Interviews

JA - Can you provide some background on the Perry Rhodan character and what inspired you to develop a game based on his adventures?

Braingame (Axel Ruske, Managing Director):

Perry Rhodan is a very well known sci-fi character in Germany. He started his first adventures back in 1961. Since then more than 3,000 novels have been published, including over 2,400 weekly serialized Perry Rhodan booklet novellas issued continuously, making Perry Rhodan the longest running “future history”.

Though Perry Rhodan is mostly a German phenomenon there have also been foreign editions of Perry Rhodan published in the USA, France, Japan, Brazil, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Hungary. 

The idea to develop a Perry Rhodan game evolved when I visited a German bookfair a few years ago. I was fascinated by the Perry Rhodan world presented at the stand of Pabel-Moewig, the licensor of Perry Rhodan. I am a former Perry Rhodan reader myself, and I quickly got into a conversation with the people from Pabel-Moewig and found out that the license for a PC game was still available.  It didn’t take a lot to convince the rest of the company that we would publish the best Perry Rhodan game ever.

JA - Does the average North American gamer need to know anything about Perry Rhodan to play the game?

Braingame:

No, it’s definitively not necessary to know about Perry Rhodan to play the game. Obviously, there are a lot of allusions and references related to the novel series, but without understanding them the “average” adventure gamer won´t miss anything. Our goal was to develop a game for both Perry Rhodan fans and adventure gamers who never heard of Perry Rhodan before. 

JA - As a point of reference, how would you compare Perry Rhodan to a character like Flash Gordon?

3d-io (Igor Posavec, Managing Director/Creative Art Director): 

The main thing in common for those two characters is their long history and installed fan base. But if you look closer they’re very different. While Flash Gordon is a classical action hero, a normal guy being confronted with dangerous situations and fighting against evil enemies, Perry Rhodan is a complex personality, more than 3000 years old, solving problems by using his head rather than his muscles. The Perryverse (as the world of Perry Rhodan is known) is a complex world, written about in more than 2000 books. Perry Rhodan could better be compared to Captain Kirk from Star Trek! The worlds, stories, and the fascination of endless space and countless alien races are very similar in the Perryverse and Star Trek. 

JA - The Immortals of Terra is a total departure from your previous games – Bioscopia & Chemicus – how difficult was it working within the restraints of a licensed character?

Braingame: 

It´s true, Perry Rhodan doesn’t seem to be a classical Braingame title. We are well known for our edutainment and learning titles and Perry Rhodan, as an adventure game, is a departure from that. But due to the fact that Perry Rhodan is a well known license in Germany we had to integrate some background information about the “Perryverse” into the gameplay. So it contains a kind of “infotainment” aspect as well– more so than most other adventure games do. 

We never had the feeling of being restricted in the game development by the fact that we were working on a licensed character. From the beginning we had a very close and friendly relationship to Pabel-Moewig, licensor of Perry Rhodan, and they gave us a lot of support. Of course we had to follow some rules, but we didn’t have to concentrate on a fixed storyline. We also worked together with some of the Perry Rhodan novel and dialogue writers so we could be sure that the story would be authentic. 

JA - What was your development time and process from beginning to end?

3d-io:

The development started back in November 2006. First of all, we had to create the concept art and the engine, of course. That took about two months. After that we started developing 3D environments and characters. There were some changes in the storyline during development process, so we had to change and redesign the different levels before getting the final result.  In January 2008, 14 months after the start of the project and after many rounds of testing, we were able to deliver the final product.

JA - The game’s graphics are stunning and have an almost movie-like quality to them.  Can you tell us a bit about the game engine you used?

3d-io:

We decided to use our own in-house developed engine “Elasticity” for the rendering of the game graphics content. Elasticity was built within the last 6 years in a tight collaboration between talented 3d and 2d artists and excellent programmers. The goal was to build an engine that achieves maximum visual impact. At the end we developed a light, fast, stable and very clean-output engine which was able to implement everything the artists wanted to show. On top of that, we added LUA Scripting language support, so almost every programmer was able to jump in and help during crunch time. On the other hand, knowing that the typical adventure player doesn’t always have the most sophisticated computer system, Elasticity was designed to support a wide range of older graphics cards, such as Gforce 3 und 4. 

JA - Does the game introduce any new characters, or are they all familiar faces from the series?

3d-io:

One of the most intriguing introductions in the game was that of the Illochim Race. The Illochim are one of the oldest and most dangerous aliens of all – in ancient times they were known to humans as angels. Those creatures were thought to be pure legend – until they were found at the end of the galaxy. 

All other characters are detailed reproductions of the characters you can find in the Perryverse. We have invested a lot of time and know-how to rebuild them with the utmost authenticity. On the other hand, a certain level of “face-lifting” was needed, to have a more modern look, compatible with today’s gaming expectations.  

JA - How important to you was it that the Perry Rhodan fan community approved of the game?

Braingame:

It was very important for us that the game was accepted by the Perry Rhodan community. We wanted to create an authentic Perry Rhodan game and therefore we needed feedback from Perry Rhodan insiders. We always had close contact with the community thanks to the great support of Pabel-Moewig. 

3d-io:

At the beginning I was quite unsure if such a huge and loyal community would be more a blessing or a curse to our project. Knowing that we would make some changes in the visual and story design, we were always on the edge of being accepted or completely refused as “incompatible to the Perryverse”. But in the end it turned out very positively. The first reviews and community feedback were great. I think we took on a certain amount of risk and won in the end.

JA - The game has been out in Europe for a few months now, how have the early reviews been?

3d-io:

We are proud to announce that we have one of the best review collections for adventure games of all time! Being placed between 80% and 85% by most of the online and print previews considering the very hard competition in the market is fantastic. The mix of superb visual art, videos, great voices and orchestra music has definitely fascinated most reviewers. Moreover, the game is extremely stable, with no bugs that can cause frustrations for gamers. We are very pleased with the result! 

JA - Do you consider the game to be more character driven or puzzle driven?

3d-io:

This game has a kind of new approach: while balancing the game to be accepted by both Perry Rhodan fans and normal gamers, we introduced a well known and recently very popular cinematic  storytelling approach. This means we actually have a kind of Cine-Game: The game never gets boring due to the huge amount of in-game and rendered cinematic scenes. We tried to find a mixture between classical puzzle driven adventures and modern action games.

JA - What types of puzzles should we expect in the game?

3d-io:

There a three main types of puzzles in the game. First of all, as in nearly every adventure game, the player has to find and collect items which have to be combined and used to solve tasks. The game also contains conversation-based riddles where the player must use his investigative skills to obtain certain information. The third type of puzzles are logical and combinatory ones.

JA - Are there plans to continue Perry’s adventures in future PC games?

Braingame:

There are no concrete plans for a second PC game at this time. As the release was only a few weeks ago we want to first have a look at the reviews and sales numbers before we make a final decision. 

JA - Is it possible that this game could bring Perry Rhodan the recognition in North America that has eluded him for so many years?

Braingame:

That would be great. Perry Rhodan will always be more of a German phenomenon due to its origin and the thousands of novels and booklet novellas which have been published there. If the first reviews in North America are good and the game gets good ratings, that might not only promote the game but even increase the interest in Perry Rhodan himself.

JA – Thanks guys!  We appreciate your time and hope to be talking to you soon about a sequel.

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