My name is Floyd Bishop, and I’m a Senior Animator at Sony Online Entertainment where I have worked on several titles, most recently Free Realms.
Prior to working in games, I’ve worked in pretty much every application of computer animation you can think of. I was a character animator on the first Ice Age film, I did hair and fur simulation on Barnyard the Movie, I ran my own nonprofit (by accident) animation studio, animated on a bunch of direct to video films, television pilots, commercials, web shows, and more. I also have a YouTube channel with over 11.2 million views. In the past, I have spoken about animation and held workshops at several industry events, including the 2012 Game Developer’s Conference Europe (GDC Europe) in Cologne, Germany. I also teach animation, rigging, and visual effects, most recently at Electronic Gaming Education.
Here at Animation Scoop, I’ll be covering all the Ups, Ups, Downs, Downs, Lefts, Rights, Lefts, and Rights of animation in video games, as well as computer animation in general. I’ll have news items, reports from industry events, and the occasional game review and interviews with people from the video game industry. If you’ve got anything you would like to see covered in future articles, let me know!
Today I’m going to showcase one of the first games I played that felt more like a world and less like a game: Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, a game from Oddworld Inhabitants. The game was released on the Playstation, DOS, and Microsoft Windows back in 1997. The game featured an odd, enslaved character named Abe, who rose up against his captors at Rupture Farms, and led his fellow Mudokens to freedom. The game is a beautifully designed gem, which was far ahead of its time. The game used pre rendered 3D graphics used as 2D sprites in order to fake a fully rendered 3D look that would not be possible until several years later.
Abe was a very popular character, and his world was vast. There were several other games set in the Oddworld universe that have been on many different systems, and published by many different publishers. Abe gets a new lease on life later this year in Abe’s Oddysee: New n’ Tasty, an HD remake of the game from UK game developers Just Add Water.
It is great to see players who may have missed out on Abe the first time around get a chance to experience the “oddness” for themselves.
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