Sacrifice (video Game) - Development

Development

Sacrifice's development started in August 1997. The game's lead programmer, Martin Brownlow, was inspired by Chaos: The Battle of Wizards, which was released in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum computer. In the old game, players take turns to control wizards, summoning creatures and casting spells to eliminate each other. The video game industry was mostly ignorant of Sacrifice's development, partly due to Shiny's desire to avoid repeating the bad experience of marketing their last product Messiah. Released in March 2000, the game was extravagantly promoted by Shiny during its development, and the resulting heavy scrutiny from the media greatly stressed the team who worked on the game. Learning from this mistake, Shiny adopted a low profile for Sacrifice; until the last several months of its development, no one outside the company knew of the game. According to Brownlow, his team was able to concentrate on developing the game without the media or "fan base questioning every decision that gets made along the way".

The bulk of the work was done by a small team. Game designer Eric Flannum, formerly of Blizzard Entertainment, recalls that there were only three other key personnel: two programmers and an animator. As more game features were developed, the team expanded. Flannum was tasked to lead four level designers, and Jon Gwyn joined Joby Otero on the art team. After the basic features of the game had been completed, James Phinney, lead designer and producer of Blizzard's 1998 real-time strategy game StarCraft, was hired to write the plot for the single-player campaign. His first draft was used as the script for recording placeholder voiceovers, which helped the team to judge the atmosphere in the game. Later, Shiny employed professional actors, such as Tim Curry and Brad Garret, and various voice artists, such as Jennifer Hale, to record the final voices for the game's characters. Audio filters altered the voices for the gods, giving them a supernatural edge appropriate to their roles. For background music, Shiny hired Kevin Manthei, who had composed many scores for video games and big- and small-screen entertainment, such as Scream 3 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His compositions for Sacrifice were played by an orchestra of 25 instruments. Shiny's founder, David Perry, was so busy with the game's development that he passed over the opportunity to create a video game for the science-fiction movie The Matrix.