By Jim Rossignol on November 30th, 2010 at 11:49 am.
What a strange headline that is. What it means is this: Introversion’s forthcoming procedurally-generated espionage game, Subversion, was shown at London-based Indie convention World Of Love earlier this year. It was filmed, via the magic of wobblecam, and uploaded for the internet. That means you can watch Chris Delay play through one of the levels, and see polygonal Kieron Gillen and Eskil Steenberg rob a bank, using their charm and their tech. As in games, so in life…
Go, watch!
This either is the most anticipated indie game in development or at least it should be.
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Hear hear. I’m more excited by this than any other game in development.
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I also hope they license out the engine. Not just because I want to see more games using procedurally generated cities. But also because it could be a good source of additional revenue for them. By the sound of things they could do with that.
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It’s close between this and Overgrowth for me.
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This is one of the most anticipated games that will never be released.
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Ach, Sassenach – you’re just as your name implies, a sour old person.
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This looks fantastic
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This is why I want to become a games programmer.
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Ahh, Chris Delay is so charmingly nerdy. It makes me want to pinch his cheek and ruffle his hair.
I just wish he’d hurry up and finish Subversion so I can play it. I don’t even really know what it is for sure, but I know that I want it. While he’s at it he should release his procedural city tool too, and make it export in a format you can tool about with.
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Haha! :D
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I’d say he’s too nerdy. The jock part of my brain kept telling me to take his lunch money, and it never does that.
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This looks excellent.
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If games were sex, this one would be the climax.
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Just out of curiosity, what would Minecraft be?
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Minecraft would be Infiniminer’s better looking, younger sister.
Every time you ride her (and every week that passes) she gets better and better.
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This looks amazing; just wonder how it will compare with Monaco? I know both Subversion and Monaco are approaching a similar topic so it will be very interesting to see how they compare.
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Monaco looks like it will be more fun, where Subversion looks like it might be more of a thoughtful, deep experience. I’ll probably end up getting both, but Monaco really does look like a blast.
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I WANT DAT SUBVERSION
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This does look like it’s going to be really great.
How can any game which can have Kieron smart-talk and threaten his way through to a bank vault before dropping the safe-cracking device and kicking it across the room not be the best thing ever?
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I think we’ve found the sequel premise to Octodad.
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So, did they have someone walking through the crowd with a collection bag or are they going to start making games that sell now?
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Uplink, Darwinia & Defcon all sold well enough to allow them to expand and grow. They just took their eye of the ball when making Darwinia+/Multiwinia and it hit them hard.
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@Optimaximal
Chris would be better off going solo like Cliffski or Eskil and losing the other two chumps who have demonstrated time and again that they have zero business acumen. Albeit I’m looking forward to this and will certainly buy it on release, I resent the fact that those two hangers on will be getting a cut of the cake as well. I’d rather Chris got all the cash.
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Chris Delay is clearly from the John Carmack school of game designers.
The glasses..! The voice.!! The enthusiasm about things that nobody else *really* understands!!!
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Looking fantastic. Insta-buy. I can’t see this game getting anything but good press, so hopefully it gets the sales to match.
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I’ve been looking forward to this for ages, and now I think I’m drooling.
It has that feel of a game in which everything was designed by creating all the systems BEHIND the gameplay mechanics they wanted, allowing what looks like a potentially absurd amount if interaction between mechanics…
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wow. another great game by those very thin chaps.
awesomness.
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It looks interesting – but at this point I’m far more excited by the city generation videos than the actual gameplay video. Here’s hoping the game itself is engaging to play.
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Do want.
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Looks fun, yeah.
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i remember mission impossible
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is it only me embedded vimeo doesn’t work for?
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It’s not working for me either, you’re not alone.
Right-click the Vimeo logo in the bottom right-hand corner and go watch it on the Vimeo site instead.
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That was absolutely amazing. I’m sold as soon as pre-orders are available.
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Looking forward to this, shame I don’t want to visit the Introversion forums(They are in my opinion filled with quite a few elitists who feel it’s their right to be condescending assholes to new members simply because they have been around for a long time and participated in beta’s and shit.)
Now, imagine if they made a program or something interlinking Uplink with this game, that’d be fucking sweet.
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This reminds me a little of a CBM64 game called They Stole A Million. You had various people performing different roles, like an electronics guy disabling alarms, a lock guy opening locked doors. You would plan and then execute a robbery against 5 locations ranging in difficulty.
The idea behind this, and from what they were showing off in that video, mean this is yet another game that I really want to watch closely.
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looks like a must have
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Gosh, I ache for this game. It would make for an awesome Inception game, or part of one.
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Fuck yes.
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Portal 2 was my #1 most wanted game, followed very closely by this. After this video, Subversion is threatening the #1 spot…
Portal 2 does have a concrete release date, though. Just saying.
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It has a Valve release date…
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It’s a concrete release in the same way as concrete shoes. It doesn’t matter what it’s attached to, it’s going to sink out of sight pretty quickly.
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That…. looks…. phenomenal!
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Yes. Yes it does.
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I get a sudden urge to play Cholo again.
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This looks very cool. In many ways a physical version of uplink.
And the fact it is all procedurally generated including all the realistic IT and security systems is very impressive.
Although it did seem a little easy. I think in real life if van parked right outside a bank and three guys with backpacks jumped out security might not like it. Once it turned into an armed robbery I would have expected someone to have hit an alarm somewhere, or a passerby on the street to notice.
Granted this is in development so hopefully they’ll tighten things up a bit and there will be lots and lots of interesting ways for plans to go horribly wrong.
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Keep in mind that this is supposed to be VERY early in the game, before you even have an organization going – you’ve just got a couple of guys-with-guns and a van. From the sounds of it, you build up your own espionage agency over the course of the game.
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Well done chaps. Now get it out.
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Will someone please feed that man
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So cant wait for this game.
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http://www.introversion.co.uk/blog/
lots of interesting stuff there about subversion development, mainly in the older posts.
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The indie scene has been very kind to us lately. SMB comes out today, and when I was just thinking about Subversion and Monaco, here this is! I’m stoked for this one. To celebrate how good it looks, I think I’ll go play some DEFCON and Multiwinia…
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My God… it’s full of stars…
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When they make the movie of Introversion’s rise, fall, rise again, and eventual creation of the Matrix rendered entirely in black/blue wireframe, i’m certain Chris Addison is a shoe-in for the Chris Delay lead role.
Introversion really are a fascinating company that produce some great pieces of work. Their battle with no longer being the fresh-faced indie-newkids (as documented in their blog) is really interesting, and shows how the game development world has changed since the old Uplink days.
Subversion looks like it’s shaping up to be another quality Introversion game – it wil probably be very thoughtful, innovative, geeky, and time consuming ;) I hope it piques the indie (and wider) gaming audience’s interest to a deeper degree their their previous game…
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Please, everyone, give generously. Just ten bucks could feed Chris Delay for a year.
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He is disturbingly thin it has to be said….
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Double post = post x 2
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Looks really cool, love the artstyle and the sneaky tech bits. Just wish there actually was a way to rob the bank without taking out the AKs :)
Definitely one of the games I’m most looking forward to!
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Oh man, this is looking incredible.
I love these guys.
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I was actually just thinking about how an in-depth robbery simulator would be awesome and here this comes!
Color me excited ! (neon-pink)
I will be purchasing this AS SOON as it’s available.
I agree with the difficulty thing, but I have confidence that will come with further dev time.
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This looks increasingly awesome.
I’m starting to wonder, how the procedurally generated Cityscape will play into this. Will Banks, Vaults and other points of interest be generated randomly making each robbery attempt a new challenge? How many players will be able to play together?
Also it would be cool if other players could play the bank employees and the police. Ah, I dunno, I’d play the game like it is in the video already. How much more awesome can it become, that’s the essential question here.
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This looks amazing, and is on my list with Witcher 2 and a few others :)
Funny, it puts me in mind of Max Headroom on the Spectrum :)
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Oh boy, I am looking forward to this one.
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Sadly, the moment my jaw hit the floor, I accidentally kicked it across the room. Just one of those days, I guess.
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WANT
“using their charm and their tech” … and their shooting holes in people who look at them funny.
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I’m almost aroused.
So old school in its complexity.
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Oh God, I so want this game.
To hear they’re still far from release it’s like having someone gently torturing you.
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Please to be having co-op. Co-op would make me very very very very happy. Thank you.
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If they like they can leave out the game altogether – just release the city generator and I’d be happy.
That said, the game does look pretty damn amazing…
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Loadsa wonga.
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I didn’t imagine there’d be armed bank robbery in this game; it looked like all abstract hacking. Considering the human interaction and fact involved, it’s quite a lot more ambitious than I’d thought. I wonder if they can pull off the research.
Since the graphics are intentionally simplistic and abstract, they can get away with a lot more complexity than most games can manage. No FMV cutscenes for dragging the guy into the bathroom. No voice actors. No complicated animations. It goes back to how great games used to be–like super-complex choose-your-own adventures, or spreadsheets. You can have hostage situations that are influenced by many factors without a million dollar budget, but there’s a research cost. The whole thing would be ruined for me if the police came in shooting rather than opening negotiations and preparing for a long standoff. And if a police negotiator did make contact, I would want them to launch a tactical assault only when real police would do so–when/if you start shooting hostages, for example.
Will they have burning bars and breaking through drywall to bypass security?
I heard about this guy, walked into
a federal bank with a portable
phone, handed the phone to the
teller, the guy on the other end of
the phone said: “We got this guy’s
little girl, and if you don’t give
him all your money, we’re gonna
kill ‘er.
Can they work that into the game?
There are just so many possibilities, and there’s so much documentation on what has and hasn’t worked, that a–I won’t even say realistic–a truthlike game would be extremely difficult, even with abstract graphics and gameplay.
The best game I can think of that’s anything like this is Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis, so they don’t have a long way to go to be the best–but it’s going to take a lot of work to make it anything but deeply flawed.
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The embedded video is not working anymore for me. Here’s a link to the original:
http://vimeo.com/17297917
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