August 9, 1999

Interviewed: Gil Damoiseau (sound engine development), Franck Sauer (sound design), Lennie Moore (music composition)

Date: August 9, 1999

 
Introduction

3DSS: Thanks again for taking the time to do this interview. Perhaps you can start out by telling our readers a little about Outcast and your background and your current role with Infogrames?

Infogrames: Appeal was founded in the summer 1995 by Yann Robert, Yves Grolet and Franck Sauer. We’ve been in the game industry for quite a while now, 12 years if my memory serves me well. We started on the C64, making conversions for UBI soft. Later, we worked on Amiga on titles such as Agony published by Psygnosis. We also worked 4 years in the coin-op field, designing games such as Ultimate Tennis. But we got bored with the very limited freedom you’ve got when designing games for the coin-op industry and went back to the consumer market.

Right from the start, Appeal has been created with Outcast in mind. At that time we had a relatively small engine demo and rather large ambition for the game itself. We met Infogrames and agree to bring this project to reality. Infogrames took a stake of 49% in Appeal, so we got pretty close together. Olivier Masclef, the former producer on Outcast eventually moved to Appeal to help managing the ever-growing staff.

Outcast is a large scope project, not trying to mimic any established genre. It is often described (not by us) as an Action/Adventure with some elements of resource management, startegy and puzzle solving. Err… that means everything right? We like to call it an Adventure. Not and adventure game, just an Adventure. And when a character go to have an adventure, he faces dangers and problems he has to solve so he’d better be an action hero. You’ve got it, an adventure has it all. We are great fans of holywood blockbusters movies, so we worked hard to bring Outcast a cinematic quality. It’s a kind of interactive movie that would be… interactive!

We think Outcast is controversial, because it is unconventionnal. And we thing this is the only way to go further in creating new interactive experiences. We don’t want to run through dark corridors forever, don’t we?

 3DSS: So how long has Outcast been in development and when do you anticipate its release in North America? Are there big changes from the European release which is already out?

Infogrames: Outcast has been in development for almost four years, wich is a hell of a lot! We are very confident in U.S. release because we see lots of fans from the US, connected to fan websites and crying out to get there copies when they see their european friends already enjoying the game. We made very little changes for the US version, mainly to prevent minor problems we encountered in the european version.

The Music of Outcast

Interviews

Aureal: Wavetracing and Vortex 2
Toni Schneider

Aureal : Vortex 2
Skip McIlvaine

Crystal Audio/Cirrus Logic

Drakan - Order of the Flame
Stuart Denman and Tim Ebling

Outcast Developers

Private Wars
Sergey Titov

RoboRumble
Bartosz Brzostek

Slave Zero
W. Scott Snyder

Sim City 3000
Alex Zvenigorodsky

Starsiege
Rick Overman

Trespasser
Brady Bell

Weapons Factory
Matthew Hanson-Weller
<Anvil.Chorus>

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