THAT’S THE SPIRIT
David Leary, designer on Blade Runner, returns to his classic
Was there always a clear idea of the genre that Blade runner would fall into?
Yes, absolutely. The team felt strongly from the start that an adventure game model with a detective theme was the right approach. One of our primary goals was to do justice to the Blade Runner property, and the movie had that strong noir/detective element that it just seemed to fit.
What were the challenges and/or advantages of working on a licensed game?
There’s a tightrope you have to walk when working with a licensed property. You need to be faithful to the source material, but not so perfectly faithful that it feels like a stale retread. In addition, restrictions on a licensed property put some walls around what you can do. For Blade Runner, we had to be especially careful when our story interacted with the events and characters from the movie. That said, the Blade
Runner partnership was great to work with, and gave us a lot of freedom to experiment within the licence.
Could you talk a bit about the idea behind the randomised elements of the game and how difficult that was to implement?
The implementation of the base system itself was straightforward – randomly rolling at the start of any new game for which characters were replicants, with a few constraints to make sure there were always at least some replicants. The challenge was in iteration to make sure the randomness mattered in the game – properly setting up all the various event sequences that fell out of that initial ‘roll’ and finding places where the randomness could be made meaningful in a conversation or a combat sequence.
the game has an enduring reputation despite being difficult to play on modern machines. Why do you think that is?
The game respected the Blade Runner universe, it had some unique gameplay elements for the adventure genre, and it was fairly replayable. I don’t think we knew it at the time, but we lucked into a few innovations. It had plenty of flaws as well, but we pulled off some good tricks that I think made the whole more than the sum of its parts.
What detective games stick out as some of your favourites?
Deus Ex springs to mind – I remember how innovative that game was when it first came out. I loved it for its mix of action, story, and environments. When I was younger, I loved some of Infocom’s mystery text adventures like Deadline, and Sierra’s games. I had the great fortune to work alongside Jim Walls, one of the creators of Police Quest, on Blade Runner – it was great to be able to draw on his experience in what worked and what didn’t in the genre.