Blade Runner is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive for Microsoft Windows, released in November 1997. The game is not a direct adaptation of the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner but is instead a "sidequel", telling an original story, which runs parallel to the film's plot, occasionally intersecting with it.

Set in 2019 Los Angeles, the game tells the story of Ray McCoy, an elite detective charged with hunting down a group of dangerous replicants (bioengineered androids designed to look and act like humans). Although several of the film's characters appear in the game, with some of the original actors returning to voice them, the film's protagonist, Rick Deckard, does not appear in a speaking role. Instead, he is referred to on multiple occasions, is seen several times, and his activities as depicted in the film are mentioned. Other parallels with the film include the reproduction of several prominent locations, as well as scenes and dialogue closely modelled on the original. The game also features extracts from the film's soundtrack.

Blade Runner was advertised as a "real-time 3D adventure game", since it was one of the first adventure games to use both 3D character rendering and a game world which progressed in real-time (as opposed to waiting for the player's actions). Unlike many games of its time, which used polygon-based renderers exploiting 3D accelerators, Westwood opted for their own software-based renderer using voxel technology.

The game received generally positive reviews and was a commercial success, selling over one million units worldwide. It went on to win the Interactive Achievement Award for "PC Adventure Game of the Year" and was nominated for "Best Adventure Game" by PC Gamer. Virgin Interactive wanted Westwood to make a sequel, but it was thought the cost of production would make the game commercially unviable and the idea was scrapped. For many years, it remained trapped in legal and intellectual property entanglement, preventing a re-release on digital storefronts, until it finally arrived on GOG.com in December 2019.

Gameplay

Blade Runner is a point-and-click adventure game played from a third-person perspective, in which the game world is navigated, explored, and manipulated using the mouse. The pointer has four different styles depending on the given situation; a standard grey pointer is used to move McCoy by clicking on any location, and scan the screen for elements with which to interact; an animated green pointer indicates McCoy can interact with an object or begin a conversation with an NPC; an animated blue pointer indicates the screen can be changed and a new area accessed (usually appears at the sides of the screen or in doorways); an animated red target becomes available only in combat mode and indicates McCoy can fire (if the target is grey, it means McCoy cannot fire).

Blade Runners main focus is detective work rather than puzzles or combat, and the majority of gameplay consists of searching for evidence, questioning suspects and analyzing clues. Occasionally, the player must solve compulsory puzzles, and often, to progress the story, certain clues must be located. Clues are found by searching crime scenes, and come in the form of items, photographs, interviews, or unusual markings. When analyzing photographs, the player must use the ESPER system, a high-density computer with a powerful three-dimensional resolution capacity which allows for the enhancement of photos and enables the player to find details within the picture. Combat is occasionally available in the game, but is rarely compulsory. The only weapon available to the player is McCoy's standard issue police pistol, which may be loaded with various types of ammunition.

Another important investigative tool at the player's disposal is the Voight-Kampff machine, which tests people to determine if they are replicants. Usually, Voight-Kampff tests are automatically triggered at certain predetermined points in the game, although on occasion, the player has the option of administering a test. The test depicts a close-up of the subject's eye, and features three needles. The further the top needle moves to the right, the more likely the subject is a human; the further the bottom needle moves to the right, the more likely they are replicant. The third needle is on a sweeping axis and measures the intensity of the questions (for every question the player can choose low, medium or high intensity), and the pressure felt by the subject. If the player pushes the subject too far, by asking too many high intensity questions, the test will end before a definite result can be obtained. If the player determines with certainty whether a subject is or is not a replicant, the test ends automatically. The player must then decide what course of action to take, with the decision influencing the rest of the storyline; for example, if a subject tests positive as a replicant, the player can kill them, attempt to arrest them, or let them go. Which characters are replicants is randomized each time a new game is started.

Aside from choosing how to react to Voight-Kampff results, the player must also decide how McCoy conducts himself in other areas of the game, such as whether to interrogate an NPC or simply talk to them and how aggressive to be in his questioning. The player can choose from one of five settings regarding McCoy's demeanor during conversations: "Polite", "Normal", "Surly", "Erratic" (the game randomly picks one of the first three options at different points of the conversation), and "User Choice". If the fifth option is selected, conversations with NPCs will present the player with menus from which they can choose their questions, rather than the game automatically selecting questions. Each choice will affect the storyline differently, with the player's cumulative decisions leading to one of the game's thirteen different endings.

All clues, conversation histories, and documents are stored in McCoy's "Knowledge Integration Assistant" (KIA), where they are automatically organized for easy access.

The game runs in nonlinear "real time", meaning that as McCoy investigates and gathers clues, the NPC characters are doing the same, completing their own objectives and performing random actions elsewhere in the game world. A good example of this is found in the computer mainframe, which is accessible from the police headquarters. When the player uploads their KIA data into the mainframe, any evidence collected by other Blade Runners is automatically downloaded into the player's KIA.

Story

Main characters

thumb|Ray McCoy is the game's main [[player character.]]

  • Ray McCoy (voiced by Mark Benninghofen): the game's protagonist and a rookie Blade Runner. McCoy shares his apartment with his pet dog, Maggie.
  • Crystal Steele (Lisa Edelstein): one of the best Blade Runners on the job and an expert in undercover work. She hates replicants, believing they should be exterminated. She is somewhat condescending towards McCoy early in the game but grows to respect him as the story progresses.
  • Gaff (Javier Grajeda as Victor Gardell): a veteran Blade Runner who often offers McCoy advice.
  • Lieutenant Edison Guzza (Jeff Garlin): temporarily placed in charge of the Blade Runner unit while the previous commander, Captain Bryant, is on sick leave.
  • Clovis (Mark Rolston): the leader of a group of renegade replicants. Highly intelligent and eloquent, he is also extremely ruthless, unpredictable and, at times, capable of extreme acts of aggression.
  • Lucy Devlin (Pauley Perrette): a fourteen-year-old girl who works at the pet store attacked by the replicants in the opening scene

Supporting characters

  • Dektora (Signy Coleman): an exotic dancer.
  • Sadik (Alexander Mervin): a member of Clovis' gang.
  • Howie Lee (Toru Nagai): the owner of a restaurant in Chinatown.
  • Zuben (Gerald Okamura): a replicant who works as a chef at Howie Lee's Restaurant in Chinatown.
  • Luther and Lance (Jason Cottle): identical twin replicant brothers who are former Tyrell Corporation employees.
  • Gordo Frizz (Bruno Oliver): a stand-up comedian.
  • Runciter (Warren Burton): the owner of the pet store attacked by the game's replicants.
  • Izo (Timothy Dang): a weapons dealer who supplies automatic firearms to Clovis' gang.
  • Bullet Bob (Vincent Schiavelli): a World War III veteran who runs a gun shop near Animoid Row.

Original cast members from the 1982 film who make cameo appearances in the game are Sean Young as Rachael, Brion James as Leon, James Hong as Hannibal Chew, Joe Turkel as Dr. Eldon Tyrell, and William Sanderson as J.F. Sebastian.

Plot

thumb|left|McCoy stands at the White Dragon Noodle Bar, the same location where [[Rick Deckard first appears in the film.]]

The game begins shortly after the beginning of the film, The endings are variations on three major themes:

  • McCoy is human and hunts down the replicants either alone or with Crystal.
  • McCoy is a replicant himself and sides with the other replicants.
  • McCoy's status remains ambiguous and he sides with neither the replicants nor the police, instead leaving the city—either alone, with Dektora, or with Lucy.
  • The Tyger - In the opening cutscene, when he kills the animals (including a tiger, the most valuable animal in the collection) belonging to Runciter, who sexually harassed Clovis's 14 y.o. stepdaughter Lucy, who was an employee in his shop, in order to punish him.
  • Jerusalem - the last stanza, when discussing McCoy fate at the roof.
  • The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - "A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees." - when discussing McCoy fate in the room.
  • A Poison Tree - the first stanza, when visiting the twins.
  • To Tirzah - The first stanza, when killing Guzza.
  • Memory, Hither Come - the last stanza, when assaulting Tyrell.
  • With happiness stretchd across the hills - the third part of the poem, the last words before expiration.

Development

Origins

The initial idea for a video game adaptation of Blade Runner came from The Blade Runner Partnership (composed of Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio of Tandem Productions). They originally approached Electronic Arts, Sierra and Activision, before Virgin Interactive agreed to take the project on. However, the rights to the film were spread out over several entities, each of whom owned a different aspect, making production of the game complex from a copyright perspective; The Ladd Company owned North American distribution rights to the film; Run Run Shaw owned international distribution rights; and The Blade Runner Partnership owned all ancillary rights, and were the bond guarantors, who had taken control of the film when it went over-budget and over-schedule towards the end of production. As a result, sorting out the rights took several years before Virgin were in a position to actually begin development. They ultimately hired Westwood Studios to work on the game, but even with the rights secured, and the game in pre-production, there were still legal problems. As Louis Castle, the game's executive producer, art director and technical director, explains

Blade Runner received generally positive reviews. It held an aggregate score of 77% on GameRankings, based on sixteen reviews. GamePro likewise judged that the game's strongest points are its faithfulness to the book and movie and the way the ending is determined by the player's actions throughout the game. They also complimented the cinematics, dialogue, and "riveting plot and slick style", though they criticized the character models for their "overwrought body language" and said that those who are not fans of Blade Runner would find it solid but unexciting. They gave it a 4.5 out of 5 for graphics, 5.0 for sound, 4.0 for control, and 4.5 for fun factor. Between January 1998 and July 1998, it sold another 47,939 copies in the region, which drew $2,283,055 in revenues. Westwood's Louis Castle reported that its lifetime sales had reached 800,000 units worldwide by February 2002. Blade Runners sales ultimately surpassed one million units by 2006; Castle claimed that it outsold The Curse of Monkey Island three to one. In 1998, it was nominated for "Adventure Game of the Year" by Computer Gaming World and for "Best Adventure Game" at the PC Gamer awards, losing on both occasions to The Curse of Monkey Island.

In 2011, Adventure Gamers named Blade Runner the 21st-best adventure game ever released. PC Gamer also did a retrospective on the game, praising it for being authentic to the cyberpunk setting more than other similar themed games.

Sequel and re-release

Sequel

Blade Runner sold well, but due to high development costs, the profit margin was low. According to Louis Castle, "The mere fact it was four CDs made it a very expensive game. And the deal we had with the Blade Runner Partnership meant it was not terribly profitable. It didn't do as well as you might think." The Blade Runner Partnership and Electronic Arts owned the rights to the game for many years by that point.

ScummVM

Several attempts were made to reverse engineer the game's engine. As it is technically complex with voxel graphics for the in-game actors, video backgrounds, and randomised paths, it took the ultimately successful project with combined efforts eight years to completion. The new Blade Runner engine was included in the game engine collection ScummVM on 13 October 2016. It took another three years until it was ready for public testing on 16 June 2019, and was included in ScummVM version 2.1.0.

Enhanced Edition

Nightdive Studios and Alcon Entertainment announced they would be developing an Enhanced Edition of the game. It was originally planned to release in 2020 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, but was delayed to an unspecified date due to technical issues. Stephen Kick explained that while the source code for the game was lost, they had reverse engineered it and reworked within their proprietary KEX Engine, used for other remastered games. In addition to support for modern systems, the Enhanced Edition included updated character models, animations and cutscenes. Many of the supporting assets to make the fixed graphic scenes were also lost, so Nightdive used a combination of graphics tools and machine learning to upscale these for modern systems as well as increasing the frame rate on the video scenes.

Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was released on June 23, 2022. The game received negative reception on release, much criticism being aimed at issues relating to the graphics, which were compared negatively to those of the original game or the unofficial ScummVM port, with Metacritic listing Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition as the tenth-worst game of 2022. Nightdive informed they would fix this in upcoming patches. Nightdive updated the Steam version of the Enhanced Edition to include the ScummVM version alongside the enhanced version a few days later.

References

  • Video: How Westwood's Blade Runner created noir-2019 way back in 1997 (Ars Technica)