Orbital, Flashback, Back To The Future, Thunderbirds 2086, Predator, Aliens and Turrican 2.
These have all in some way influenced the design of our new game, and to explain how, here’s a breakdown:
Thunderbirds 2086
This was easily my favourite cartoon on TV when I was a kid. I can’t remember a single plot line now, but I couldn’t get enough of the futuristic intro sequence with the animated vehicle schematics. When we got our artist drawing up the pilot, ship and schematics for the teaser puzzle, this intro video was the main point of reference.
Aliens
Why should we want to create a female lead character? Ripley.
Flashback
When developing the art style for the game, we looked to the classic rotoscoped adventure game, Flashback. It is still one of my favourite games. It has animated cut scenes that use a very economical art style, with large areas of flat colour and simple angular shapes used to describe the environment and objects within.
Back To The Future
When working on the ship design, we wanted a unique look that reminded us of cool vehicle designs. So we designed the rear of the ship to be reminiscent of the DeLorean in Back To The Future – with its large thruster, bright blue energy and wings positioned above the ship, we think it looks like the DeLorean with its doors open 🙂
Predator
Continuing on the ship design, once we had the mean looking pincer wings in place, someone in the office commented that it looked a bit like Predator’s mandibles – so, we emphasised them 🙂
Everyone here is pretty happy with the way the ship looks now 🙂
Orbital
I’ve been an Orbital fan since the In Sides album in 1995. Their epic 14 minute electro-escapades inspired me to learn how to produce music myself, and soon after getting my first decent keyboard (a Roland JP8000), I wrote the Teleport Rescue tune (although it was called something else).
It’s a tune that I spent nearly a decade working on, with a couple of my friends getting very bored of it. I knew it had potential though, and kept working to try and get it right. I even asked Paul Hartnoll from Orbital to help me with it. He politely declined and said I should just keep working on it myself 🙂
I’ve now finally got a mix I’m happy with, and you lucky people have got 10 years worth of effort for free! :p
My hope is that we’ll be able to extend the theme out into a concept album to accompany the game in the vein of the epic Orbital tunes such as Out There Somewhere and Nothing Left.
Turrican 2
Continuing on the topic of music, I used to look forward to visiting my friend’s house when I was little, as he had an Amiga, and therefore had Turrican 2. The music on level 1, The Desert Rocks is perhaps my all-time favourite tune ever. I tried to capture the same kind of uplifting mood in Teleport Rescue.
So there you go, hopefully we’re going to do these influences justice!