Tom Hall got rich and famous as one of the creative titans of id Software, helping to mastermind the first-person revolution of Doom and Quake. But in hyped (and recently volatile�see sidebar, page 65) start-up. With a ton of Eidos money behind it, Ion Storm gave Hall free rein to develop Anachronox.
When you think about role-playing games, you don�t think of Quake II. But it�s the Quake II engine that was used to build Anachronox, a third-person game that its creator says owes more to Zeldas and Final Fantasies than it does to Vores and lightning guns.
�We knew from the start that we wanted the character onscreen all the time,� says Hall. �It�s how you build real attachment to who you are and what�s going on.�
Who you are and what�s going on are considerations fairly new to the co-creator of the first-person shooter genre. Plotline never factored in much in such games, and Hall found himself itching to tell a story.
�To use first-person 3D technology and apply it to a deep, rich universe� is the goal, Hall says. To both ends, he and his Ion Storm team have worked to create an immersive visual environment��a place that feels real,� says Hall�and wed it to a complex, challenging storyline. The emphasis on immersion is so great that Hall feels the need to justify even the cursor in Anachronox: it�s a hologrammic flashlight/personal digital assistant called Fatima Doohan. With typical Hall humor, he explains that he came up with that name as a play on �What am I doing?�