Starting with the original NES and the jumping plumber Mario, consoles have been expected to have mascots. Cartoon characters starred in platform games and served as living avatars for their hardware, just like Sonic made Sega a household name during the 16-bit era. So when the next generation of gaming hit home systems, everybody was trying to come up with something for Sony’s original PlayStation.
Eventually Crash Bandicoot would come to fill that role. But before he debuted, a pair of American computer animators who had never made a game before borrowed millions of dollars and made a game starring an ungainly creature named Abe in a world of meat processing plants, bizarre prophecies, and tricky puzzles. Against all odds, Abe and his odd world became the face of the PS1 for a while. Let’s see how it all went down.
Proud Parents
Lorne Lanning was an artist looking for a medium. He started out at New York’s prestigious School of Visual Arts as a photorealistic painter before transferring across the country to Cal Arts and graduating with a degree in character animation. This cross-disciplinary training led him to a career in the nascent computer animation industry, working on projects at effects studio Rhythm & Hues.
When there, he met producer Sherry McKenna, one of the pioneering spirits in early cinematic computer animation. The duo split off to form their own company in 1992. Inspired by the rapid technological advancement in the video game industry, they realized the next great frontier for computer art was in gaming. He had a story he wanted to tell, and after seeing a preview of Sony’s upcoming PlayStation console, he realized that was the medium he wanted to do it in.
Lanning was able to borrow $3.5 million based on his experience, and he and McKenna relocated to San Luis Obispo to open their studio, Oddworld Inhabitants. They had an idea and immediately started figuring out how to turn it into reality.
Welcome to Rupture
Coming from a Hollywood background, storytelling was key to Lanning’s vision. Previous console games had dabbled in narrative with cutscenes and text, but the data storage of the PlayStation’s CD-ROM disks meant that developers could include full-motion video, realistic audio, and more. One thing it couldn’t do, however, was 3D graphics to the quality that the high-end machines Lanning was used to. So he took a cue from Nintendo, which had used pricey Silicon Graphics workstations to render 3D models for games like Donkey Kong Country and then imported them as 2D sprites.
There were plenty of platformers available for the system, but none looked like Abe’s Oddysee. Dark, detailed pre-rendered backgrounds gave protagonist Abe a rich world to move through, and instead of racing through stages making tricky jumps, areas were more puzzle-oriented, with protagonist Abe having to figure out ways to free his trapped Mudokon brethren from the meat processing factory at Rupture Farms before moving on.
One of the key decisions made early in the process was to strip Abe of any weapons or offensive abilities. He couldn’t hop on top of enemies to kill them, or collect power-ups to gain skills. Instead, he had to use stealth to dodge patrols, exploit environmental features to distract, or incapacitate guards and use “GameSpeak,” a set of commands mapped to the face buttons, to communicate with other Mudokons and get them to help out.
Behind the scenes at publisher GT Interactive, one executive wasn’t sold on the vision, so he went to his superior and tried to get him to cancel the project. According to an interview with Lanning, the plan backfired and the game was then given a sizable $10 million marketing budget, the largest the publisher had ever devoted to a new franchise.
Lanning was vindicated on Oddworld’s release in September 1997. The game was a critical and commercial success, selling over 3.5 million units worldwide and leading GT to immediately green light a sequel.
World Building
There was a lot of lore behind the scenes of the first Oddworld game. Lanning and his crew wanted to use the booming medium of video games to make a point about the real world we lived in, the crisis of capitalism, the natural environment and more. It was intended to be the first in a tetralogy, each with its own setting and protagonist. But the newbie developers at Oddworld Inhabitants were about to learn a harsh lesson about the games industry.
You see, although GT Interactive was very supportive of Lanning’s vision, they also wanted to strike while the iron was hot and get more product on the shelves. They wanted more Abe, and they wanted it in stores by Christmas 1998. That didn’t give the team much time to come up with something new, so they didn’t. Abe’s Exoddus delivered a very similar experience leavened by some much-needed quality-of-life improvements, like the ability to save anywhere.
Console generations started hitting faster and faster, with Moore’s Law increasing the processing power each time. Microsoft’s Xbox was the first machine that Lanning really thought could capture Oddworld in real-time, so the official second installment of the tetralogy, Munch’s Oddysee, was developed exclusively for it despite starting out as a PlayStation 2 title. In full 3D, it let players control both Abe and new hero Munch as they escalated the global rebellion against the Mudokons. But development was difficult, with a team unused to working in 3D space and Microsoft pushing for more humor and a lighter tone, and the game underperformed at retail.
Oddworld Inhabitants took one more crack at the ball with 2005’s Stranger’s Wrath, a very different game. No Abe; instead, it starred the Stranger, a ruthless bounty hunter tracking down wanted outlaws, armed to the teeth. It seemed like a complete 180 from the values that the previous games espoused, but Lanning knew he needed to adapt to the times. Unfortunately, publisher Electronic Arts didn’t buy in. The game was a critical success but a commercial failure.
Worlds Beyond
Surprisingly, EA then offered to purchase Oddworld Inhabitants and all of its intellectual property straight up, a deal Lanning declined. Instead, he pursued an audit against the publisher that allegedly revealed millions in unpaid royalties. Lanning made a deal to forgo the money in exchange for EA granting them the rights to the game back, but by this point there was no path forward and Oddworld Inhabitants closed its doors.
The gaming industry had transformed dramatically in just eight years. Publishers were now extremely risk-averse as budgets ballooned. To get the money they needed to make a game to their standards, Oddworld Inhabitants would have to compromise to a level they simply could not do. Instead, Lanning and McKenna pivoted back to film, pitching an R-rated CGI feature called Citizen Siege and some other properties.
Nothing major came of this period, but the studio would soon partner with a British firm called Just Add Water to bring it all full circle.
Still Odd After All These Years
Technology was always the barrier to the rich and detailed world Lanning wanted to create, so working with modern consoles allowed him to add a second layer of polish to his earlier efforts. Just Add Water shepherded a 2010 port of Stranger’s Wrath to Steam and PS3, followed by the earlier games. But a new generation of players deserved something better, so development started on a ground-up remake of Abe’s Oddysee in Unity.
Named Oddworld: New & Tasty, the 2014 release not only smoothed out the PS1 game’s rough edges and added myriad layers of detail to the backgrounds but also massively added content and secret areas. It was a tremendous success, introducing an entirely new generation of gamers to Lanning’s unique world.
Today sees the release of Oddworld: Soulstorm on the Epic Games Store, and it applies the same remake philosophy to Abe’s Exoddus.
It’s crazy to think that one company, known for just one series, has managed to hang on for a whopping five console generations. But Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t an ordinary video game company motivated by profit margins and chasing trends. They have a story to tell and a world to build, and hopefully based on the success of the remakes they’ll be able to finally do just that.
