Éric Chahi’s first published game had no box. A friend of his parents told the sixteen-year-old to take his Oric tape to a publisher, the publisher offered him money or hardware, and he chose a printer and a joypad. “I did not even get a copy of the game when it was published,” he told Retro Gamer. Years later he found it as a prize on a fairground stall. Eight years after that tape he released Another World, a science-fiction film you could play, which he had designed, programmed, animated and drawn almost entirely by himself on an Amiga 500. He then took six years over its successor, stepped away from games to paint, take photographs and study volcanoes, and came back with a god game about lava.
Fast facts
- Born: 1967, in France.
- First games: Frog and Carnaval for the Oric-1 (1983); Doggy and Le Pacte for Loriciels.
- Artist: Voyage au centre de la Terre and Jeanne d’Arc for Chip; Future Wars for Delphine Software.
- Known for: Another World (1991), Out of This World in North America.
- Studios: co-founder of Amazing Studio (Heart of Darkness, 1998); founder of Pixel Reef in Montpellier (Paper Beast, 2020).
- With Ubisoft: creative designer of From Dust (2011).
Oric and Amstrad
Chahi first programmed at school, on a ZX81, in lunchtime lessons run by a maths teacher. In the summer of 1983, at sixteen, he spent his savings on an Oric-1. His first program, written in BASIC in two weeks, was Frog: a frog on the screen catches flies with its tongue and explodes if it swallows a wasp. His second, Carnaval, was, in his words, “a clone of another game called Carnival”, and it was this tape he took to the importer of the Oric.
Loriciels, then the biggest games publisher in France, turned down his next idea, an Egyptian adventure called Le Sceptre d’Anubis, because it had just released a better one of its own, L’Aigle d’Or. Another publisher, Micro Programmes 5, took it instead. Loriciels did take Doggy, which he had written in 6502 assembly language, with horizontal scrolling and a mix of redefined characters and bitmap graphics. For the Amstrad CPC he wrote the 1985 version of Infernal Runner, a game first designed for the Commodore 64 by Michel Koell and Yves Korta.
His last original game of the 1980s was Le Pacte (1986), a Loriciels adventure in which the player investigates a haunted house. He said the film The Amityville Horror inspired it, and it was “the first time I tried to produce a mood in the game”. The player carried a camera, photographed a spirit and checked the picture to see whether it was a demon. While making it, at eighteen, he left his studies to work on games full time. “It disturbed my parents because I stopped before I went to university,” he said.
After Le Pacte he spent a year trying to build a “game generator”, gave it up, and “started to lose confidence. I felt uncomfortable with my ability to create a game alone.”
The artist years
He moved to graphics. For the young company Chip he drew Voyage au centre de la Terre and Jeanne d’Arc, his move to 16-bit machines, and left after about a year because, he said, Chip “was having financial difficulties and they were not paying people”. He had discovered the Amiga 500 and “enjoyed creating art more than I did programming”.
In 1989 he went freelance as graphic artist and animator on Paul Cuisset’s Future Wars, the adventure that introduced Delphine’s Cinématique system. Cuisset was unsure about him at first, and Chahi spent two or three weeks on pictures and a small animation of a character walking towards a ship before Cuisset agreed to work with him.
Another World
Watching Cuisset finish Future Wars in August 1989, Chahi became frustrated at “not being able to create my own games, as I used to”. The Amiga version of Dragon’s Lair had just come out, and he wanted its pictures in a game the player controlled. What followed took two years. He wrote the polygon engine in 68000 assembly language and the editors in GFA Basic, traced his own movements from video to animate the hero, Lester, and painted the box art. Only the music, by his friend Jean-François Freitas, came from someone else. Polygons, he said, “allowed me to create large graphics in a small amount of memory”, at around 20 frames a second. Lester was modelled on himself, which he found strange, “so I changed the hair to red”.
Delphine published the game in November 1991. The Another World entry tells its story in full, from the scripting language underneath to its reviews and ports, and the rotoscoping entry explains how the animation was made. Retro Gamer put its sales at a million copies. Chahi found success unsettling: “People want to meet you and some people want to create with you. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I had a lot of pressure to create something else.”
Heart of Darkness
That something else was Heart of Darkness. In 1992 Chahi and Frédéric Savoir, who had been the lead programmer of Delphine’s Flashback, set up Amazing Studio in Paris and signed with Virgin. Edge found a twelve-strong team there in 1995, three years in and still secretive, making a platform adventure in which a boy called Andy goes into a world of shadows to rescue his dog, Whisky.
It took six years. Virgin gave up on it after repeated delays, and Infogrames took it on for Europe, moving it from the Sega Saturn to the PC and PlayStation; Interplay published it in America. Chahi later explained that the story, characters and cinematic scenes were almost done by 1995, but the game itself was not: coding it all in C proved slow, and it came together only after the team wrote a scripting language “in the same way as in Another World”, after which they “finalised the game in about a year”.
The reviews split. Computer Gaming World headlined its November 1998 review “Like Out of This World, Only Better”, praising the puzzles, backgrounds and animation but finding it far too short. Edge gave the PlayStation version four out of ten: beautiful, but “not very good”, with infinite lives that reduced it to “a trivial process of trial and error”. His one regret, Chahi said later, was the length of the development, “which could have been shorter by taking the right decisions sooner”.
Volcanoes
After Heart of Darkness Chahi left games for several years to concentrate on photography and painting. He travelled, and he studied volcanoes. Edge later described “years of research into volcanology” and “numerous trips to active sites”. In 2004, he said, “the desire to create a game came back”. In 2005 he worked with Magic Productions on a mobile phone version of Another World, and in 2006 he took an idea to Ubisoft.
From Dust
The idea became From Dust, announced by Ubisoft at E3 in 2010 with Chahi as creative designer and developed at Ubisoft Montpellier. It is a god game in which the player does not command a tribe but moves the ground under it, picking up sand, water and lava and setting them down to save the tribe from tsunamis, floods and eruptions. It came out on the Xbox 360 in July 2011, with PC and PlayStation 3 versions to follow. Edge gave it nine out of ten, calling it “magnificent because it’s designed with a playful deity in mind”. Chahi told Retro Gamer that working with a large team and publisher meant convincing people “all the time”, and that where Another World was “very scripted”, From Dust taught him “to create a game with emergence in the game system”.
Pixel Reef and Paper Beast
Chahi later founded Pixel Reef, an independent studio in Montpellier, which made itself known publicly in 2019. Its first game, Paper Beast (2020), is a virtual-reality puzzle adventure set inside a simulation, where creatures built like folded paper roam deserts and caves and the player can play with sand, water and heat as in From Dust. Wireframe gave the PlayStation VR version 80% and called it “a truly unique experience and one of the best PSVR exclusives”. Versions for PC headsets and a non-VR Folded Edition followed later in 2020.
Influence
Retro Gamer reported that Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear, named Another World as one of the five games that most influenced him. The developers of Inmost told Wireframe in 2019 that Another World and Flashback were their “main sources of inspiration” for movement and animation. Delphine’s own staff were careful to separate Chahi’s game from theirs: “Another World was developed by Eric Chahi independently from Delphine,” Philippe Chastel told Edge in 1997.
Chahi has said he will not make a sequel or remake. “Another World came out 20 years ago and I want to preserve it as it is,” he told Retro Gamer. He did approve other people’s work on it: a fan-made Atari Jaguar version, which he was pleased to see finished, and the 20th Anniversary Edition published from 2011, described in the Another World entry. The game’s original source code has not been published.
Sources
- “In the chair with… Eric Chahi”, Retro Gamer, reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection vol. 7 (Imagine Publishing, 2013), pp. 186–191: his timeline (Frog and Carnaval 1983, Le Sceptre d’Anubis and Doggy 1984, Infernal Runner 1985, Le Pacte 1986, Journey to the Center of the Earth 1988, Joan of Arc 1989); the Oric in 1983, the printer and joypad, the fairground stall; Loriciels, L’Aigle d’Or and Micro Programmes 5; Doggy in 6502 assembly; Le Pacte, Amityville and the camera; leaving his studies at 18; the game generator and losing confidence; Chip; the Amiga 500; meeting Cuisset; polygons, 20 frames a second and the red hair; sales of one million; the pressure after success; Heart of Darkness’s development and his regret; photography and painting; 2004, the mobile version, Ubisoft in 2006; working on From Dust; no sequel; the Jaguar version; Kojima.
- Retro Gamer issue 24, 2006, pp. 34–37: “The making of Another World” (the Oric and Amstrad games, Chip, lead artist on Future Wars, Freitas’s music, the box art; Infernal Runner on the Amstrad CPC, 1985).
- Retro Gamer issue 29, 2006, p. 45: Loriciels as the leading Oric publisher and Doggy.
- Éric Chahi, Another World official site, “Genesis” page (web, secondary): independent games 1983–1987, Chip in 1987–1988, freelance on Future Wars in 1989, and his frustration in August 1989. https://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/page_genese.htm
- Wikipedia, “Infernal Runner” (web, secondary): Michel Koell and Yves Korta’s design, Loriciels, Chahi’s Amstrad CPC version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_Runner
- The One issue 49, October 1992, p. 16: Chahi and Savoir sign with Virgin.
- Edge issue 14, November 1994, and issue 20, May 1995: Amazing Studio, co-founded by Chahi and Savoir; the twelve-strong team, Heart of Darkness in development since 1992; Savoir as lead coder on Flashback.
- PC Player (Germany), June 1998: Amazing Studio founded in 1992; Virgin drops the game after delays; Infogrames, and the move from Saturn to PC and PlayStation.
- Edge issue 61, August 1998, p. 92: Heart of Darkness review (PlayStation, Infogrames, £40, four out of ten).
- Thierry Nguyen, “Short but Sweet Heart”, Computer Gaming World issue 172, November 1998: Heart of Darkness review (“announced in 1992”).
- Edge issue 231, September 2011: From Dust review (Ubisoft Montpellier, Xbox 360, nine out of ten; volcanology and trips to active sites); retrospective listing Heart of Darkness as published by Interplay.
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: Philippe Chastel on Another World’s independence from Delphine.
- Wireframe issue 19, July 2019: Inmost interview. Issue 39, May 2020, p. 95: Paper Beast review (PSVR, Pixel Reef, £24.99, 80%).
- Alissa McAloon, “Another World designer Eric Chahi sets up indie studio Pixel Reef”, Game Developer, 27 March 2019 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-i-another-world-i-designer-eric-chahi-sets-up-indie-studio-pixel-reef
- Pixel Reef, “About us” (web, secondary): the studio in Montpellier. https://www.pixelreef.fr/about/
- Wikipedia, “Paper Beast” (web, secondary): PlayStation VR release on 24 March 2020, PC on 24 July 2020 and the Folded Edition on 20 October 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Beast
- Fabien Sanglard, “Another World Code Review”, 2011 (web, secondary): the original source code unpublished. https://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/