Iconic Dungeons & Dragons RPG Planescape: Torment was a 'B-Team' project that started life as 3 different games—including a 3D dungeon crawler
Now I don't have the fancy book learnin' to know what can change the nature of a man, but there sure are a lot of factors that can change the nature of a game. In a retrospective feature for upcoming PC Gamer print issue 390 (402 for our friends across the pond), contributor Robert Zak dug into the strange history of Planescape: Torment by talking to members of the unlikely Interplay team that made it happen.
«I was just trying to figure everything out, and I noticed that there were three Planescape projects that all had like four people on them,» recalled Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. These were the heady years of 1996-'97, when Interplay was simultaneously publishing Baldur's Gate while internally developing Fallout and, eventually, Planescape: Torment. Urquhart was head of Interplay's RPG division, which was then coalescing into the publisher's well-loved subsidiary, Black Isle Studios.
«Almost no work» was getting done on one of those projects according to Urquhart, the second remains a mystery, while the third presents a tantalizing but likely ill-fated what if scenario: A first person, full 3D dungeon crawler that would have taken advantage of brand spanking new 3D accelerator cards like the 3dfx Voodoo.
«I said, 'Ok, we need a game that we can go and actually just make without inventing new technology,'» Urquhart said. «We're going to use the Baldur's Gate engine, and differentiate ourselves by having a character who's not just going to be a generic character, and we're going to reinforce that by zooming in the camera.»
As development progressed, many of Interplay's resources were devoted to a never to be released sequel to 1995's Stonekeep. This allowed a number of newer developers to take up the reigns and prove themselves on a project with a large degree of creative freedom. Some of them weren't even familiar with the Planescape setting before starting work on the game. "[Urquhart] just came one day and said, 'We're going to do a Planescape game,' and in
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