| Notes: |
I believe these two games are
identical (please compare below). The Outpost is
listed as a CD with unknown due date, Wes Craven Presents: Mindripper is listed as a game
due for February 1996 in the Atari Dealer Price List Q3/1995.
CR: How about Wes Craven Presents Mindripper?
FT: Basically it was kind of a B-movie produced by Wes Craven and we were trying to start
a deal with this movie company where we would kind of develop products based on their
movies. They were ultimately a B-movie company but they had a lot of really good contacts
so, you know, over time the relationship might have actually grown reasonably well and, I
mean, for me personally it was good contacts that led me to other work outside of Atari.
Mindripper basically would have been a neat first-person horror shooter type game. The
movie came out on HBO and video a few years ago, fairly 'schlacky' fair but would have
made a neat game. What was cool is that they actually shot it in Bulgaria and I went down
to the set and met Lance Hendrikson and hung out with the cast and crew for a few days.
All my memories of it are actually pretty cool because we were able to go out on the set
and take pictures of all the assets they had out there and they gave us open access to
everything, to all the actors, so we had Lance Hendrikson on the blue screen and he was
very helpful in getting... in digitizing his likeness to be in the game. And one of the
guys that was in Saving Private Ryan who is now almost becoming a big star was in
Mindripper too, so it's funny to see some of these people that you've never heard of and
that are now becoming big stars or almost big stars. Or like Lance Hendrikson, he is just
kind of a legend in that type of genre of film. But no, it was actually a lot of fun and
they were shooting in a lot of, you know, kind of weird places, like abandoned nuclear
reactor type places in Bulgaria, so it was kind of creepy. Kind of cool, running through
these underground catacombs and getting all these shots, the nice things about those
places is that, you know, the countries are so poor that they'll allow these movie
companies to come in and work with their film infrastructure and give them access to any
parts of the city that they want to shot in. So it was actually kind of neat, it would
have been to see how the final product would have come out, ultimately there is a lot of
cool little things that we wanted to do, put into the game, like multi-player play and
things like that. So, first person shooter in the vein of your DOOM, we wanted to do
things that haden't been done, like walk on ceilings and stuff like that if you would have
played the monster because the monster had his set of abilities and, you know, the human
heros had their own set of abilities. And you had to rescue people and things like that,
we were trying to add more depth to the first person shooter genre.
CR: Kind of like Alien Vs. Predator?
FT: Yeah, a lot of it was probably influenced by Alien Vs. Predator and we wanted to try
to take it one step further.
CR: Sounds way cool! Would have been a fun game!
FT: Yeah, I can't really vouch for the movie too much - it was kind of Wes Craven in some
respects just giving some favors back to people that had helped him over his career, by
kind of lending his name and credibility to the film but the game, I think, would have
actually been a lot of fun! It was right at the point before first person shooters became
kind of over-saturated and it would have had some new features, you know.
What we were actually trying to do... that was at the time were they were trying to go
multi-platform, there would have actually been a PC and Jaguar-CD version. And it had full
motion video from the film, at that time it would have had all the kind of cool things
that people were looking for.
CR: I assume the PC version never got anywhere? What was the final status?
FT: No, the PC version got probably even less farther than the Jaguar version. It
definitely got started and seemed to move forward and as I remember a few years ago there
was even some litigation on trying to tie up the legal lose ends, just making sure that
when Atari was no more people got their cuts or at least worked stuff out. Yes, it
definitely got started and it was actually planned of it being the first of a multi-game
series with that movie company.
CR: Do you remember the name of that company?
FT: Yeah, Kushner-Locke, Donald Kushner the producer of TRON. It was all kind of a
independent film company. The game would have been pretty innovative for its time.
(CyberRoach Magazine #9, 2/2000 - Interview with Faran Thomason)
From The Hollywood Reporter comes this interesting tidbit:
Kushner-Locke is also making a game for Wes Craven's "The Outpost" with Atari,
which went to Bulgaria to shoot special interactive footage of the actors. In addition to
actors in the film, Atari hired nine additional actors to serve as characters for the game
only.
AEO has since confirmed from Atari that this game is indeed Jaguar-bound. Wes Craven, as
many of you know, is the horrormeister behind such scarefests as the Nightmare on Elm
Street series; what's planned for this Jag game is bound to be intriguing.
(AEO 3/13) |