You were going to be able to climb, swim, float or fly to achieve mission goals - even pass through walls. It was going to be a first-person "running through a crypt type thing", McComb summarises - with branching dialogue! It would have real-time combat and, of course, be based in the weird and wonderful Planescape setting of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. McComb isn't sure who wrote it but seems fairly sure it wasn't him. He can only remember so much, nearly 20 years later, but he does manage to dig out an old vision document for me. He hadn't made a computer game before, only tabletop games, but gradually ideas began to form, and the project known as Planescape PSX was born. It was just him and a programmer in a small office for weeks, months even. John Teti had much more to say about the game in our King's Field retrospective.īrief in hand, McComb got going. But more than that it respected players, treated them like grown-ups who could figure things out for themselves. King's Field was dark, grim and ruthlessly difficult. "And he said, 'Your first task is to play King's Field.' So they dropped me into an office with a PlayStation and King's Field and then said, 'Get going.'" "And I said, 'I have not,'" McComb tells me. "Have you played King's Field?" Urquhart asks McComb in his first briefing. You know, the King's Field series that would inspire Demon's Souls. You know, King's Field made by From Software. What Urquhart wanted Colin McComb to make was something a lot like 1994 PS1 game King's Field. The company turns out to be Interplay, a games company in full bloom the man offering him a job is Feargus Urquhart, head of subsidiary studio Black Isle (now in charge of Obsidian Entertainment). "Come on out and be the lead designer of this PlayStation game that we're doing with the Planescape licence," a company offers him. But he wants to go to California because there's this girl there. Meanwhile, over in America, Colin McComb writes Planescape campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons. The Spice Girls are only just coming out (I could have worded that differently). It's 1996 and Super Mario 64 has come out, Quake has come out, Tomb Raider has come out. But as I discovered, in something of a crypt in London recently, the Souls effect was felt a long, long time ago. Feels like a recent thing, given that Dark Souls appeared in 2011 to really kick it all off. The Souls effect will reach fever pitch this week with the release of Bloodborne, and very important gaming people at lunch around the world will wonder how they can copy it.
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