Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[With Good Old Games' launch meaning that Sacrifice is once again available to buy, I thought I'd republish this old piece on RPS. A version of it originally appeared in PC Gamer as part of their Long Play series, but it's lived at my blog for a couple of years too. This version has a few tweaks to make more time-appropriate.]

Sacrifice makes me sad.

It’s not that it didn’t get a sequel. It’s not that it didn’t sell at all. It’s not that despite its critical appeal, it’s barely referenced today despite having innovated a number of mechanics and technologies. It’s not that now, years later, Shiny are a laughing stock among gamers’ for the various Matrix misadventures when once they were this good. Hell – it’s not even that due to gamers’ goldfish memories that Shiny’s entire history has been tarnished, with them being Stalinistically revised to always being hopeless.

Sacrifice makes me sad for even bigger reasons.
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We briefly mentioned Good Old Games yesterday, but if you’ve not heard of it then… well, suffice to say, if you’re the kind of fellow who reads this site regularly, then GoG’s mooted catalogue of classic game downloads is going to make you a very excited wee PCophile.

The retrocentric digi-store, offering DRM-free, cheapie downloads of the likes of Fallout, Sacrifice and Operation Flashpoint, isn’t starting up until September, but we thought we’d better chuck a few questions about the site’s origins and intentions at the folks behind it – CD Projekt, who you’re probably most familiar with for last year’s divisive RPG The Witcher. Now, they’re potential saviours of olden games…
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[Another of my Making Of's from the vault. I was pleased that I got a chance to do this too - it's much easier to get a developer to talk about their previous game when it's one in a series which they've making a sequel to. It just ties into the whole PR cycle. Trying to get an interview just about something outside of that is a little trickier, and Eric Flannum was enormously gracious with his time. This is a slightly expanded version from PC Format's original, with some extra material. I replayed it last year actually, and lobbed my piece on Sacrifice's merits over on my blog a while back. If you like this, you may like that too.]

Sacrifice is one of the most distant landmarks in the PC gaming atlas, in an area marked “Here Be Dragons”. While spectacular, few people went there, and those who did came back reciting fantastical tales of strange vistas, genre-blending RTS/Action mechanics and a frankly wicked sense of humour. To game historians looking back from the far future, it’s going to prove as mystifying as Stonehenge is to archaeologists. How on earth did they build this?

Well, like everything, it started with an idea. “The inspiration was originally from our lead programmer, Martin Brownlow,” Eric Flannum, now at Arenanet tells, us, “He got the opportunity to start a team at Shiny, and basically able to make any game he wanted to. He’d also had the idea for the Sacrifice terrain engine”. The game he wanted was, essentially, a radical update of ancient Julian-Gollop spectrum classic Chaos, but in 3D.

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