Future Imperfect – THE LOST ART OF WESTWOOD’S BLADE RUNNER

The Deadendthrills website has a great article about Westwood’s Blade Runner game (an article that contains some truly stunning graphics from 3D artist David Austin taken from the game). The article tells the story how the Westwood studio came to get to do the game, the involvement from Syd Mead and others involved from the Blade Runner movie.
The game was released back in the days when a PC wasn’t as capable of producing 3D graphics as a PC can do today, so Westood used something called Voxels that made things look 3D

In the mid-’90s, a game that attempted 1,000 motion-captured sequences would be rightly considered a dangerous folly; Blade Runner features 20,000.
 
The original voxel objects weighed in at around seven megabytes in size while hardware at the time could manage only about 100K.
 

The game has a great atmosphere to it and is still a good game by today’s standards, it’s not comparable when it comes to the graphics that today’s computer games has but remember that it is a point&click adventure game that unfolds differently as to how you play it and has different endings, all depending to your actions in the game. That is something not many games had back when Westwood’s Blade Runner was released.
 
You can find more information on Westwood’s Blade Runner game right here at LA2019 and the great article you should read can be found here

Looking back on the Blade Runner PC game

Youtube publisher RagnarRox has posted a “Looking back” episode with Westwood Studios Blade Runner PC game (released in 1997 and was back in those days a jawdropper when it comes to graphics). Not only does RagnarRox give you a little information on the Blade Runner movie but also how movie-game adaptaions usually end up and what it was that made Westwood Studios Blade Runner game so unique, there is also an interview with  Louis Castle, founder of Westwood Studios and Art Director, Creative Director and Technical Director of “Blade Runner – The Video Game”.
 
The game is very detailed and you cannot miss that it takes place in the Blade Runner universe and to make things even better, it had multiple endings all depending on how you played the game. The video is worth watching even if you’re not into computer games
 

 
You can find more of RagnaRox videos here and if you want more information on the videogame you can find out more right here