Blade Runner, a 1997 film adaptation of the same name developed by Nishiki Studios, recently landed on gog. It's one of the best adventure games of all time, but for a variety of reasons, it's been out of the public eye for years.
Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, pioneered cyberpunk cinema that reflected concerns about the rapid development of computers and artificial intelligence, perhaps because of it, made it a symbol of the digital age.
Nishiki's version of Blade Runner isn't the first game adaptation of the film, but it's definitely the most successful one. The first game adaptation appeared on the zx spectrum platform in 1985, but it didn't get much attention.
The Westwood edition appeared 12 years late, but this is not a problem, because good food is not afraid of late.
Today, taking the opportunity of the game to land on gog, let's talk about some of the stories of this game in that year.
In 1992, 10 years after the film's release, the rights holder of Blade Runner released a director's cut, and seeing that the market response was good, he decided to adapt the film into a game again.
Such a cult movie, who is the right person to make the game? The copyright owner approached some well-known big distributors at the time, such as Xueleshan and ea, but they all refused, and finally the British company Virgin Interactive got the adaptation rights.
Virgin Interactive decided to take on this job because its studio Westwood was thriving on The Command and Conquer, the studio that had developed the well-known Kalandia Legends series of adventure games, and had successfully adapted the Disney animated film The Lion King into a critically acclaimed platform-jumping game.
The producer of the Westwood edition of Blade Runner, programmer and lead artist louis castle, one of the studio's founders, and frank klepacki on the soundtrack of the Command & Conquer series, now seems strong enough.
Due to the copyright issues involving the character lines and costumes in the film, the team decided to set a new protagonist Ray McCoy detective and a new story for the game version of Blade Runner, and found someone to rewrite the script.
But the biggest challenge the studio faced wasn't that, as Castle admitted in a later interview, the team wasted a lot of time due to the lack of the right engine.
To create the dark, damp feel of Los Angeles in the film's 2019, the team decided to apply some new techniques, using so-called "voxels" instead of polygons to create objects, which gave the game characters a more realistic and detailed look.
In addition, the designers used additional hidden layers in many places, so that the characters had light, shadow and fog effects, and the game had a cyberpunk atmosphere.
In 1997, Blade Runner was launched at a capacity of 4cd, and the game received unanimous praise from the industry and players, and sales exceeded 1 million units. In China, Xintiandi Interactive launched the Chinese version.
In 2019, 22 years later, gog found The Blade Runner, the current copyright holder, Elcon, to put the game on the shelves in the form of encryption-free, and now everything is ready, only Chinese, if you love adventure games, then be sure to try.