Planescape: Torment is a beloved classic of PC gaming, but its beginnings were surprisingly inauspicious.
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.
