The Let's Play Archive

Stonekeep

by davidspackage

Part 4: Production Woes




Those who remember Stonekeep being announced and previewed will remember that it was famously late, being released years after its due date. The story of why this happened is interesting, with the caveat that nearly all these saucy details come strictly from the mouth of head programmer Peter Oliphant - who had some minor conflicts with Interplay's people and ended up negotiating a deal by which he would drop out of the project before it got delayed even more.

Much thanks to AirPhforce for linking this interview with Peter Oliphant on page 2 (well, perhaps not 'interview' as much as 'soliloquoy').


What is a fact is that Stonekeep was announced to the gaming press in January 1993, only to have its release date pushed back again and again until it finally hit shelves in late 1995. What caused all that delay? Well…

Stonekeep started somewhere around 1990 as a simpler Eye of the Beholder-style game with the working title Brian’s Dungeon. It was set for a 9-month development time and a budget of $50k. The two guys who kicked off the project, Michael Quarles and Peter Oliphant, would stick with it for nearly the entire development that led it into becoming Stonekeep. Brian Fargo, head of Interplay at the time, felt the initial game looked so good that he OKed it for a bigger budget, bigger crew and longer development time. The extra time would give them a chance to take advantage of the shifting specs of home computers.

Peter Oliphant, who was not an Interplay employee unlike Quarles, left the project after four years as he probably didn’t expect to see an end result, the way things were being handled. Oliphant pins the blame for Stonekeep’s delay mainly on the poor decisions and pig-headedness of his former co-workers. For instance, as development continued to lag, Oliphant pled with Fargo to shift the game to a CD-rom format instead of floppies, which would reduce production cost considerably. It took Fargo six months to see the light and agree with him. A little weird, since the whole reason he pushed this project was to make use of rapidly increasing home PC technology - in the early stages, Fargo didn't even want the game to need a mouse (or hard drive!).

Similarly, the greenscreening of character animations was apparently not handled by Oliphant despite him having actual, and considerable, experience with filming. Thus someone else clumsily did the filming outside in the sunlight, which – as anyone with some knowledge of chroma keying can tell you – resulted in the sort of uneven lighting that made the footage unusable. Aside from that, they neglected to film the legs of the characters and in some cases didn’t think to film the back of them. Not that this mattered much as the whole thing had to be trashed and redone by a professional studio anyway.

Speaking of the character animations, the skeleton – which is now a sprite of a 3D model – was originally acted out using a lab skeleton ("Lucy"), manipulated like a puppet by one of the project artists. It was only replaced in the game a few months before the actual release. A few shots of how it looked in-game can still be found:



Interestingly, this early footage also shows a completely different breastplate, shield and what looks like some kind of lamp. On the right, you can see the orb of Afri(?) appears to actually project a map of the entire level, rather than just your close proximity.


The opening movie supposedly cost nearly $500k to produce and I just have no idea how that could’ve happened, as this would be a sizeable budget for a short movie today. The 3D graphics could’ve been handled by Interplay’s in-house artists and there were maybe 6 or 7 actors that needed to be filmed in a greenscreen studio. It’s quite a spectacular intro, even for 1995, but if that’s really the final budget than either someone messed up or someone got scammed.

Lastly, Oliphant mentions that one reason for the pushing of the release date late in the project is Michael Quarles’s decision (after Oliphant left) to change the player’s position in the game’s tiles from central to far edge of the tile. That seems logical, since as Stonekeep isn’t really 3D, absolutely all the background animations and textures had to be redrawn or shifted, and the whole combat system had to be retooled. In fact, this might be the reason why the “Sharga mines” background is reused ad nauseam.

So, that’s one side of the story; 2 guys having 9 months to deliver a game on $50k, turning into a 5-year project with over 200 people that cost $5 million to make, a figure you couldn’t possibly recoup with an RPG released in 1995. How much of it is accurate is impossible to tell, but one can at least conclude that Stonekeep saw some very poor decision-making during its long development cycle.




The Stonekeep team: note the Throg shield in front and the sword in the back, plus the lab skeleton in the center.




Stonekeep was originally released in a luxurious coffin-shaped black box with a cool holographic image of the skeleton in a corridor on it. The box I bought the game in was a plain rectangular box of the oversized variety that PC games came in in the 90s, though it had the same holographic front cover. Unfortunately I tore up and threw out all my game boxes in a madness-induced moment of "cleaning up."


Links of interest: