RPG Maker: History & Games A look at the last three decades of this legendary indie dev tool

 (Cool retrospective on RpgMaker History and it's various communities)

 (from Felipe Pepe - June 30th, 2023)

It was common in Japan to have magazines and game publishers create design contests for their readers/gamers — that’s how many industry legends began, such as Dragon Quest’s creator Yuji Horii.

In 1995, ASCII released RPG Maker: Super Dante, a version for the SNES / Super Famicon, and held a game design contest to celebrate it.

They received 3,447 entries. Yes, over three thousand Japanese in 1995 made a game in RPG Maker and sent it to a contest!

The winner was Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, which got around the severe limitations the tool had by making a comedy RPG where you play as Pal, the pet rooster of a rich boy gone broke. Together with a cat (that calls himself “God of Death”), you must work to help the kid recover his finances, alternating between the three characters.

Arguably the first noteworthy RPG Maker game, it was distributed for free using the Japan-only Satellaview modem for the Super Famicom. Later it was remade for RPG Maker Dante 98 (released in 1992 for the Japanese PC-98 computer). You can use this Dante 98 Player to try it on Windows computers.

Richard Honeywood helped the house of Final Fantasy go from incoherent to incomparable - (FFIX's hallmark translation)

(from 1UP.com by Jeremy Parish - April 28th, 2011)

(on webarchive, when prompt, "click continue to 1up", on the top right corner to advance to the next page)

...With a successful translation of Final Fantasy VIII under their belts by September 1999 and Chrono Cross ready to go in August 2000, Squaresoft's localization teams had only one last PlayStation masterpiece to tackle: Final Fantasy IX.

The lush fantasy world and medieval cities of Final Fantasy IX marked a return to tradition for the series, which had grown increasingly modern with VII and VIII. But tradition hardly meant simplicity: As a celebration of the Final Fantasy series, IX packed a dizzying number of references to past characters, locations and themes, all wrapped up in a charming adventure that pushed the PlayStation to the limits of what it's hardware cound handle. A host of changes made the game feel like an interactive fantasy storybook or stage play: The return to cartoony superdeformed characters, the Active Time Events that introduced secondary plot elements, the allusions to Shakespeare. Even the simple addition of quotation marks around dialogue, first appearing in VII, gave the text a more literary air.

Though many of IX's allusions were present in the Japanese version of the game, they weren't there at the beginning -- when Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi delivered his original script, it barely resembled the full game that would later appear.

"I can remember receiving an initial draft of Sakaguchi-san's script early in production to review as preparation for our Loc Dept," Honeywood said. "I was surprised that it didn't really have any structure or even grammar to it. The plot was just a series of nouns. 'Darkness. Matches. Light. Candle. Boy with tail....' It made me laugh as I tried to imagine how a dev team would make a game out of this, and how much the planners would flesh out that basic story draft to have a very involved plot."

Final Fantasy IX's references range from the obvious to the obscure. Garland, Mog, Vivi, and "No cloud, no squall shall hinder us!" all make overt references to fan-favorite series elements, while Trance, the Dwarves of Conde Petit and the Princess Cornelia of "I Want to Be Your Canary" could easily sail over the heads of all but the most devoted fans. And that's not even counting the pop culture references packed into the script, with allusions to Star Trek ("Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker.") and Monty Python ("Bah! Only only a flesh wound!")

Perhaps it was the wonderful source material, or perhaps it was the strength of the localization department by the year 2000; either way, Final Fantasy IX's translation remains one of the strongest scripts Squaresoft has ever produced. The improvements in technology helped, too, of course.

"FFVIII was the last game that forced the translators to submit their text in Shift-JIS double byte letters. I had written a tool that converted the text for them (along with line-width-checkers and a few other tools). On FFIX we convinced the dev team to allow us to use extended ASCII from the get-go, helping them implement that encoding into the program along with better fonts."

By the time Honeywood and the other localization producers were working on FFIX, they had hired translators capable of converting Japanese straight to FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish) rather than translating the script to English first. As a remarkably lively translation and a technical accomplishment, Final Fantasy IX was a fitting homage to the series and a hallmark of what was to come in future Square titles, when localization teams would work more closely with the developers than ever before.

"At FFIX's stage, we weren't too involved on a daily basis with the Japanese version...FFX, FFXI, FFX-2, FFXII and onwards we had the translators move to sit within the dev team at an earlier stage, and there was more collaboration. Over time, some dev teams became very good at choosing product and character names that work in all regions by discussing them with us."

In some cases, that close working relationship resulted in the English translations feeding back into the Japanese scripts -- FFX-2's developers liked the term "machina" that was developed for Final Fantasy X's English script so much they added it into their game in Japanese. And because American gamers cared far more about lip syncing in cut-scenes, some games like The Bouncer were recorded with English voices first and later dubbed into Japanese.

Via 1UP.com (webarchive)

Hironobu Sakaguchi and FF programmers' try to rival DQ [Game Designers in their'early' days] - Keiichi Tanaka

(from Denfaminicogamer by Keiichi Tanaka - July 21th, 2017)

The 1980s and 1990s was the “adolescence” of the game industry. Wanting to find out more about the passionate, young, overeaching past of the game designers that struggled during that time, this report manga was created. The first guest is Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of “Final Fantasy”!

Via Denfaminicogamer

In 1994, Ted Woolsey changed game localization by writing a "deathless" apocalypse - [USGAMER]

Final Fantasy 6's story inspired more than one budding writer to pick up their pen and go wild. [Square Enix/Source]

(from USGAMER by Nadia Oxford - May 5th, 2020)

"Every RPG enthusiast can recall what game they were playing when they were struck by the fandom's universal epiphany: The realization that RPGs can treat us to rich stories and deep character rosters that rival classic fantasy novels. We don't say it often enough, but the people who translated those games and added flavor to their characters, stories, and worlds deserve some credit for these discoveries. It's fine to journey for 60 hours with wooden heroes; it's better to come come away from the adventure bright-eyed and stuffed full of one-liners like, "Don't tease the octopus, kids!" and, "You sound like a chapter from a self-help booklet."

The 16-bit era was a renaissance for console RPGs, especially for Westerners. Though RPGs wouldn't reach anything close to mainstream popularity until Final Fantasy 7 hit the PlayStation in 1997, the candy-colored sprites in Secret of Mana and the solemn, realistic backdrops of Final Fantasy 6—released in the West as Final Fantasy 3— turned some heads and won some hearts. In time, these newly-baptized RPG fans and the veterans who fell in love with the genre through Dragon Warrior came to the same observation: Many of the RPGs produced by Square Enix (then Squaresoft) boasted next-level translations in an era where video game localizations were still infamous for being shoddy.

Squaresoft's RPGs weren't just clear and competent. They built up the worlds they belonged to, gave life and character to hero and monster alike. In particular, the localization for Final Fantasy 6 is so ingrained in fans' minds that certain character quirks and bits of dialogue have carried over into modern Final Fantasy games. Professional authors even cite Final Fantasy 6 as a major inspiration for their works.

It's remarkable to realize Square Enix's ability to deliver such a powerful story about death, devastation, and the end of the world while under the watchful eye of Nintendo of America's content censors. That's why the man behind the translations, Ted Woolsey, is still celebrated for his work."

Via USGAMER

Are RPG Maker games as bad as people think? [EUROGAMER]

"RPG Maker games have always been here. They are really easy to identify...
...But the tag is lying to you"

(from eurogamer.net by Giada Zavarise - May 24th 2018)

"We all have our petty personal crusades to fight. Mine is the endless battle in defence of RPG Maker, accused by many of being a bad engine only used by lazy developers. RPG Maker games tend to look the same, so this means that only untalented developers use it, right? I decided to prove people wrong. With science. That's why I took a deep dive in the Steam RPG Maker tag, gathering data about all 559 tagged games released to this day. Behold the results of my foolish research."

Via EUROGAMER

(Reference) Illustrator Akira “Akiman” Yasuda, (Capcom) [toco toco]

Keiichi Tanaka explores the history behind Nintendo's now-legendary “EarthBound” - [denfaminicogamer]

(from Denfaminicogamer by Keiichi Tanaka - January 9th, 2018)

It was 1987. On the train back to Kyoto, Shigesato Itoi was weeping. "It wasn't because I felt sad It was because I felt powerless. Granted, I felt that way several more times later on in life. But I never felt quite as depressed as I did then… It was two years before 'MOTHER" (Earthbound Beginnings) was born.'

Via Denfaminicogamer

Fatal Limits - [RMHistoria]

"They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Most RPG Maker games tend to have very traceable influences and they vary based on the choices an author would make. To say Fatal Limits is a recreation of Final Fantasy 7 isn’t quite accurate. It starts off at roughly the story beat in FF7 where Cloud and crew decides to rescue Aeris from Shinra as opposed to a bombing mission equivalent. Only, you aren’t terrorists, you simply want to escape the city and travel the world. There are tiny little details that are divergent from FF7, and it’s interesting to see how even the style of the cutscenes and phrasing mimic the source material and then don’t. I think it proves that unless you are actually lifting exact moment to moment aspects of the source material directly, there are still ways in which a game can define itself...."

(from RMHistoria - March 17, 2019)
Please check out RMHistoria!

Confessions of a teenage asset ripper ----- A better class of art thief: [rockpapershotgun.com]

(from rockpapershotgun.com by Giada Zavarise - May 24th 2018)

"...I never played Secret of Mana 2 on the Super Nintendo, but I could recognize its trees in a blink. I saw them in countless other games, their lush branches decorating the corners of fantasy worlds filled with magic, dragons, and bugs. Oh, so many bugs. I’ve never played the first Star Ocean, the Suikoden series, Terranigma, or Chrono Trigger. But I know them. They are games I’ve always appreciated in a disjointed state, their plants and furniture dissected and laid out on sprite sheets like tiny organs on an autopsy table. I saw all this because, when I was a teenager, I illegally ripped art assets from commercial games..."

"...Before 2005, the amateur game-making tool RPG Maker didn’t have an official publisher. The community thrived in the shadows, a bunch of teenagers armed with cracked, unofficially-translated copies of the engine, and one shared dream: making games as cool as Final Fantasy. Teens with no preparation, no guidance, and no bloody idea of what they were doing.

RPG Maker is an intuitive tool, and people were quick to master it even without official support. But all games need art assets to shine, and most of those teens had never used graphics software more complicated than MS Paint. That’s why they – we – turned to stealing art from other games. Ripping assets was not a new concept to the pre-pubescent indie scene. GameMaker users were ripping as well, and some famous GameMaker games from that era, like Ark 22, feature a number of ripped and edited graphics. Ripping from commercial titles soon became an integral part of the early RPG Maker days..."

"...People often feel OK about downloading those old, forgotten games from clandestine websites, but using old assets from forgotten games in your own non-commercial endeavour is still a taboo. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to salvage whatever we can from our past? To celebrate it in a new form?..."



"...When a work enters the public domain, everyone becomes free to change it, redistribute it, and use parts of it for their own creations. In the world of literature, this freedom gave birth to literary mashups, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and to new novels featuring borrowed characters, like The Wide Sargasso Sea. It’s a form of fan-fiction, in a sense (another kind of homage that is getting difficult for videogame authors, with more and more projects taken down by cease and desist letters).

Pop art got Andy Warhol and endless replicas of Marilyn Monroe’s face. Songs have covers and remixes. Novels have fan-fiction. Moms have decoupage. Will games ever be allowed to have the same freedom? We’re used to seeing old games being remastered and rebooted. I hope one day we will be allowed to remix them."

Via RockPaperShotgun

Stop Hating on 'RPG Maker,' the Easy-Bake Game Development Tool - [MOTHERBOARD]

(from MOTHERBOARD by David Jagneaux - May 24th 2018)

"...If you browse the RPG Maker forums or the various digital indie game storefronts like itch.io or Steam Greenlight, you can see why. They're filled with shoddy efforts that appear to have been created in an afternoon using nothing but stock art assets that come with the program. Broken english, bad level design, poorly written stories, boilerplate interaction, and inconsistent pacing are just some of the problems that often plague these games.

To the Moon’s promotional art work. Image: Freebird Games.

...The most important thing a developer can do to protect the vision of their game is creating unique content that goes beyond this base level of production," said Justin Amirkhani, creative director at Vagabond Dog. "With the proper application of fresh art and uniquely developed mechanics, it can be difficult to discern if a game was even made using RPG Maker. Developers who take the time and effort to make their product their own need not fear any stigma, regardless of what engine they create with."

Via MOTHERBOARD

(Reference) - RPGMAKER 101: An Intro to Development and Community

(Rindre, Hogwash and Meake did a really cool panel at AnimeNEXT June 2018)

"Love when your favorite Youtuber played The Witch’s House? Ever wanted to make a game, but programming complex code seems terrifying? Join our lovely dev guides Meaka, Hogwash, and Rindre as we walk you through all things RPGMaker. The past, the present… and maybe you, the future!

Part of our discussion of RPG Maker and its history will include “landmark” games made in the engines, such as Yume Nikki, OFF, and Ib, among others.

This discussion will include how these games shaped the community that grew from it and how they continue to inspire new developers to this day. A particular emphasis will be placed on community and the “fandom,” as it were, since they are the lifeblood of RPG Maker and indie game dev in general.

The approachability of the idea that anyone can make a game is a particularly strong draw, and people of varying skill sets can come together for game jams, create fanworks, or even just be able to chat with fellow fans and devs, bounce ideas off each other, and bring new projects to life without even realizing it."

A Conversation With the Creator of Final Fantasy IV - (theatre influence)

(from 1UP.com by Jeremy Parish - April 15th, 2011)

...I guess up until then RPGs tended to have a map, a dungeon, a castle, and boss battles, and you kind of went back and forth between the gameplay and the boss battles. But our idea was if we approached it from a movie editing perspective, perhaps we could create a more dramatic, story-driven game.

And it was also a big development in terms of music, because up until then we had one piece music per map, essentially. For IV, we focused on how to make the game more emotional -- to have the music play at the right timing. And so it was kind of a new way to approach the music in a game.

1UP: The characters are really a big part of the game, and FFIV was really the first game I can think of to have musical leitmotifs surrounding the characters. Did you and [composer Nobuo] Uematsu look to movies for inspiration and say, "This is something we need in our game?"

Tokita: I, myself, have a theatre background, and the main appeal of an RPG is that you can play as the protagonist. We really wanted to have the music play out when it would affect you the most, in a sense. So, we really focused on finding the right points and best timings to play the music so it would evoke the emotions necessary to make you feel better.

1UP: You say you have a theatre background. Did you have a lot of interest in videogames and, specifically, RPGs before coming to work with Square and Final Fantasy?

Tokita: I'm a little bit the opposite, actually. Apparently there was an animation boom when I was young. I had the intention of becoming a voice actor. On the side, I was drawing manga and cartoons, and while I was in a theatre troupe, I made some cash. I had the game design work as something part-time on the side, and that's how I got into the industry.

As a part-time job, I wanted to be involved in something creative as well. So a career in game design seemed very appealing as well. I'm not sure if you know Tokyo very well, but there's a little area Roppongi... Prior to Square, I was with ASCII in Roppongi.

Via 1UP.com (webarchive)

Arc Symphony imagines not a faux-JRPG, but the community that surrounds it. Fan fiction, passive aggression, and all - [USGAMER]

(from USGAMER by Caty McCarthy - April 24th, 2017)

"There comes a point in nearly every online community when drama tears it apart. Naturally, in all the fan communities I’ve seen rise, I’ve watched them fall; whether over pettiness, fights, people leaving and newbies shaking up the community’s dynamic, moderators going power hungry, and so on. But I'll never forget the friends I've made across them. And even today, I still stay in contact with a select few friends I've made over the early years of rabid fandoms. The inevitable drama that unfolds in Arc Symphony’s fan community ends up feeling personal, not just because we've witnessed something like it before, but because so many of us have reinvented ourselves in one way or another online. We create the ideal self, and sometimes, we see that be rejected."

Via USGamer
Via Itch.io Arc Symphony

(This is a really old post - I was gonna post this sooner but other things sort of got in the way. It was an interesting sort of text adventure that delved into the nature surrounding online internet communities. The game is no longer free, but it's 2.69USD. It's still worth checking out.)

Copy & Paste & Play: Amateur Games as Appropriation Art - [Amplab.ca]

(from Amplab.ca by Saeed Afzal - Noevember 8th, 2016)

"...Marcus Boon, in his book “In Praise of Copying”, writes of the putting together of a mixtape or iTunes playlist in a way that I think reflects the philosophy of these RPG Maker amalgamations: he notes that the process of making a mixtape is “intimate” and “emotionally charged”, and that “the mixtape maker has available in accessing the variety that is essential to copia, and straight out of a classical rhetoric manual: inventio (the selection of tunes to be played),dispositio (the ordering or sequencing of them), and elocutio(the cuts and edits made, but also the loving care put into the handwritten cover, the decoration of the cassette), all deployed in order to charm the recipient of the tape” (Boon 55). Just like the mixtape-maker, the RPG Maker game designer carefully selects the assets they’re going to copy, rearranges and reorders them in new configurations, and also omits, edits, and personalizes these resources to make a product that is uniquely theirs.

RPG Maker game Final Fantasy Black Moon Prophecy, a fangame of the Final Fantasy series, makes use of assets from Final Fantasy IV, released 25 years ago as of the writing of this probe. The fangame uses a tileset from the game’s town maps, safe zones for the player to recover their strength and restock on items. Black Moon Prophecy, however, edits the tileset and then uses it to map one of the game’s dungeons, Niflheim (Left), a decaying town in which monsters abound. This is another instance of familiar iconography being reconfigured and given new meaning – note the re-use of graphics between Niflheim (Left) and Final Fantasy IV’s town of Baron (Right)"

Via Amplab.ca (webarchive)

The secret history of underdog game engine RPG Maker and how it got its bad reputation - [PC Gamer]

(from PC Gamer by Giada Zavarise - October 11, 2017)

"...The release of RPG Maker VX Ace coincided with the birth of Steam Greenlight. RPG Maker users started to consider themselves real game developers, and realized they could actually try to sell their games. The result? An explosion of RPG Maker games on Steam Greenlight, often made by teenagers with big dreams but limited skills. And all those games looked the same.

Players began to associate RPG Maker's RTPs with mediocre, "lazy" games. The engine got a bad reputation. In a 2016 Reddit thread about why people had begun to hate games made with RPG Maker a community manager who worked for Degica said, "I really wish people who weren't ready for the big time would stop submitting to greenlight. It would make my job easier. Because the perception of RM is already bad enough without people trying to throw their 10 minute effort game on greenlight."

On forums and in Steam user reviews the same comments about RPG Maker games recur over and over. They're "low effort and low quality," "look more or less identical," use the same "stock resources." It's enough to put you off using the engine entirely..."

Via PC Gamer

(Reference) RPGMAKER Playstation Agetec Reviewed

(Happy Birthday RpgmakerArchive! - things have been kind of slow, but there's a lot happening in the world of rpgmaker, I'll try to continue to quietly update this when I can. 
In the meantime, be sure to check out the new thread on RMN, if you're looking for something in particular)

(Zoom In!)

Via Official Playstation Magazine August 2000 Issue 35 "Millionaire Comes Home"
Via RetroMags

(EDIT:Also, Cherry recently updated rpgmaker2003 to allow for better picture in battles functionality. To see what that entails, check out JosephSeraph's thread on RMN - Really Exciting Stuff!)

The Real Story Behind Xenogears' 'Unfinished' Disc 2 - [Kotaku]

(from Kotaku by Jason Schreier - June 15th, 2017)

Xenogears, widely considered one of the greatest role-playing games ever made, has long felt to fans like an unfinished product thanks to its controversial, seemingly unfinished second disc. Although western gamers have assumed that the team simply ran out of money, the real story—as revealed by director Tetsuya Takahashi to Kotaku today—is a little more nuanced.

Whereas the first disc of Xenogears is a sprawling role-playing game, full of towns and dungeons and beautiful cut-scenes, the second disc takes a different approach. Disc 2 of Xenogears chooses to tell rather than show the game’s epic finale, putting main characters Fei and Elly in a dark room and having them narrate the game’s climactic events while a slideshow plays on a screen in front of them. It’s an unusual and jarring change of pace.

Conventional wisdom has long been this: Square ran out of money and rushed the team, forcing Tetsuya Takahashi to put Xenogears’ second half together with duct tape. Fans have always believed that Takahashi had more ambitious plans but was forced to ditch them because of budget and time issues.

As far as I can tell, however, there’s been no official explanation since Xenogearswas released 19 years ago. So while interviewing Takahashi during E3 in Los Angeles today about his new game, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (more on that soon), I had to slip in a question about that urban legend. Xenogears is one of my favorite games, I said, but what happened to that second disc?

“Honestly speaking, what had happened is Xenogears as a project was staffed pretty much entirely out of new staff members, young staff members,” said Takahashi, speaking through a translator. “Back then, we had the direction of, ‘All projects take two years and that’s when we need to get it done.’ So on top of developing the game, we had to nurture and teach and grow these younger employees. Things like 3D were extremely new, which led to some delays in the schedule. It just wasn’t possible to get everything done.”

As it became clear that Takahashi and team weren’t going to hit their deadlines, Square’s higher-ups suggested that they just end the game after the first disc, when Fei and his team escape from Solaris.

“It was a rough way to end it, and I felt like if we do that, then the players will not be satisfied,” Takahashi told me. “So we had a proposal—I proposed that if we do disc 2 in this way that it turned out to be, we can finish the game with the current number of staff and the current time allotted for the schedule and the remaining budget we have.”

So they turned disc 2 of Xenogears into the montage that shipped with today’s game. Instead of playing through events like the world’s mutation and the search for Fei, you just have to watch them. And it was Takahashi’s decision—so he could finish the story he wanted to tell rather than cutting it off after the first half.

“I do think my decision was the right one to make,” said Takahashi. “Because if we had just ended at Disc 1 it would have been bad.”

Via Kotaku

(Note:Really bad cold this month, will update more once things are more normal)

(Reference) Spotted - RPGMAKER - Playstation - Agetec

(Busy this month, have a few posts lined up, but for now I thought I'd upload this)

Like, love at first sight...
(Zoom In!)
Via PSM Playstation Magazine Psm July 2000 Issue 35
Via RetroMags

(Reference) GameCenterCX: Taito Interview

(I wanted to post this on a slow day, but things are getting busy, so I'm posting this here now, in hopes that it'll get buried over the next couple of entries.)

I decided to post another Game Center CX episode.

Not just because this also happens to be the first episode of GameCenter CX, but because there's this really interesting interview Arino conducts with the creator of the Desha de Go/"Go by Train" series, where we learn of Akira Saito's history with Taito and what eventually drove him to create such a unique and interesting series of video games. (@20:00)

There's this interesting sort of revelation, during the interview: That it's not just people who are fixated on "Numbers" or "Game Design" who want to create games, but people from all different walks of life, who simply never had the opportunity to experience certain things (In Saito's case, being a train engineer, being able to drive a train) and video games are often created as an extension towards that - a way to fulfill that experience - very interesting.

As always, please use discretion when sharing.

(Alternative Download - GameCenter CX - Taito/Takeshi No Chousenjou)
(CrunkGames.com write up)
(Go by Train series on Wikipedia)
(GameCenterCX/RetroGameMaster on Amazon)

(from The TV Database - thetvdb.com )

"First Aired 2003-11-04

"In the first episode of Game Center CX, Arino visits Taito to learn it's history and play one of it's most difficult and cruel games Takeshi no Chousenjou. Upon first entering Taito he marvels at the Space Invaders machine. Tomohiro Nishikado, the creator of Space Invaders comes and discusses with Arino the history and impact of the game and they challenge one another to a game. After this Arino meets Akira Saito to discuss the Densha de GO! series. As the tour continues he finds out nobody from the original development team of Takeshi no Chousenjou is left so he meets Tetsuo Egawa instead to discuss it. To find out more about the legendary game he talks to Kazuhiro Hayashi who presents Arino with guidebooks for the game.

Finally we see Arino tackle Takeshi no Chousenjou which includes various hilarious snippits of him getting frustrated at the game's bizarre challenges such as singing karaoke, and waiting one hour without pushing anything. Does Arino complete Takeshi's insane challenge? Watch and find out!"

What makes Oddworld tick - [Polygon]

(from Polygon by Richard Moss - April 24th, 2017)

One of the minds behind the Oddworld universe shares his storytelling philosophies and inspirations as he works on the Abe's Exoddus reimagining Soulstorm.

"...Lanning believes that the best stories are rooted in allegory. "It adds depth that resonates with us [and] gives us a stronger connection to it," he says. "And I think maybe partially makes us feel not as lonely in the world." Not only that, he sees allegorical storytelling as a tool to help us to understand the world. That is Oddworld's purpose; Abe's Odyssey and its successors were made to inspire, to enlighten, "to peel off some of the layers of this world of bullshit that we're saturated in."

Now, as he revisits the original material, Lanning has plenty of frustration with the failings of politics and big-money business. "I think never has the modern world been more disillusioned with its matrix as today," he says. "They see all types of corruption and hijinks around them and the average person just feels that they can't do anything about it. Which is a bad place for us all to be. So for me I feel like I really don't have a choice [on whether to create games with deeper meaning]..."

Via Polygon