One of the most wonderfully imaginative developers in the business, Oddworld Inhabitants (Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath) has been a little quiet for the last few years. Its recent PSN releases indicate that the company is ready to make a move. Oddworld looks poised to shake things up in the near future, doing it with its trademark creativity and independence (naturally!). I recently caught up with company co-founder Lorne Lanning to talk about what’s going on with Oddworld, what the PSN releases mean to him, social gaming, being a creative developer in a harsh economic climate, the status of Citizen Siege, working with Electronic Arts, and more. While he didn’t say anything outright, it’s pretty clear where he thinks the gaming business is going and how he thinks Oddworld should approach it.
Raymond Padilla: First off, how are you doing? What’s new and exciting with you, Lorne?
Lorne Lanning: Doing great, in spite of the economy, which definitely makes all efforts more challenging.
We’re working on something new / something different, but we haven’t been able to talk about it yet — hope to in the not too distant future.
RP: With Abe’s Oddysee and Abe’s Exoddus hitting the PlayStation Network, your games have a chance to reach a whole new generation of players. How does it feel to introduce Abe to gamers that could barely hold a controller when the games were originally released?
LL: You mean, beyond feeling old?!? Beyond that, of course it’s a joy to see the fan mail from new players that have just discovered these games. A bit time machine’ish I should say. The feedback is fresh, it’s new to them, so there’s something that feels very much like it did when the games first came out. A lot of people got passionate about Abe. Now we’re seeing it again, and it’s the same vibe and reaction of newness, but a different generation. A bit Déjà to the last millennium.
When I see them write, “I remember my father used to play, but I was too young” it’s a serious testament to just how quickly time flies and how quickly the times change. We’re thrilled that the Abe games are finding a new audience, especially considering that we didn’t even foresee the future of digital distribution back when we originally built these games. I mean, most people still didn’t know what www.com meant back in ‘94 when we started building Abe. Strange how different a world it already is today.
— All my industry buddies are saying this one is awesome and addresses all the flaws in the original.
Gaming is more expensive than ever. Consoles cost more. Games cost more. The addition of downloadable content adds to a game’s total cost of ownership. With a languishing economy, it’s no wonder that software sales are down.
: March 9, 2010!!! To bolster the announcement, the company released a video featuring Producer Yoshinori Kitase, director Motomu Toriyama, art director Isamu Kamikokuryo, and battle director Yuji Abe. Check it out!