[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I’m delighted to welcome Shaun Musgrave, who posts at Post Game Content and on twitter as @ShaunMusgrave, and whose dives into the history and workings of individual games are always a joy.]
Sometimes, games can be important in ways they were never intended to be. Activision’s Apocalypse is one such title. By the 1990s, the publisher who had essentially established third-party console game publishing as we know it today had fallen far from its glory days. Through a combination of talent bleed, questionable management, and misreading the software market, Activision nearly went extinct. The company was purchased by a group of investors led by a young businessman named Bobby Kotick, who set about trying to rebuild the company. It was a tall order, as Activision didn’t have much more than its name and some largely dormant IPs.
One thing the new Activision did have was money, and it was used to secure a number of licenses and recognizable names. At the time, the biggest of those names was Hollywood star Bruce Willis. The actor had been enjoying a comeback of his own after a disastrous string of failed films in the early 1990s. Things would get even better for the Die Hard star as the decade marched on, but when Activision signed him to headline a video game he was fresh off of successful appearances in Pulp Fiction and Die Hard with a Vengeance.
The middle of the 1990s was a very exciting time for game development. The new batch of consoles were packing powerful 3D processing capabilities. On the computer end of things, graphics cards with 3D accelerators were going mainstream. Sony’s giant step into the console market brought in a lot of attention and talent that had until that point paid little mind to the video game industry. In that moment of history it seemed like video games could do anything, and ambitious plans seemed to flow from developers like water from a tap. Few of them ended up going as expected.
Apocalypse, the game Bruce Willis had signed on for, was originally intended to show off an exciting new feature only made possible by the power of the latest hardware. You would be joined in your action-packed quest to conquer evil by none other than Bruce Willis himself. He would be an intelligent AI-controlled partner who would assist you in combat, help you solve puzzles, and converse with you along the way. You wouldn’t just be starring in your own thrilling action movie – Bruce Willis would be your co-star! With the latest 3D scanning and motion capture technology, it would be like Bruce was really there with you!
The game was being developed internally at Activision, and Mr. Willis came in and did his agreed-upon part. His face was scanned, his dialogue was recorded, and he may have even done some motion-capture, though that aspect is disputed. Magazines began hyping the game up, and Bruce Willis himself was on hand to promote the game at the June 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. The game was scheduled to release in September of 1997, but it soon became apparent to Activision that it could not meet that date. The exact nature of the issues with the game aren’t a matter of public record, but the game ended up being shelved with no firm idea of when it would ever see the light of day.
It’s at this point that the final player in this production entered the scene. Neversoft, a California-based developer founded in 1994, was in trouble. Its first game had failed to catch on, and its most recent project had just been canceled by its publishing partner. After cutting back to a skeleton crew, the remaining members had resorted to shopping their technology around, hoping someone would bite. In January 1998, just as things were looking their darkest, someone did. Activision was seeking a developer to try to make something of its expensive investment in the Apocalypse project, and Neversoft seemed to fit the bill.
There was one catch, however: the game absolutely needed to be finished in time for the 1998 holiday season. Fortunately, the tech that Neversoft had developed for its canceled project could be put to work on the new Apocalypse. Focus testing revealed something that perhaps should have been obvious from the start: players didn’t want to battle evil beside Bruce Willis. They wanted to be Bruce Willis. Thus, the AI partner idea was scrapped and Bruce’s character was made the main playable hero. Willis was not available to do any additional dialogue recording, so the developers had to make do with what they had.
Somehow, Neversoft managed to complete the game well in time for a Halloween release in October of 1998. The resulting game wasn’t all that remarkable outside of its famous star. A rather serviceable twin-stick shooter with some light platforming and a frankly bizarre story that had to be hashed together with bits and pieces of dialogue originally intended for a side character. But it was enjoyable enough to satisfy those looking for a quick bit of action. It came in hot on the heels of the Willis-headlined box office smash Armageddon, and had a vaguely similar title. Perhaps most importantly of all, it was finished. Apocalypse wasn’t a massive success, but it was a success. Given the state of affairs at the beginning of the year, it was a big win for both Activision and Neversoft.
Activision was so impressed with Neversoft’s work on Apocalypse that it commissioned the studio to develop another project, a skateboarding game featuring a number of real-life skateboarders. The Apocalypse engine would serve as the basis for this game and its many sequels, with the prototype featuring Willis’s character skateboarding around simple environments until its ultimate star, Tony Hawk, could be implemented. The engine would again be put into service for a game featuring another face that was about to rock Hollywood: Marvel’s Spider-Man. Apocalypse may not have been the revolution Activision was hoping for, but the technology and partnerships built around it put Activision directly on the path to becoming the juggernaut that it is today. Yippee-Ki-Yay, indeed.