Alone in the Dark Dev on Hating His Own Game
Frederick Raynal leads a post-mortem GDC panel for the original Alone in the Dark.
March 9, 2012
During his post-mortem for the original Alone in the Dark, programmer and creator Frederick Raynal made a confession. "I hated this game," he said. Raynal didn't think consumers would like it either. By the end of his year-long development period, Raynal was exhausted by the work and uncertain of the result. He latched onto little things that didn't quite work the way he wished they would, such as the physics of thrown objects.
Keep in mind, this was 1992. This was a time when survival horror games didn't exist. This is a time when technology was so rudimentary that Raynal up and created software from scratch so he could model 3D characters.
The survival horror genre has come a long way.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Raynal's hand-made editor is its flexibility. In the middle of a walk cycle, for instance, an artist could modify animations in real time. In turn, the silent protagonist could react to enemy attacks in a seamless fashion while cooperating with the collision detection. It was such a complicated project at the time that Raynal wanted to give his artists the "maximum freedom inside the constraint" of the game's scope.
The sound designer on the project used the relatively new Sound Blaster for audio sampling. This allowed for contextual audio such as creaking stairs, a small feature Raynal felt was "very important" to achieving a spooky atmosphere.
Raynal's dedication to forward-thinking technology enabled his team at Infogrames to create something that would inspire almost every survival horror title for the next 20 years. In reflecting on Alone in the Dark for the day, Raynal answered a question from the crowd saying "I would love an HD remake," he said, "I hope that happens."
