Interview | Lorne Lanning on Oddworld

Strangers in the night…

Interview: Lorne Lanning on Oddworld

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After playing Abe’s Odyssee more recently it’s clear that the titular character was meant to inspire players. But he wasn’t a superhero. He was someone that we could emulate. “We wanted to create a hero that was more innocent than you, that embodied the need for protection,” Lanning explains. “If he could have such innocence, could we feel compassion for him? Could he be someone that you would want to protect, like a kid brother, or the butt ugly child that only a mother would love? If he was someone that didn’t deserve what was coming to him, could players feel engaged to not just ’beat the game,’ but actually help the little guy out?  Give him a break and set him off on a better life? He’s a pretty helpless schmuck doomed to a horrible destiny, a terribly dangerous world full of greedy, soulless pursuers.” And that, says Lanning, was the soup from which the story emerged.

But people wouldn’t respect this game, this standout game, if all it did was take the moral high ground and preached to its players throughout. The teachings from the Oddworld games were softened with humour and friendly imagery. Gamespeak was a system implemented from the start: if you wanted someone to follow you to safety, you could tell them. You want them to stay? Well, you get the picture. There was an element of forward thinking here, and many players would take a break from Abe’s plight and simply mess around, luring fellow Mudokons into traps or simply pressing the fart button followed by a giggle.

“In the Oddworld games, we always felt humour was critical,” recalls Lanning. “The subject matter is dark. It’s a broken mirror reflecting back our dark side of earthly globalism. This, for anyone who is informed on what’s going on, is some pretty dark shit. So if we were going to play off of that backdrop, then we had to be funny, or the whole thing would be terribly bleak and probably end up preachy, which always stinks.  Instead, we’re taking bleak subject matter and putting it into an ironic and humorously charged world, so it takes away one edge that can be overly negative, and adds back another edge that hopefully gives it more appeal.  I remember we often called it ’Muppets meets the X-files’.”

A risky business?

Despite the game being wholly accessible via the characters and narrative, this was a game that shunned the current gaming world and tried something different – it could have easily failed. Abe ventured into people’s homes with quite a population of heroes around him. Lara Croft was backflipping over a T-Rex, while somebody called Cloud Strife arrived on a speeding train. So, surely, it must have been hard for Abe to find his home? Not so, according to Lanning.

“At the time, there were a lot of games being pushed that had big-breasted, gun-toting women and muscle-bound male killers, but Abe was something quite different. While a lot of the landscape was heading for more violence, Abe was about empathy. He was not aligned with current trends and I think that helped him to stand out as something a publisher could get behind and feel good about.”

Abe won over gamers and critics alike, and Oddworld Inhabitants found themselves with a thriving fanbase that yearned for more from the world of odd. Many members of the gaming community believed that Munch’s Odyssee, a launch title for the Xbox, failed to recapture the essence of Oddworld. This title was a shift in style from Abe’s adventures, and many fans didn’t feel ready for the switch.

While Munch maintained the fantasy theme of previous iterations, it wasn’t until Stranger waltzed in and won over even the most fickle of gamers that the Oddworld series resurged to its former glory. But if the world never really change,d and the characters retained the same charm, was it the change of genre emphasis that put off gamers? Stranger’s Wrath was certainly the biggest jump for the series, as it incorporated a first-person shooter vibe.

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