Flashback | Code Like It's 198x

Flashback was meant to be The Godfather. In 1991 US Gold’s chief executive, Geoff Brown, had bought the licence and asked Delphine Software in Paris to make the game. Paul Cuisset, who had just finished Cruise for a Corpse, did not want another enclosed, old-fashioned setting, so he suggested moving the plot into the future. Brown agreed, and by the time the first level reached him eight months later Michael Corleone had become Conrad B. Hart, an agent who wakes in a jungle on Saturn’s moon Titan with his memory wiped. Nobody at US Gold asked for the Mafia back. Brown suggested the title instead, Flashback: The Quest for Identity.

What the players of 1993 noticed first was the movement. Conrad runs, jumps, hangs from ledges, rolls and draws his pistol in animation traced from film of a real person, and The One called the game “the closest we’ve come yet to actually playing the movie”.

Fast facts

Developer: Delphine Software, Paris.
Designer: Paul Cuisset, who also wrote the story; programmers included Cuisset, Philippe Chastel and Frédéric Savoir.
Artists: Denis Mercier, Christian Robert and Thierry Perreau, later joined by Thierry Levastre, Fabrice Visserot and Patrick Daher.
Publisher: US Gold.
First release: Amiga, in France, late 1992. Amiga, Mega Drive and PC versions followed in Britain and America in 1993.
Later versions: Super Nintendo, Acorn Archimedes, Mega-CD, PC CD-ROM, CD-i, 3DO, Jaguar and Macintosh; many of them converted by Tiertex.

From The Godfather to Titan

Edge’s account of the game’s making, published in 2006, tells how far the project drifted from its licence. Cuisset and Chastel built a new system that let them try ideas and play them straight away, and Delphine decided early to release the game on the Mega Drive as well as the Amiga, a new market for a company that had only made computer games. Cuisset “had been promised that the console market could bring millions of sales”. When Brown played the first level, the game “had next to nothing to do with the licence”, but he liked it and told the team to carry on.

The finished story borrows openly from the cinema. The One‘s David Upchurch, visiting Delphine in September 1992, listed They Live, Total Recall, Alien and Terminator 2 among its influences. Conrad has discovered, with a pair of glasses that measure molecular density, that some of the people running Earth are shape-shifting aliens, the Morphs. They capture him and wipe his memory; he escapes on a stolen hoverbike, is shot down over Titan, and finds a holocube recording of himself telling him what to do next. From there the game crosses a jungle, the city of New Washington, a televised death-match in the Death Tower, Earth and finally the Morphs’ own planet, across seven levels.

Animation from traced video

The team made Conrad move the way Jordan Mechner had made the prince move in Prince of Persia, a game Edge says strongly influenced Cuisset. They filmed one of their number in front of a white wall, ran the footage frame by frame on a television, traced the figure onto a transparency taped to the screen, then taped the transparency to a computer monitor and traced it again in Deluxe Paint. Chastel remembered 1,500 frames, 800 of them for Conrad; Cuisset remembered “crates of transparencies”. The rotoscoping entry tells the story in more detail, including the visit from Mechner that kept the tired artists going.

In 1992 Cuisset was less forthcoming. The characters, he told The One, “were animated using Rotoscoping, our Top Secret programming methods and our amazingly talented artists!” He did explain how the frames fitted in memory: all the bitmapped graphics were stored compressed, and “all the sprites use a unique high-speed decompression routine to get them from memory and onto the screen as quickly as possible”. The cut-scenes between the action were drawn in polygons, like those of Another World, because polygon animation took far less memory than bitmaps; the Amiga version, he said, had “at least fifty such sequences”, more than a cartridge could hold. Cuisset added that the graphics system was not Delphine’s Cinématique engine from Future Wars but “a new system that’s been specially designed for Flashback which is much more orientated towards doing animation.”

Delphine and US Gold made the frame rate the selling point. Amiga Format reported Delphine’s claim of “a main character animated at a rate of 24 frames per second”, and a US Gold advertisement in Sega Visions in April 1993 called Flashback “the first game ever to pump awesome high-octane CD ROM performance from a cartridge”.

What it was like to play

Flashback looks like a platform game and plays more slowly and deliberately. Every move takes the time its animation takes, so the player plans a route screen by screen: hang from a ledge to see what is below, roll past a droid, draw the gun before landing, not after. Edge noted that the delay between command and movement suited Cuisset, who wanted “a slower, deeper game”. Conrad carries a pistol with unlimited ammunition and a shield that each hit wears down. Between fights he talks to people, picks up and uses objects, earns credits for the fare home, and carries a teleporter he can throw ahead of himself.

It was much longer than Another World. A US Gold tester told The One in 1992 that he had finished Another World in five hours but had played Flashback for nearly fifty without reaching the halfway point, and Delphine claimed the game was six times the size.

Versions

Version	When	Notes
Amiga	France, late 1992; Britain, spring 1993	Four disks, needs 1 MB. Amiga Format reviewed the French version in April 1993.
Mega Drive / Genesis	Early 1993	Developed alongside the Amiga version. Sega Visions previewed it in February 1993 and carried US Gold’s advert in April.
PC (DOS)	1993	Released in North America under Strategic Simulations’ name; supports Sound Blaster, AdLib and Roland cards.
Super Nintendo	Early 1994 in Britain	Converted by Tiertex. Nintendo Magazine System reported the work in July 1993.
Acorn Archimedes	By 1995	Advertised at £27.99.
CD-ROM and Jaguar versions	1994–1995	Tiertex listed Mega-CD, PC CD-ROM, CD-i, 3DO and Jaguar conversions.

Most versions played the same game. 3DO Magazine noted that the 3DO version “adds no new levels or radically reworked graphics”, and ST Format, reviewing an early Jaguar version in June 1994, found its graphics smaller than on other machines but the colours richer and the animation more fluid; “The Jaguar game makes this SNES version look ill.” The history of US Gold also lists FM Towns and PC-98 versions for Japanese computers. A version for the iPhone followed in 2009.

Reception

The British Amiga press gave it its highest praise. Simon Byron in The One wrote in March 1993: “Even though it’s only March and there’s over two-thirds of the year left, I can honestly state that Flashback is the game of the year.” Amiga Format gave it 93 per cent the following month and called it “one of the slickest, best-looking, most wonderful-sounding, atmosphere-packed, futuristic arcade adventures ever seen”, adding that it fitted on four disks “with hardly any swapping at all”. Amiga Power chose it among its games of 1993.

The console and PC reviews agreed. SNES Force found the Super Nintendo conversion kept everything that had “blown away” its reviewer on the Amiga, and Computer Gaming World praised the “impressive animation derived from 24 frames-per-second rotoscoping — a truly uncanny thing to watch!” In August 1993 Computer and Video Games’ charts had the Mega Drive version at number two and the Amiga version at number five, and The One had it third in the Amiga full-price chart.

No reliable sales figure was published at the time. The history of US Gold says only that Flashback on the Genesis was “a huge hit” in America in 1993. France’s Centre national du cinéma called it the best-selling French video game in the world in 2021, without giving a number.

Later history

Delphine followed it in 1995 with Fade to Black, a 3D sequel for the PC and PlayStation that brought Conrad back but was, in Retro Gamer’s view, “nowhere near as well received”. By then Éric Chahi had left Delphine and taken key members of the Flashback team, among them the programmer Frédéric Savoir, to form Amazing Studio.

Cuisset returned to the game twice. In 2013 his studio VectorCell, working with members of the original team, remade Flashback for Ubisoft on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, with new graphics and audio; Edge felt it lacked “the 1992 game’s rotoscoped charm”, and reviews were mixed. In 2018 Microids published Flashback 25th Anniversary, the original game with a choice between the 1993 version and a modern mode with graphic filters, remastered sound and a rewind feature, first on the Nintendo Switch in June 2018 and then on other machines.

A full sequel, Flashback 2, followed on 16 November 2023 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, developed by Microids’ studios in Lyon and Paris with Cuisset leading the design. Critics were unkind: Metacritic’s averages sat in the mid-thirties out of a hundred, with reviewers citing bugs and flat, linear design.

Sources

“The making of Flashback”, Edge issue 163, June 2006: The Godfather commission, Geoff Brown and Paul de Senneville, the move to the future, Chastel, the Mega Drive decision, the art team and later artists, the transparency method, the 1,500 frames, Mechner’s visit, the first level after eight months, the title, the slower, deeper game.
David Upchurch, “Yet Another…”, The One issue 48, September 1992, pp. 30–32: Flashback work in progress (the film influences, Cuisset as lead programmer, the five-hour tester, compressed sprites, polygon cut-scenes, “at least fifty” sequences on the Amiga, the new animation system).
Simon Byron, Flashback review, The One issue 54, March 1993, pp. 68–71 (“closest we’ve come yet to actually playing the movie”; “the game of the year”; the shield; six times the size of Another World).
The One issue 59, August 1993, p. 17: Amiga full-price top ten.
Amiga Format issue 44, March 1993, p. 17: news (24 frames a second, six times larger, on the shelves in France). Issue 45, April 1993, pp. 54–55: Maff Evans’s review of the French version (seven levels, credits, four disks, 1 MB). Issue 46, May 1993, p. 37: the 93 per cent score.
Amiga Joker, January 1993, p. 12: Amiga review.
The Games Machine (Italy), January 1993, pp. 123–124: Amiga review.
Sega Visions, February 1993: preview. April 1993, p. 11: US Gold advertisement (“the first game ever to pump awesome high-octane CD ROM performance from a cartridge”; the six settings).
Computer and Video Games issue 141, August 1993, p. 8: charts.
Dave Pyron, “Flash Forward to Flashback”, Computer Gaming World issue 111, October 1993, pp. 60–62: the PC version as Strategic Simulations’ release, the sound cards, the rotoscoping quote.
Nintendo Magazine System issue 10, July 1993: the Super Nintendo version being programmed by Tiertex for US Gold.
SNES Force issue 8, January 1994, p. 51: Super Nintendo review.
Super Play issue 28, February 1995: advertisement for the Acorn Archimedes version.
ST Format issue 59, June 1994, p. 61: Jaguar version.
3DO Magazine issue 5, August 1995: 3DO version.
Edge issue 20, May 1995: Frédéric Savoir as “lead coder on the original version of Flashback”; Chahi taking key members of the Flashback team to set up Amazing Studio.
Amiga Power issue 32, December 1993: games of the year.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 92, 95, 106, 130: Geoff Brown on naming the game; the list of later versions and the iPhone version; the Genesis version “a huge hit” in 1993; Tiertex’s conversions.
Dan Curley, “The Classic Game: Flashback”, Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, pp. 36–39: the holocube, the teleporter, Fade to Black.
Edge issue 254, June 2013, p. 73: the VectorCell remake for Ubisoft.
Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013, pp. 6–7: the remake by Cuisset’s studio and the original team.
Metacritic, “Flashback” (2013) and “Flashback 2” (web, secondary): release dates, developers and average scores. https://www.metacritic.com/game/flashback/ https://www.metacritic.com/game/flashback-2/
“Amazon Germany Lists Flashback: 25th Anniversary Edition For June Switch Release”, Nintendo Life, March 2018 (web, secondary): the 7 June 2018 Switch release, Microids and Cuisset, the modern mode. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/03/amazon_germany_lists_flashback_25th_anniversary_edition_for_june_switch_release
Microids, “Flashback” and “Go behind the scenes of Flashback 2” (web, secondary): the 25th Anniversary platforms; Flashback 2’s studios, Cuisset’s role and the 16 November 2023 release. https://www.microids.com/game-flashback-us/ https://www.microids.com/go-behind-the-scenes-of-flashback-2-in-the-latest-developer-diary/
Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, “« Flashback », retour sur un jeu vidéo culte”, 10 June 2021 (web, secondary): “jeu français le plus vendu au monde”. https://www.cnc.fr/jeu-video/actualites/flashback-retour-sur-un-jeu-video-culte_932532