This is the story of a French game, created with passion by a dozen people, within a studio that has now disappeared, but which forever marked the minds of those who got their hands on it. In 1992 he came out Retrospective scenea new title from Delphine Software to which we owe a year ago cruise for a dead body AND Another dayCreated by Eric Chahi.
In four years, the Parisian studio carved out a place for itself on the international video game scene. Founded in 1988 by Paul de Senneville and Paul Cuisset, Delphine Software breathed new life into the giants of Mario on Nintendo and Sonic on Sega.
Qualification Retrospective scene is going to shake everything, designed as a futuristic action-adventure platformer, with more realistic character movements, side camera tracking and hero movements inspired by Prince of Persia.
Waking up in the middle of a strange jungle, faced with a hologram of himself ordering him to stop an interplanetary plot, Conrad, an amnesiac scientist, also tries to piece together pieces of his memory to understand what happened to him. .
A futuristic and realistic game out of step with its time.
asked about France Inter, its creator Paul Cuisset recalls the will at that time to “do something new” for the Mega Drive console that then collapses in living rooms. “My first idea was to transpose the history of the Godfather in the future”, he confesses. The project, considered too unusual, will not be successful. But Retrospective scene see the day
Three decades later, the oldest players are still talking about Retrospective scene with stars in their eyes and a palpable nostalgia. With its Philip K. Dick vibe, its cinematic influences of the time (Total Retirement, Blade Runner…) and its different gameplay (it was necessary to anticipate their actions to link them better, with a certain voluntary latency), the game surprises, it also confuses. For its designer, it was also the force of the time to allow for testing and innovation. Some of its functions have been emulated, others have been forgotten. “But we tried,” laughed Paul Cuisset.
Released in multiple media, from Amiga to Super Nintendo to Jaguar and Mega Drive, Retrospective scene it will be able to boast of being for a time the best-selling French video game in the world (two million units). “Although it had been very well received, 10 years after its release, I was still not aware of it,” confesses its creator when celebrating the game’s 25th anniversary. to tell me how much Retrospective scene they cared.”
If a new work released a few years later will not be remembered, even by those interested (fade to black, 1995), the original title will have the right to improved versions on PC, Mega CD and even recently on smartphones (iOS and Android). For his 25th birthday, he is even reborn in a remastered version on Nintendo Switch after a remake for his 20th birthday.
“I’m going to do something bad to him and we’ll see if he gets away with it”
and the story of Retrospective scene it will not stop there. an official sequel – Fade to black it was not stamped Retrospective scene- approaches. Used by Microids, but also by Paul Cuisset, it is expected to hit the console in 2023. “It’s a bit like finding old friends: we know they exist, we know they’re around us, but at some point, we tell ourselves “. that it would be good to see each other again and do something”, says Paul Cuisset who admits a certain nostalgia.
Paul Cuisset wrote a sequel in the 1990s. flashback 2 Will he pick up where his hero left off? He is not completely sure. He admits that the mindset in game development has changed.
“Today we are interested in the player’s experience, the way in which he is going to live his adventure, we try to give him the means to satisfy him… At that time, we had a somewhat different situation,” acknowledges who sees the game as “a challenge , a showdown between the creator and the player”. “We were more like telling ourselves: I’m going to do something bad to him and we’ll see if he gets away with it! Now (…) we try to give the player the tools to solve the problems, while at that moment we put the problems, but not the tools…”
Quite a punishing game and with few stops when it comes out, there is no doubt that Retrospective scene it will not completely seduce the greatest number again. But just the promise of a return of the iconic game is already itself a Proust madeleine that many are eager to savor, come that easy or not.
Source: BFM TV
