Another World | Code Like It's 198x

A young physicist drives his Ferrari to the laboratory on a stormy night, starts an experiment, opens a can of drink, and is blown by a lightning strike into a lake on another planet. From that moment nobody in Another World says a word the player can understand. There is no score, no energy bar and no text. Everything the player learns about Lester Knight Chaykin’s predicament comes from what they see: a beast on a distant ridge, a cage swinging over a guard, an alien prisoner who becomes a friend.

Éric Chahi made it almost alone, over two years, on an Amiga 500. He drew the whole game in flat-filled polygons instead of bitmaps, traced its movements from video, and ran it on a small scripting language of his own. That design is why it looked like nothing else in 1991, why its opening film fitted in under 100K, and why the same game has been moved from machine to machine for over thirty years.

Fast facts

Designer: Éric Chahi, with music by Jean-François Freitas.
Publisher: Delphine Software; US Gold in Britain; Interplay in North America, as Out of This World.
Released: Amiga, November 1991; Atari ST and PC versions followed in 1992.
Price: £27.99 in Britain; $59.95 in America.
Graphics: flat polygons throughout, with rotoscoped animation.
Engine: a bytecode interpreter with 64 execution channels and 256 variables.
Later versions: Super Nintendo (1992), Mega Drive (1993), 3DO (1994), a Windows re-release (2006) and a 20th Anniversary Edition (2011 onwards).

A game built from Dragon’s Lair

Chahi had been a Delphine graphic artist. ACE called him Future Wars’ co-designer; The One called him its artist. He could have stayed in that job. What changed his mind, he writes, came in August 1989, as Paul Cuisset was finishing Future Wars: the Amiga version of Dragon’s Lair came out, “a game as famous for its spectacular pictures as for its non-interactivity”. Chahi wanted pictures like that in a game the player controlled, and thought about its mechanics as something “between ‘Karateka’ and ‘Impossible Mission’”.

He worked on an Amiga 500 with 1MB of memory and a 20MB hard disk. The game’s editors were written in GFA Basic, which Chahi called “a master work”, and the engine and the polygon-drawing routines in 68000 assembly language with the Devpac assembler. By his account to the Game Developers Conference in 2011, the engine was finished in December 1989. At the beginning of 1990 the introduction was complete and he was building the first level, with, he writes, “no clue about the following events”. The story grew as he went. After 17 months, in December 1990, about a third of the game was done.

Polygons instead of pictures

Every image in Another World, the characters included, is a set of flat polygons filled with solid colour. That was the reason for the choice: a polygon is a handful of corner points, where a bitmap is every pixel. The One reported in October 1991 that the introduction, several minutes long, took 70K of animation data and 15K of program, 95K in all, where the same film in “traditional bitmapped artwork would take up an entire disk!” Delphine had used the technique on a smaller scale in Cruise for a Corpse for zooms and scaling. In Another World it let Chahi cut between shots as a film director would: close-ups, panoramas, and a view that switches to show a creature leaping at the player with its claws out.

The movement came from real movement. Chahi describes filming with a camcorder, a genlock and a video recorder that had a digital frame memory, then copying each video frame by hand in polygons in his editor. He used this rotoscoping for “the ones that were linked to realism”: the walk, the run, the feet in the introduction, and the Ferrari’s skid, which he filmed with a scale model. Nintendo Power told its readers in 1992 that “Eric had himself photographed” walking, running, jumping and kneeling, and that the images were traced to make Lester. See rotoscoping for the technique.

The engine underneath

The game program does not contain the game. Chahi wrote what he called “a mini-language structured in 64 independent execution channels and 256 variables”, with an instruction set of “around only thirty ‘words’”. Each channel runs its own script, so a guard, a falling rock and Lester can all move at once. Chahi told the 2011 conference that a BREAK instruction pausing a script until the next frame turned the interpreted code into an animation sequencer. He kept track of the 256 variables on paper.

Fabien Sanglard, who studied a reverse-engineered version of the PC executable in 2011, found that the program itself is only about 20K: a virtual machine that reads the game’s bytecode, polygon data and sound from separate files. Porting the game meant writing a new interpreter; “the bytecode remained the same!” The original source code has never been published. Chahi has published his own description of the editors, the scripting language and its instructions on the game’s official site, and Sanglard’s article shows screenshots of the script editor.

Reviews

US Gold sold Another World in Britain. Amiga Power ran a competition in November 1991 to celebrate its release, with a trip to EuroDisney as the prize, and Amiga Action put a playable demo on its December cover disk.

The One’s Paul Presley opened his review in January 1992 with “Another World is very… blue. Very, very blue.” He thought it “very, very good”, and liked the way the controls adapted to the situation: pulling down usually made Lester duck, but with his gun on the floor and lasers flying, he rolled. He missed text. The joystick-only design felt “a little cold and unwelcoming” at times. Presley compared it to Dragon’s Lair, “but with one major advantage: you constantly have full control over the central character.”

Trenton Webb in Amiga Format gave it 82% in February 1992. He admired Lester, who “moves with the assurance and style of Prince of Persia”, the background characters who “turn and look when a fight breaks out”, and the sound, from the lion’s roar to the aliens’ “Blade Runneresque ‘city speak’”. He was angry about the deaths: “There are instances, where only dying reveals a fatal trap. There’s no clue, no chance to escape, just certain doom.” His summary: “Occasionally has Space Ace gameplay tendencies. One wrong move and you’re dead. One right move and you’re still dead!”

The other complaint was length. When The One visited Delphine in 1992 to see Flashback, a US Gold tester said he had finished Another World in five hours, and Paul Cuisset promised that Flashback would take “considerably longer”. Chahi later gave his own explanation for the ending, in which Lester is barely alive: “at the end of the development I was exhausted and this is the reason that Lester was almost dying in the end.”

Out of This World

Interplay published the game in North America as Out of This World, for the PC and Amiga at $59.95. Its advertisement promised “real-time, rotoscoped animation in a fluid system of cinematic zooms, pans, close-ups, and scaling”. Previewing it for .info in February 1992, the reviewer wrote that “Polygon graphic games have been around for a long time, but this is the first significant evolutionary step I’ve seen in them since the technology was developed for flight simulators”, and that the polygon look “comes across more as a graphic style than as a limitation”.

According to Chahi’s account at GDC, Interplay’s testers wanted a longer game, and Interplay wanted to change the introduction’s music. Chahi said he made an “infinite fax”, a loop of paper fed through the fax machine with one message, “Keep the original intro music”. It did not work, he said; what kept the music was Delphine telling Interplay that legally it could not be changed.

Ports

Version	Year	Notes
Amiga	1991	The original. Chahi thinks it has the best sound.
Atari ST	1992	Chahi: identical to the Amiga, with less sharp colours and rougher sound. Reviewed by ST Format in April 1992.
PC (DOS)	1992	Ported by Daniel Morais, with an extra level before the arena.
Super Nintendo	1992	Interplay. Rated in Nintendo Power in October 1992.
Mega Drive	1993	Virgin, on an 8-megabit cartridge.
Macintosh	—	As the PC version, at a higher resolution.
3DO	1994	Interplay, with new, detailed bitmap backgrounds.
Mega-CD	—	With the sequel Heart of the Alien and new CD music.

For the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive, Chahi writes, a guard was added in the prison at the foot of the lift and lethal steam jets in the ventilation maze. He also writes that Nintendo of America objected to the nudity and blood. Germany’s Video Games found the Mega Drive version, in Virgin’s 8-megabit cartridge, almost pixel-for-pixel the same as the PC and Super Nintendo versions, with weaker music but easier control than the Super Nintendo’s.

Edge reviewed the 3DO version in August 1994 and gave it six out of ten. “Aesthetically, this is the best version yet”, with superb draughtsmanship and gorgeous backgrounds, but “like every other version, it’s over too soon”, and Interplay had missed the chance to add anything new.

Later history

Chahi and Frédéric Savoir signed with Virgin in 1992 to publish their next polygon adventure, Heart of Darkness. It took six years. Computer Gaming World, reviewing it in November 1998, noted that it had been “announced in 1992” and headlined it “Like Out of This World, Only Better”. By then Interplay was selling Out of This World for about $10 in its Signature Series.

Chahi writes that he later bought the publishing rights back from Delphine. A re-release for Windows followed in 2006. For the game’s 20th anniversary, announced at his GDC talk in 2011, DotEmu remade the graphics in high definition with a switch back to the originals, added difficulty settings including a “Hardcore” mode, and remixed the sound. It came to iOS on 22 September 2011 and to Steam on 4 April 2013, with a development diary, a making-of video and a technical handbook, and it has since reached Android, consoles and handhelds. Chahi’s later games include From Dust and the virtual-reality Paper Beast (2020).

Another World‘s influence is easiest to see in games whose makers name it. The developers of Inmost told Wireframe in 2019 that “Another World and Flashback were my main sources of inspiration for mechanics of movement and characters’ animations”, and Wireframe’s reviewer found the “spirit of Another World” in Olija in 2021.

Sources

The One issue 37, October 1991, p. 10: preview (Chahi as Future Wars artist; the polygon system, Cruise for a Corpse; 70K plus 15K for the introduction; cinematic effects; US Gold).
ACE issue 50, November 1991: preview (Chahi as Future Wars’ co-designer; two years’ work).
Amiga Power issue 7, November 1991: US Gold competition for the game’s release.
Amiga Action issue 27, December 1991: cover-disk demo.
The One issue 40, January 1992, pp. 48–50: review by Paul Presley.
Amiga Format issue 31, February 1992, pp. 62–64: review by Trenton Webb, 82%, US Gold, £27.99; US Gold advertisement, p. 116 (“2 years development”).
.info issue 47, February 1992: Out of This World preview, and Interplay’s advertisement ($59.95, MS-DOS and Amiga).
Nintendo Power issue 38, July 1992, p. 76: Chahi photographed for Lester’s movements. Issue 41, October 1992, p. 92: Super Nintendo Out of This World.
The One issue 48, September 1992, pp. 30–32: Flashback work in progress (the five-hour tester, Cuisset’s comparison). Issue 49, October 1992, p. 16: Chahi and Savoir sign with Virgin for Heart of Darkness.
ST Format issue 33, April 1992, p. 90: Atari ST review.
Video Games (Germany), April 1993: Mega Drive review (Virgin, 8-megabit cartridge).
Edge issue 11, August 1994, p. 66: 3DO review, six out of ten.
Computer Gaming World issue 172, November 1998: Heart of Darkness review by Thierry Nguyen (announced in 1992; the Signature Series).
Éric Chahi, Another World official site, pages “Genesis”, “Making of”, “Versions” and “Re-release” (web, secondary): Dragon’s Lair, Karateka and Impossible Mission; the Amiga 500, GFA Basic and Devpac; the scripting language; rotoscoping; progress at the start of 1990; the ports and their differences; Nintendo of America; buying back the rights; the platforms since 2006. https://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/page_genese.htm, https://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/page_realisation.htm, https://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/page_versions.htm and https://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/page_reedition.htm
Christian Nutt, “GDC 2011: Eric Chahi’s Retro Postmortem: Another World”, Gamasutra, March 2011 (web, secondary): the development timeline, the BREAK instruction, the variables on paper, Interplay’s testing and the fax, Chahi’s exhaustion. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/console/gdc-2011-eric-chahi-s-retro-postmortem-i-another-world-i-
Fabien Sanglard, “Another World Code Review”, 2011 (web, secondary): the 20K virtual machine, unchanged bytecode across ports, the unreleased source, the script editor. https://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/
Black Screen Records, Another World soundtrack release (web, secondary): music by Jean-François Freitas. https://blackscreenrecords.com/products/another-world-cd
Destructoid, “Review: Another World – 20th Anniversary (iOS)”, 27 September 2011 (web, secondary): iOS release on 22 September 2011, DotEmu and BulkyPix, graphics switch, difficulty modes. https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/review-another-world-20th-anniversary-ios/
Steam store page, Another World – 20th Anniversary Edition (web, secondary): 4 April 2013 release, the remixed sound and bonus material. https://store.steampowered.com/app/233550/Another_World__20th_Anniversary_Edition/
Wireframe issue 19, July 2019: Inmost interview. Issue 39, May 2020: Paper Beast review (Chahi’s earlier From Dust). Issue 48, February 2021: Olija review.