The making of Another World with Éric Chahi and Jean-François Freitas

Here's something I found on YouTube just yesterday. I think I may have seen it before, but it wasn't in my bookmarks. In this short documentary video, Éric Chahi, the creator of Another World, reminisces about the process of developing his all-time classic. Chahi, a true artist, is almost a little uncomfortable while doing so, as he explains: "I don't like talking about Another World. The pictures speak for themselves". Which is actually true - the entire story of the game is driven by the imagery and the player's imagination. There isn't a single sentence, word or dialogue to be read in the entire game.

Also featured is composer Jean-François Freitas, who wrote the memorable intro music for the game, and also helped create the game's sound effects. We learn some interesting tidbits, like for example how the sound of an old dot matrix printer was turned into the sound of the lifts in the game, or how nuts became the sound of bones exploding.



I also found the video on Vimeo. You can watch it here.

Tim Cain on Matt Chat

In 2012, Tim Cain was another great guest on Matt Barton's Matt Chat show. The videos are a little short (I believe Matt was fighting some YouTube upload restrictions at the time), but very interesting to watch. Cain talks about how he got started on the Atari 800, how Fallout came to be, working on the game at Interplay, working on his other games Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and Temple of Elemental Evil, and also gives his opinion on Fallout 3.

Fallout post-mortem with Tim Cain

This is probably my favourite of all the GDC post-mortem videos available online. Tim Cain is probably best known to gamers as the producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of Interplay's post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout. Prior to Fallout, he was a programmer at Interplay working on various games. In this GDC 2012 post-mortem, Cain explains how his engine he began working on in 1994 evolved into the now classic RPG. He also talks about the popular culture that influenced the game, and shares some hilarious anecdotes about the game's development (the one about the Windows NT installer, for example, is simply priceless).



You can also watch this video at the GDC Vault website.

Llamasoft And The Space Giraffe

(description TBA)

The history of Llamasoft with Jeff Minter

(description TBA)

Julian Gollop lecture at GDS Bulgaria 2011

At the 2011 Game Dev Summit in Sofia, Bulgaria, Julian Gollop gave a lecture on how to get your career started in game development. This is not directly related to old school game development, but I felt like including it anyway since it's interesting to watch. In this video, Gollop talks about how he got started making games on the ZX81 and BBC Model B, and then proceeds to give advice for programmers, game designers and level designers.

The making of UFO: Enemy Unknown

Edge Online has a making of article on UFO: Enemy Unknown which, again, is a little short but still fun to read. Julian Gollop explains how he and his brother Nick pitched the game to MicroProse, and also talks about some of the problems that arose during its production.