BioForge: Забытый киберпанк от Origin Systems

BioForge is a 1995 action adventure game developed by Origin Systems and published by Electronic Arts for MS DOS. Set in the future, the player controls an amnesiac cyborg trying to escape the research facility in which they are being held prisoner. BioForge was developed as an interactive movie making use of motion capture, voice acting, and multiple camera angles. BioForge received mixed reviews. Work was started on a sequel for the game, which was then re scoped as an expansion pack, and ultimately cancelled. BioForge was re released on GOG. com in 2012.

Writer Jack Herman created a fictional universe as the setting for BioForge. BioForge has tank controls as in the player character can rotate left and right, walk and run forwards and backwards, and sidestep. The player can also enter a combat stance that makes several punch and kick movements and hand to hand weapons (if carried) available. The combat system has been described as being similar to Alone in the Dark. BioForge was developed at Origin by a core team of ten people under Demarest, during a period of two years from February 1993 to March 1995. The game was developed using C++ and 80x86 assembly and used the Phar Lap DOS extender. Internally, the game used a custom script language for world management and animation. It also employed an HTML styled language to code the in game interface. The working title for the game was Interactive Movie 1. The 3D models of BioForge were created from reference sketches in 3D Studio and then texture mapped in a proprietary Electronic Arts tool named EOR. The animations were created using the rotoscope technique on live actor movements captured with the Flock of Birds on body motion detector system, using an in house pose editor named System for Animating Lifelike Synthetic Actors (S. A. L. S. A.) that was capable of displaying captured movement as fully rendered models in real time. Origin reportedly paid between $30,000 and $32,000 for the Flock of Birds hardware in order to save time on creating animations.

A sequel (BioForge II) was designed and the team were working on the art when the project was halted and changed to an expansion pack of the original game, BioForge Plus. BioForge Plus was projected by Origin as an extension to the original game, which would directly continue the plot, but it was cancelled after a rushed beta was completed in 10 weeks. A Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog reported that EA Mythic received a crate full of old Origin Systems archive materials, possibly containing BioForge Plus source code.

Reviews for BioForge at its release were mixed. More positive reviews summarized it as "a game that combines outstanding atmospherics with decent gameplay", It was the second place finalist for Computer Game Reviews 1995 "Role Playing Game of the Year" award, which went to Anvil of Dawn. The editors wrote, "[I]n a year that held few RPGs for a starved audience, it had the guts to try role playing in a sci fi universe instead of one plagued with magic and dragons."

Tim Schafer cited BioForge as an influence on the critically acclaimed 1998 game Grim Fandango in its approach to 3D graphics and use of tank controls. PC Gamer UK ranked BioForge at 88 in its Top 100 PC games in 2001, noting that it "pushed boundaries at the time". BioForge was included as one of the titles in the 2010 book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. The Guardian included BioForge in a 2014 list of the "greatest video games that time forgot" calling it a "fascinating example" among the "nightmarishly unplayable dross" of the mid 90s interactive movie genre. In 2013, director Ken Demarest reflected that "BioForge was conceived from a technical perspective, and I think that if I’d given as much focus to the gameplay as the underlying technology, it might have enjoyed greater acclaim."