1997/98 Prey Interview and tech demo

I didn't find this posted previously so I thought some people would be interested in these. They basically talk about prey in 1998 and show you the tech demos for it. In one part of the second video they show in their demo how you can create your own portals whereever you want, which is just like what valve is doing in "portal", I wonder why they didn't implement that feature in prey when they had the capability even back then. Ahh well, cool to see how things were back 8 years ago anyway..

Video 1

Video 2

LoL. They're going to make it 3D accelerated. Watch out now.

Techx said:

I wonder why they didn't implement that feature in prey when they had the capability even back then.

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Most likely 'cause it complicates level design tenfold when players can teleport themselves around at will.

It's a similar case to Red Faction, the first shooter (that I know of, at least) to feature destructible environments. In the end they were largely superficial, as in almost all cases indestructible walls stopped you from blowing your way through to other parts of the level. As far as I know, no other game has even attempted it since (except RFII, in which it was even more useless), even though the capability has been there for quite a while. There's just not a lot of middle ground between leaving it as a useless gimmick and constructing the entire game around it.

The kind of freedom allowed by this, and by teleportation, just won't translate well to a single-player FPS. So it's probably a good thing that
(a) Prey didn't try to pull it off, and
(b) Portal isn't an FPS.

They should combine the old-Prey's "anywhere" portals with Red Factions destructable terrain and you'd have some funky gameplay.

SideNote: I can't believe they said that game could run on a 48633

Damn shadow warrior and terminal velocity were cool as hell... Back in the day.

"right now we are running this on a voodo 2, and as you can see it's running smoothly"

damn, why did i buy this video card?

Was anyone else annoyed or creeped out by the interviewer?

I didn't think the interview was that bad. I think Gamespot's interviews are terribly uncomfortable so this was mild by comparison. Looking back on it, the interviewer does look very Miami Vice.

I never realized how long Prey has been in development. I mean... is this the same game we're talking about? Almost 10 years in development, and we end up with a really good short game? What... 5-6 hours. And something else caught my eye was Valve's "Portal" game. Looks like Valve took a cue from 3dRealms?

zamardii said:

I never realized how long Prey has been in development. I mean... is this the same game we're talking about?

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3DRealms were working on it themselves from ~1995-1999. It was put on indefinite hold until 2001, and restarted from scratch by Human Head, using the Doom3 engine. So the concept has been around for that long, but this iteration of the game is a bit more recent.

And something else caught my eye was Valve's "Portal" game. Looks like Valve took a cue from 3dRealms?

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Valve took a cue from Narbacular Drop. In fact, Valve hired the entire development team.

Narbacular drop owns...if Portal is anything like it (and it should be) then it is going to be great...