“Today, there are more slaves on planet Earth than there ever were in world history combined…”
40.3 million people in 2016, to be precise, there in plain sight, all around us.
“Who are these people to be put through hell? And what if one of those broke out, inspired their people and it led to uprisings, rumours, uneasiness and disruption, which would eventually spark a revolution which would topple financial markets through the disruption of commerce and produce and trade?”
What if?
This is how Lorne Lanning rolls when it comes to video games. Nothing should be off-topic for video games. More video games should use those secret ingredients – interactivity, empathy – in the service of things that truly matter in the world. This is part of the brilliance of Oddworld, why the series grabs people so strongly even after all these years. It’s why, more than two decades after the first game was released, people still flock to hear creator Lorne Lanning talk. There’s a magic here.
“Why don’t we set forth to see if we can’t … get the quintology done in our lifetimes.” -Lorne Lanning
But the magic was nearly lost.
To put it another way: once upon a time there was a dream. Five games, one character, one Oddworld.
“I looked at a world where I thought people were getting disengaged from what they saw happening on a global landscape,” Lorne Lanning explains to me over Skype. “Politicians could no longer be trusted, corporations could no longer be trusted, pharmaceuticals and medicine could no longer be trusted, law enforcement was questionable. The world was increasingly becoming more Orwellian.”
(As if, Lorne, as if!)
That “what if?” became Abe’s story.
“Abe, this lowly slave, would slowly start having an impact on the major economic forces of the world and really start fucking shit up,” Lanning says. “And then the holy hell of the law, the political landscape, the fake news media – all of it would come raining down on him. And he would become labelled ‘the Bin Laden of Oddworld’, the public enemy number one, who’s causing everyone’s Happy Meals to go up 200 per cent in price – the unforgivable! Your coffee’s more expensive: unforgivable! Kill that guy!
“That,” adds Lanning, “was the essence of Abe.”
And in Abe’s Odyssey, the debut release in 1997, that essence was intact. “Of all the games we built, Abe’s Odyssey was the purest vision in terms of the overall Oddworld quintology,” he tells me. On the back of the box it apparently even said Abe’s Odyssey would be the first of a five-part series. Remaking Abe’s Odyssey, then, made perfect sense, so Oddworld Inhabitants did exactly that with Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty in 2014, and it was good. Very.