Blade Runner (1997 Video Game) - Development

Development

The game design was ambitious for the available technology of the time. In contrast to other games at that time, the game engine (which included backgrounds that were pre-rendered and models calculated in 3D), did not require or use hardware 3D graphics accelerators. Game designers, David Leary and James Walls, achieved this through a self-developed technology based on voxels (pixels with width, height and depth), which they called "Voxel Plus".

"When we told Intel that we were doing a 640x480, 65,000 color game that emulates true color, with a 16-bit Z-buffer and six channel CD-quality audio, they said you can't—the PCI bus can't support it...we hadn't even mentioned the 750,000 polygons for the characters yet." — Louis Castle, executive vice president of Westwood Studios

Instead of just having one voxel, dozens of rotating voxels were used in the shape and depth of the actual polygon model data, making it true real-time 3D without requiring 3D hardware. In layman's terms, it was piecing together flat "picture panels", and then rotating and positioning them in 3D-space, thereby giving the illusion of a 3D object.

However, the technology had some shortcomings. A powerful processor was required since the engine relied on the processor doing all the work of creating the 3D models. Since processor power at that time was limited, the 3D models looked quite rough in-game due to the low amount of voxels used to display them; had the number of voxels been raised to increase the detail, the game would have become too slow to play. With the level of detail Westwood settled on, the game ran at a minimum of 15 FPS on slow systems.

The film's original soundtrack could not be secured for the game so Westwood brought in Frank Klepacki to recreate the feel of the film. He re-recorded the Blade Runner soundtrack as well as creating original tracks in the style of the film.