Another World

How it was made

What the press said at the time

How the Atari Jaguar version differs

Not a period release. Interplay planned a Jaguar port for September 1994 that never shipped; the cartridge that exists was confirmed and approved by Eric Chahi in 2012 and published by Retro-Gaming Connexion.

It is playable in both the original 16-colour mode and the 256-colour Deluxe 15th Anniversary mode — a toggle no period console version offered.

Also on other platforms

Apple IIGS · Mac OS · MS-DOS · Game Boy Advance · Sega CD · Genesis · Super NES · Linux · Android · Windows · 3DS · OS X · PlayStation 3 · PlayStation 4 · PlayStation Vita · Symbian · Wii U · Windows Mobile · Xbox One · Switch

• Amiga. The original, and a one-man project. Éric Chahi funded it with his royalties from Future Wars, which let him build it "without any constraint of any sort or any editorial pressure". In August 1989 he saw the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair and reasoned that vector outlines could achieve similar flat-colour animation in a fraction of the storage; he proved it with a polygon routine on an Atari ST, then found the same code ran at about 20 frames per second on the Amiga — the moment he knew the approach would work. He used the Amiga's genlock hardware to rotoscope polygon animation from video of himself performing the actions.
• Atari ST. Where the polygon routine that made the whole game possible was first written and tested, on the Motorola 68000, before Chahi moved it to the Amiga.

Worth knowing

• One man, his own programming language, and no HUD. Éric Chahi built it alone, improvising the content "layer by layer without knowing where it was going", and wrote his own animation sequencer to do it — a new language in GFA BASIC coupled to an engine in Devpac assembler, interpreted in real time. He removed the HUD and all dialogue deliberately, leaving only the world on screen during both play and cutscenes. He also developed strictly in chronological order, and has said the loneliness of the opening sections reflects his own mood working by himself. The influences are unusually well documented: Dune, Hyperion, the artists Michael Whelan, Frank Frazetta, Bernie Wrightson and Zdzisław Beksiński, and Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball — the thin motion lines and the charged power attack both come from it.