s not comfortable. No, it feels a little like. So this is one of those games which does not use the, the characters or, you know, the main characters of the film it’s based on. But the characters it does come up with are like analogous to ones that are in the film. So McCoy. By the way, McCoy definitely will play on real McCoy, right? It’s like, is he a real person? I didn’t, I didn’t think of that. This is why you’re here. And so he’s, he’s, you know, a kind of slightly blander Ford standing. And you’ve got Clovis, who is the sort of charismatic, intriguing terrorist ringleader. You know, he’s the, he’s the Roy Batty of the story. And Lucy is the Rachel of the story. But of course, Rachel’s a grown up. Yeah, I mean, you can argue that all replicants are only, you know, a maximum of four years old in reality. But yeah, true. Yeah, there are there are cameos from from the original movie’s cast, right? Like Sean, Sean Young is there. You meet her in Tyrell and you know, although I didn’t want her. I didn’t. I think that scene is one that’s kind of randomised. Like you may get it or you may not. So I don’t think I ever met her. But yeah, you get like a lot of the fun side characters, like Chew, the guy who just does eyes as he protests. Yeah, he’s there. You can go and visit him in his, for some reason, fridge like workshop. JF Sebastian, you know, he’s of the Bradbury building. I didn’t see him, I didn’t meet him, but I heard his voice on an answer phone machine and I went and visited his apartment with the incredible grand ceilings and the clockwork-esque toys marching around in little sort of, you know, old fashioned uniforms. So there’s a lot of the kind of peripheral voice cast, which kind of lends an authenticity to it. Yeah, I think that speaks to how tricky the rights situation was because you do have some real strong… You know, Sean Young is quite an important part of the original Blade Runner movie and there she is in this game, but certain other things are completely absent. Yeah. It’s just a bit of a legal mess. Apparently, they did reach out to Harrison Ford to see if he wanted to voice his cameo in it, and they never heard back. No response. Great takes from Harrison Ford on that one. I can believe that, although it does work very nicely. Yeah, on the whole, I appreciate that there’s a story that runs parallel to the film, but it doesn’t go for the cheap shots in terms of crossover that it could do. Yeah. I don’t know about you. I only saw Deckard in the background. There’s a point where you catch up with a perp and to distract you, to make his getaway, he’s a kind of shock keeper of an antiques place. And he takes a photo of you with an antique camera, which has this flash which blinds you, you know, takes over the whole screen. And so he can run off and you make off after him. But of course, he’s taken an actual photo. So when you get back there, you can then analyze that photo. And in the background of that scene is Harrison Ford, Deckard. I think it’s the moment in the film where he finds a scale, doesn’t he? I think it may be in Leon’s apartment. And he goes and speaks to a woman and is like, is it a fish scale? And she says, no, snake. And I think that’s the moment that’s going on in the background of your scene. It’s quite a subtle… And if you don’t analyze the photo, you’ll never see that. Yeah, well actually that’s another randomized bit. So for me, Harrison Ford wasn’t in that photo. It’s just the scale. So I just, I’ve timed it wrong. I don’t know. But I’ve actually, I’ve never seen his camera. I’m aware of it, but in my playthroughs, I’ve never crossed paths with Rick Deckard. But yeah, you get the scale to analyze, but then obviously the scale doesn’t look like that’s part of a different investigation. And that’s particularly baffling. Yeah, it’s baffling if you’re 12 and haven’t seen the movie and you’re like, okay, I’ve got the scale. Moreover, you don’t know the movie exists. Let her know the case that it concerns. What’s this lead that I’ve got? What do I do with this scale? In the end, like cards on the table, despite what I said in my review wars, I did print out like a 30 page walkthrough for this when I originally played it, because I wanted to, the stress of the idea of getting a bad ending was just too much for me. I didn’t want the responsibility of people having unhappy lives or dying on account of my incompetence. So it’s funny, you know, when we talked about System Shock 2 and you said, you know, when you were playing it when you were young and it distressed you coming across the scene and thinking that somebody maybe had just killed themselves. And if you got there sooner, you might have been able to stop it. Well, this game is, you know, it sort of is that. Like it has those elements and it tells you, you know, well, there’s a possibility that if you don’t take the right routes, if you don’t find the right evidence that you might not stop something, you might not catch up with someone. And so you have that sense of unease and like a really exciting sense of time passing, which you don’t normally get in this genre. The other one of the time that I can think of that I really like is The Last Express, the Jordan Mechner game where you’re on a train and there’s a ticking clock and events pass, regardless of whether or not you’re there to see them. And Blade Runner has a bit of that. It’s quite a nerving and quite alluring, the fact that you just might not be there. That often- Yeah, the game is happening whether you’re there to see it or not. Yeah, quite often in this game you give chase, right? There’s somebody, as you say, trucks a cauldron of bubbling green goo at you and you follow them and I must have took a wrong turn. I didn’t catch up with that guy, but he can do. You know, there’s a possibility you go exactly the right way and you catch up with him right outside his hideout and have a little shootout there or not. Yeah, I’ve never managed that either. I always, for me, he turns up when I go home and he’s just there on the rooftop walking very slowly towards me while I absolutely unload bullets into him. Yeah, that’s what happened with me as well. And then Gaff turns up, doesn’t he? See, Gaff is the character in the film who brings Deckard back into the force. He speaks that kind of amalgam of different languages. Depending on which version of Blade Runner you watch, Deckard either doesn’t know the language or he pretends not to. Like with the narration, he says, of course I knew how to speak it. I wasn’t going to make things easy for him. At the end of the film as well, of course, to go, it’s a shame she won’t live. I’ve forgotten the line, Phil. Nobody does, you know, because none of us live. I think you committed to the Harrison Ford line about 110% more than Harrison Ford did. Yeah. So fair play to you. Let’s transition into 90s games court then to finish. We’ll weigh up its merits in the modern day and we’ll ultimately decide whether it deserves a place in the pantheon of 90s PC gaming classics or whether it’s just warped nonsense that’s only subsisting on nostalgia alone. I think we’ve already made quite a strong case for it, haven’t we? I don’t think this one’s massively up for debate, but would you be on the prosecution or the defense for Blade Runner, Jeremy? The defense, I think. Sorry, I was mainly just working on remembering that line while you were speaking this time, which I have done, if anyone’s interested. Go on, let’s hear it again. What do I need to say to tee you up? So I think Decker, Harrison Ford has one word in that scene. So Gaff says to him, you know, you’ve done a man’s job. And he asks him whether he’s finished. And I can’t remember what Harrison Ford says. Yes, something like that. And then I say, it’s a shame she won’t live. Then again, who does? There we go. It’s the most thought provoking line of Blade Runner. Okay, I will have order in the court now. Yeah, so yeah, I think we’re both going to be on the side of the defense for this game. I’ve got tons more respect for it after playing it this year, this last week or so. There’s a load to it that I didn’t realize. The complexity of the AI things blow my mind. The randomized rep or human elements have blown my mind. And now that I know Blade Runner is a film as well, I can appreciate how well it taps into that universe. It’s not an easy thing to do at all. Blade Runner has got to be one of the toughest games, films to do that with. Still confused about it because it’s so beloved. It’s so distinct. Cyberpunk is easy to get wrong. We’ve all learned that in the last few years without throwing too much shade at Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a very distinct aesthetic that Westwood absolutely gets right. I’ve seen it compared to Alien Isolation. This isn’t my observation. I agree with those similes in that Creative Assembly took the visual language of everything, every frame of the original movie, broke it down to its component parts and developed this, like this coda so that everything that they rebuilt had some element of that. Even if it wasn’t verbatim, it had some element of the movie set of the original in it. So it all felt of a piece. It felt terribly authentic, but it was new. And it gave them the freedom to create new spaces in an entirely new space station on the Sevastopol. And I think that’s what Westwood has achieved as well. It’s broken down the movie into this modular toolkit of lovely ambient lights and rainy side streets and like food stalls and grand opulent buildings. And it’s all new, but it all feels like you could be watching the film. They’ve taken every element and turned it just slightly to avoid any licensing issues or what have you. And what they’ve done is it’s just like wherever you are, you’re just around the corner from the movie, but absolutely part of the same place. And it’s honestly, it’s absolutely staggering. And the fact that this one studio in a three year spell put out Command and Conquer and then Red Alert and then this game. My goodness, my goodness, Westwood. Yeah, it’s something really special about this. This world that was so evocative to people, but was mostly built on the Warner Brothers back lot. You know, there’s nothing there’s nothing around the corner from what you could see, except that in this game, they they allow you to go around that corner and they’ve they’ve built that out. They’ve they’ve extended it and and brought a sort of geographical sense to to the LA of Blade Runner. You know, you can kind of walk between a lot of these areas that you see in the film and you and you see how they kind of connect up. And it and it feels like a real, real place. I mean, there are there are some real locations in Blade Runner, right? Like the Bradbury building is a real building in LA that sort of eerie grandeur that it has. And I think the police station in this game and the film is is a is a famous train station, right? In LA. I’m not sure which one it’s called. I didn’t know that. In the Museum of Sci-Fi and Culture, I think it’s called in Seattle. They have some pretty cool set elements and props from Blade Runner. Like they’ve got the car. They’ve got a few bits and bobs of decades in there. And that’s quite a that’s quite a spiritual experience. If you’re if you’re a nerd, to spend time with that. That’s like the Phil Iwaniuk Museum in there, because they had a big Nirvana exhibition going on. So like I turned the corner from like the skull from Terminator. And then I’ve seen the car from Blade Runner. And then it’s like, oh, this is Kurt Cobain’s cardigan. Just ascended into like a very specific version of Heaven. It’s wonderful. Amazing. Well, I think that will probably do it for Blade Runner. It is part of the pantheon of PC Gaming Classics. We would both, I think, implore you to track it down and give it a play if you’re at all interested in either that cinematic universe or the genre at the time. I don’t know. Do we recommend the Night Dive version or not? I mean, I can definitely recommend playing it on a Windows 98 PC if you want to go all in. It still functions pretty well. Yeah, I think… Yeah, I don’t know. What do you think about the Night Dive version? Since the kind of backlash Night Dive, you can still buy it and play the original version if you so choose. Yeah, the Night Dive one on consoles is obviously, you know, it’s more convenient to play portably in some respects. It works nicely there, but yeah, it has some issues. But it’s playable. You can certainly make it to the end. That’s all anyone can ask. In the end, who does… Is that the line? Yeah, close. There’s nothing worse than someone getting a film quote just slightly wrong. You have to say it right afterwards, like immediately afterwards. So next episode is going to be Fallout, the original isometric RPG also from 97 and also in the same tin of games that came with my PC. So easy street for me. We’d love to take your temperature on the kind of games we’re covering on this, whether you’re happy with deeper cuts like Blade Runner or whether you want us to take on some of the more famous, more celebrated titles from the 90s. So do drop us a line on Discord if you’re part of it or on Twitter, anywhere where we’re going to see it. Yeah, and we can always adjust our list of games accordingly to your tastes, because this is your podcast. Yeah, not once I’ve played them though, you know. Yeah, there’s a cut off period. And there’s a few that I’ll die for later on. I don’t know if we’ve revealed the whole list, but there’s one. Oh, we have, okay. So Trespasser is happening, I don’t care. I don’t care if the listenership drops off by 99%, like Trespasser is happening. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, of course. Hopefully you are interested in that oddity from DreamWorks Interactive. But yeah, let us know how you’re feeling about the list of games, what you want to hear more or less of, and we will factor that in. Yeah, please. Any further thoughts, Jeremy? Yeah, there’s a Back Page Discordment, or, you know, backers will know of. You can chat to us there, I lurk on there. And obviously, anything you tweet to the Back Page as well will get back to us. And yeah, you can vote on this episode, Review Wars, to either appease or further upset Phil. Yeah, well, thank you very much for listening to this. We hope it’s met your ears well, and we will catch you in the next episode, which will be Fallout. We’ll play out with a bit of ambient cyberpunk synth work from the Blade Runner soundtrack. Catch you next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Finally. Yeah, I forgot to point out that you go everywhere in the spinner in this game. But I realised belatedly that I had been flying my car to work. Actually, McCoy lives only a block away from the police station. It probably takes him less time to walk. Yeah, certainly the less environmentally conscious option. Yeah. Yeah, I had a few episodes like that where I just left my car somewhere. You know, you get held up by somebody, you get captured or you go off, like, suing clues. And you’re like, oh, where the fuck did I park my car? Just walking around, walking around for ages and oh God, it’s all the way over there. But again, I like the realism of that. I was sort of expecting that it would like just reset to the roof of my apartment, but it doesn’t. It’s where you leave it. And again, that’s just like somehow typical of this game. Blade Runner, a playthrough where you never find your spinner again. You have to walk over to Tyrell from your apartment. Looking visibly disheveled by the time we get there. Yeah. Anyway, I might find a way to chuck that in, because that’s a nice little anecdote, but.