Game:

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 19:14

8,692 views

28

Life, Times and Ridiculous Misadventures of Richard B. Riddick, Esquire: a Dickensian Tale.

Prologue:
in which Riddick is symbolically born through an archetypical arsehole.

In 2000 David Twohy finished his film Pitch Black. It had a cool "space ship crash lands on an uninhabited planet" scene they spend most of their 20 mil. budget on I suspect, good script, some good acting and terrible CG aliens who somehow ended up being scary anyway (watch director's cut). It also had Riddick, a life convict and a killer, who just wanted to be left alone. But silly humanity didn't want to comply, it sent a bounty hunter after a bounty hunter, stuck him in one hell hole of a prison after another, an so he had to escape again and kill again. Poor thing.

Bosses in Universal saw a potential franchise in the movie from the beginning. They even made Twohy rewrite the script (Riddick was supposed to die in the end). And although Pitch Black wasn't that successful financially, it did propel Vin Diesel's career into stardom. So the second movie, The Chronicles of Riddick, came out in 2004 along with a game and a half hour cartoon directed by Peter Chung, creator of Aeon Flux, which were supposed to tie-in the both movies' plots.

In 2002 Starbreeze, a small Swedish game developing studio, was approached by Vivendi. At that time Starbreeze only had a half-successful action RPG Enclave behind their belts. I think they were supposed to make something quick and dirty like most movie games. With the help of Twohy himself, who assisted with the script, and Tigon Studios, "a video game production company focused primarily on games featuring or starring actor Vin Diesel" (whatever it means), the game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, quietly came out without any advertisement because Vivendi Universal in their infinite wisdom decided that the big film coming on big screens will be enough to support it. And the movie flopped. The fact that Starbreeze decided to make an FPS and Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry all came out the same year almost simultaneously with it didn't help its popularity either. Despite that, the game got incredibly good press and word of mouth. Some people, including gaming journalists, considered it a better game than HL2 and D3, thus making it a sleeper hit.

In my opinion the developers did just the right combination of an FPS, a stealth game, an RPG, a horror, a beat'em up even. At that time the visuals looked stunning: it was the first game that used normal mapping on everything coming out two months before Doom 3. It was also one of the first games that used dynamic soundtrack (calm and battle music tracks played simultaneously while player hears only one of them, blended during the mood switches), the first one was Unreal. The game has a very strong voicing cast: Vin Diesel, Ron Perlman, John DiMaggio, Xzibit and others. And it was the first game which did a competent first person close combat fighting system (unless you count Duke Nukem 3D, where Duke could kick with his left leg, his right one or both simultaneously), F.E.A.R and awesome Mirror's Edge came out much later.

Like Enclave, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay came out on PC and Xbox (the first one). Both versions were worked on simultaneously, but the PC version came out six months after Xbox release due to a contract with Microsoft. In 2009 Starbreeze, who at that time kinda got themselves a reputation of go to guys for tie-in games that do not suck, released a remake of Butcher Bay for Xbox 360 (the original game was unplayable on its Xbox emulator), PS3 and PC along with Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, an additional, shorter campaign. They made a giant amount of work: rebuild most levels from scratch, called all the voice over actors again, built new models for everything... Unfortunately they also broke the AI, so it started to see you through the walls in total darkness and made plenty small unnecessary changes I am not a fan of. So we're let's playing the original game.

And that's a lot of words.

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